Africa and the Subway

An interesting opening to Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Shadow of the Sun, in which he relates the shock of stepping off the plane on his first visit to Africa:

In times past, when people wandered the world on foot, rode on horseback, or sailed in ships, the journey itself accustomed them to the change. Images of the earth passed ever so slowly before their eyes, the stage revolved in a barely perceptible way. The voyage lasted weeks, months. The traveler had time to grow used to another environment, a different landscape. The climate, too, changed gradually. Before the traveler arrived from a cool Europe to the burning Equator, he already had left behind the pleasasnt warmth of Las Palmas, the heat of Al-Mahara, and the hell of Cape Verde Islands.

On a much smaller scale, I experienced a related phenomenon during my travels in Europe. It was in Paris, my favorite of cities, during my four visits as a teenager (and none since!), that it became clear that simply stepping down into Le Metro at Gare du Nord and stepping out at St-Michel gives you absolutely no sense of Paris as it should be experienced, as a grand portrait painted with shades of color that blend and evolve into each other street by street.

The better choice is to walk, for hours, for days, to roam aimlessly, to chart interesting paths that take you through that one arrondissement you've somehow yet to visit. You see the cafes, the bars, the markets, you see the life of the city. You can see the sights too, but now you've seen the context in which they exist.

Seeing Paris by subway is seeing Paris as a series of postcards, each sight utterly disconnected from the rest. But a fist is more than the sum of five fingers, and a city is more than the sum of its landmarks.