[cities & me]

[wispfox]

So, I'm attempting to explain why cities scare me as much as they do (and they do! Boston used to scare me. Now, I just mostly avoid driving in it and I'm fine), and thought it needed a wider audience than in the comment I made.

A major portion of my fear of cities is that they are so overwhelming that I cannot process well enough to figure out how to get where I want to go - no matter _how_ simple the instructions are. Combine with this my complete lack of direction sense, and the fact that I need at least 3 times navigating something, within a fairly small amount of time, before I have any hope of being able to repeat it again myself (detailed written instructions help), and I've got a pretty major handicap in larger cities. Smaller ones simply have fewer options, so are less overwhelming.

I can - now - generally manage to figure out unfamiliar public transportation, with a _lot_ of advance research, to the point where I know exactly where I need to go and all the steps to get there, before I have to do it. I cannot navigate things on the fly unless I'm already familiar enough with most of the necessary steps, or I have insanely detailed instructions. Public transportation (with the notable exception of busses in a city, which tend to have far more available options) tends to have a fairly limited selection of where it goes, and a fair number of the online sites for these places will tell you how to get from point A to point B. This makes it _much_ more managable for me than driving (or walking!) in a strange city.

I know that I'm bad at this kind of thing, which means that trying to do it _scares_ me. I'm more willing now to _try_, at least, but it's still terrifying. And I think that the amount of time that I spend in Greater Boston is _why_ I'm more willing to try. I've gotten used to it, once, with lots of help.

I doubt I'll ever _like_ a large city, but I can get better at navigating with sufficient help, time, and patience.

[edit: I have found, living near Boston, that I like being _near_ cities, because they give me lots of things I can do, at the same time as having a reasonable distance to and amount of natural settings. I did _not_ enjoy growing up in a place with nothing interesting (to me) to do...]

Comments

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

Of course, I would first need to have seen enough subway stations in NYC to recognize them, or I won't see them if I'm lost and unhappy about it.

[phaedra-lari.livejournal.com]

I think NYC and Kyoto are the cities I credit with giving me a sense of direction. In addition to all the great points regyt makes, many parts of NYC are also on a grid system with numbered avenues and streets, which makes it easier to figure out where you are once you only know a very little about it. Plus many of the tall buildings are great landmarks.

Kyoto is largely shaped like a wheel, with spokes radiating outward from the center. What was nifty for getting oriented was that many street corners seemed to feature a metal compass embedded in the cement. This allowed me to always figure out which was north when I was bewildered, which helped enormously. Weirdly enough, my Wicca 101 studies helped me a lot too, because they made me figure out which way was north, south, east and west a lot by way of trying to cast circles in parks I didn't know :) Somehow that translated eventually into overall better sense of which way was north, most of the time, which does help.

[bridgetester.livejournal.com]

I have a reasonably decent direction sense for when I know where I am. Randomly big buildings with turns can confuse me. But other people can't even point out directions when they know which building they're in, and which way it faces... Weird to me.

Unfamiliar places still cause big problems though.

I grew up primarily in a spoked city, but there were no handydandy metal compasses to be had.

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

If I know which way a building faces, I _might_ - maybe - be able to figure out where I am respective to that, and therefore which direction is which.

But not regularly.