Au Pair Lessons: Get to Know Your City

Because that’s what it is now. It’s your city. Maybe only for six months, a year (though you never know what will happen), but, for that time, it is completely and utterly your city. You live and shop and eat and drink and are entertained there. So get to know it. Start out with all the cheesy touristy things (even if you don’t like looking like a tourist). Do the bus rides or walking tours or boat tours or whatever else is available. Any major city will have a tourism office where you can ask questions and pick up maps, brochures and activity listings. Figure out what interests you and hit it up. Learn a little history. Visit the big museums and take cheesy touristy pictures and spam your Facebook or Instagram feed with them.

But then do more than that. Get off the metro or the bus at new stops and explore different parts of the city. Go down side streets. I mean, be smart and sensible about it and have a buddy or let someone know when you’ll be back, have a cellphone with you, but you already knew that. Start memorizing the metro lines and how to get from point A to B without having to look it up every time. Go for dinner or drinks (or dinner and drinks) somewhere new a couple of times a month. It doesn’t have to be expensive, but you’ll get to taste new food and see new people and try new things and the city will start to become yours and you’ll start to become part of the city and one day you’ll look around you and realize that you’re not lost anymore and you know exactly where you are and you don’t need that map you’ve been carrying around with you for a couple of months now. Find a place that becomes your place, no matter where it is or what it is or if it’s the place for a thousand other people. Somewhere where you go for coffee a couple times a week or a theatre you go to with friends every Friday or a park where you drink wine on the grass as you watch the sunset.

These things do take time and it takes some determination to go out and get lost and figure out how to get unlost again and if you’re at all like me, at all, you’ll get lost in the same place at least half a dozen times before you finally remember on that seventh time that no, you have to turn left, not right to get to the fro-yo place from here. But you’ll get there and trust me, it will make a big difference.

Things I’m Loving:

+ These brogues – (Which I want in my life in a kind of ‘I need them’ kind of way. Also: these.)
+ Fall is caramel season – (So have a recipe.)
+ This bag looks like perfection – (No, really.)
+ A fall playlist – (For cold, windy days like today.)