Oh, the ordinary places you’ll go

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For some travellers, the big draw in a destination is not a hot new restaurant or high-end hotel. It’s the grocery store, swimming pool or kitchenware shop, where they can dip into the stream of local life. Photo / Michelle Perez, The New York Times
Bonnie Tsui finds ways to elevate the holiday experience by simply tapping into the everyday routines of others
You could say that I have a public pool habit when I travel. From Reykjavík and Sydney to Phoenix and Palm Springs, California, it’s how I eavesdrop on and observe everyday life, wherever I am. Early one morning last summer in Tokyo, I entered the lobby of a sports complex in the Shimokitazawa neighbourhood, joined the orderly queue of seniors, and enthusiastically pantomimed my way to a day pass.
After my swim, I followed the illustrated signs and rinsed off before wandering over to the hot tub. A tiny Japanese woman with a halo of white hair gave me a grin as I got in. “I like your swimming!” she said, in English. From our perch, we chatted animatedly as the 8am aqua aerobics class kicked and splashed into high gear. It was a highlight of my time in Japan.
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I was reminded of this the other day while getting a haircut from my longtime hairdresser in Berkeley, California, Noel Shabazian. He mentioned a trip he was about to take to Little Rock, Arkansas, to visit his girlfriend’s parents, and I asked what he was planning to do.
“Oh, I’m going to the barbershop,” he said, snipping away. “Whenever I go someplace new, I like to head over to the local barbershop for a shave and a haircut. I don’t even tell them I do hair — I just like to see how they do things.” He loves getting a window into the lives of strangers: where they live, who they gossip about, what preoccupies them.
I’d always thought of my public pool visits as idiosyncratic, but Noel’s barbershop ritual made me see it as a shared way of thinking about travel, of experiencing the world. Our eyes met in the mirror, and I smiled in recognition.
“Authentic” is overused these days when talking about travel, but I think it means wanting to know something real about a place and the people who live there. So often, the vacation vision sold to us involves a preordained, highlight-reel itinerary that has been followed by millions of others, one that promises to be amazing, eye-opening, new! And yet so little truly surprises — we’ve already seen it all on Instagram or TikTok. There’s something to be said for partaking of the parts of daily life that are not designed especially for you, the visitor. That’s where the surprise lies.
I decided to ask people who travel a lot about the everyday things they like to do when they are on the road — those totally average, run-of-the-mill things that give a place colour, texture and dimensionality.
My friend Jon Natchez is a musician and composer — and, as a member of the War on Drugs, he’s an actual rock star. When he’s on tour, he makes it a point to seek out produce markets, which keep him grounded in location and season.
He remembers one visit to Hunts Point Produce Market in the Bronx, New York: “It’s this gritty, concrete, utilitarian place, where all these perfect fruits are laid out like jewels,” he said. “I’d always wanted to go there, and I just couldn’t believe how fresh everything was.” He bought a flat of 20 pomelos, just to try them.
He especially loves finding fruit he’s never had before. “It’s amazing how much specificity can be found in a local produce market,” he said. “For example, in a small English town, you’ll find all these little apples that have been picked from orchards nearby.” He’ll stock the tour bus with his discoveries. A crew favourite is the granadilla, a cousin to the passionfruit that is commonly found in Colombia, Peru and Argentina.
Roy Vella, a friend’s father, goes to churches. He grew up Catholic in Brooklyn, New York, and as an adult, has gone to church off and on, but lately he attends Mass almost every day. When he travels, finding a church is part of the ritual; by the end of a trip, he might find himself greeting the pastor by name and nodding to regulars in the congregation.
Roy especially remembers a trip to the tiny island country of Malta, where his parents were born. “Malta is famous for having around 365 churches — you can pretty much go to a different church every day for a year,” he said. “A lot of the services are in Maltese. But even if I don’t speak the language in a place, I know what’s going on in the Mass.” That overlap of the known and the unknown, he said, holds a kind of magic.
Maybe it’s that feeling of possibility, of a life outside your own, suddenly snaps into focus. There’s an element of the unexpected, scratching up against the familiar. A swim, a haircut, a visit to the produce market, a church service: These are snapshots of routines that exist in a parallel universe to the one you have at home. The friction between them is where the insight happens, the mundane given the glitter of the novel. Maybe that’s what travel is, at its best.
Des Linden, a Boston Marathon champion, two-time Olympian and world-record-holding ultra runner, is obsessed with coffee shops. She was on an plane to Mexico City when I messaged her, plotting out a Google Map of the city’s small coffee roasters, as she does for every big trip. A week later, I got her on the phone.
As a runner, she spends so much time on her feet that she needs to find a way to explore without endless walking. “A cup of coffee is a great way into a place,” she said. In Mexico City, she visited 12 coffee shops over three days, learning about farms across the southern states of Chiapas, Oaxaca and Veracruz, where the shops all sourced their beans.
“I like a pour-over, because it’s a slow, drawn-out cup,” she said. “And I like the smaller speciality operations where you can sit and chat with the baristas. So that it’s more than just transactional.” Admittedly, she did come back with eight bags of coffee in her luggage.
Maybe your own idiosyncrasies lead you to sniff out the local restaurant supply store, to find kitchen tools you wouldn’t find anywhere else. That’s the happy place of Sam Clonts, the chef and co-owner of 63 Clinton, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which has a Michelin star.
“A restaurant supply shop gives you a peek into the history of a city, and what the chefs of a region specialise in,” he said. In Kyoto, known for its high-end cuisine and history of knife making, he picked up a Deba knife that’s designed for butchering smaller fish, with a blade less than 8cm long. In the Spanish city of San Sebastián, with its long history of cooking over open fire, he found special sauté pans with small holes, to cook peas and other small vegetables that would typically be hard to grill; across Italy, he has collected pasta-making tools and cutters made of bronze.
Perhaps you prefer to let the birds lead the way. Wherever Lisa Morehouse, the public radio journalist behind the California Foodways series and podcast, goes, she opens up eBird, the crowdsourced citizen science app, to find out what’s been spotted recently, and then plans her day accordingly.
“It’s like, ‘I’m going to this vintage store, and then I’m going to pop over to that park to bird, and then I’m here getting a biscuit,’” she said with a laugh, describing her recent visit to New Orleans. “It’s that easy.”
Birding leads her to parks she’d otherwise never visit and to interactions with curious passersby who ask, What do you see?
Listening to people talk about these ordinary glories and how they open a window to life elsewhere reminds me of why I love travel. A cup of coffee or a bird you’ve never seen before can offer an unheralded path to discovery. Rather than passively watching, you engage with a place long enough to uncover a truth about it. This isn’t flashy, and it isn’t about doing something unusual or exceptional. I give you, instead, a song of praise for everyday places.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Bonnie Tsui is the author of “Why We Swim.”
Written by: Bonnie Tsui
Photographs by: Michelle Perez
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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