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[muckefuck]

For some reason, I was wondering in my dream last night which cities I could claim to "know". Obviously, there's not another I know like I know Chicago--not even my hometown of St Louis. But I also don't mean cities I've only been through once or twice. I'm thinking in terms of cities where I have enough sense of the layout, the landmarks, and the transport to get around relatively comfortably. Places where, if someone described the location of some site, I'd have an idea of where it was and how to get there.

Here's the list I've come up with, in rough order of familiarity. It pretty much corresponds to the amount of time I've spent in each place, but not entirely. Other factors include the recentness of my visit and how much I've research I've done. (For instance, I've read much more about Barcelona over the years than Toronto.):

1. Chicago
2. St Louis
3. San Francisco
4. Toronto
5. New York [Manhattan only]
6. Beijing
7. Berlin
8. Barcelona
9. Freiburg (Breisgau)
10. Vienna
11. Xi'an
12. Paris

Cites I've stayed in which didn't make the list include Granada, Seattle, LA, Amsterdam, Prague, Budapest, Ávila, and Rome. I'm mildly embarrassed not to see any UK cities on the list, but it's been ages since my last visit and London bamboozled me even back then and all the British media I've consumed since then hasn't really helped (except to expand the number of placenames that I recognise but couldn't find on a map without help). But the real shame is the lack of American cities. Even my birthplace doesn't rank!

What's your list?

Comments

[princeofcairo.livejournal.com]

1. Chicago
2. Oklahoma City
3. New York City (mostly, but by no means entirely, Manhattan)
4. London
5. Las Vegas
6. Los Angeles

and, probably,

7. San Francisco

are the cities I really know, outside a single neighborhood or downtown area. (Milwaukee, Columbus, and Indianapolis, for example, I know about 20 square blocks of intimately, but would be buffaloed by anywhere else in their urbus.) I have buried or latent knowledge of Seattle, Dallas, and a handful of others that would probably come flooding back after a day or so.

But I'm generally confident in my urban-navigation skills, even in unfamiliar, non-Anglophone cities. Given a map and a decent starting point, I could probably build a pretty good working knowledge of a city in little time, and get myself to an unfamiliar location in considerably less.