One of the great travel clichés says that no one knows other lands to find, but to get lost. The problem is when it has literal meaning, that is, every time I travel.
Last year, in Italy, I, my girlfriend and my father-in-law achieved that typical feat of shopping mall parking lots, but sometimes it also gives the faces in other environments: we stopped the car outside of Montalcino, a city of five thousand inhabitants in southern Tuscany. We went through for about two hours, had ice cream and, city seen, decided to take the car and return to Florence. But who said we knew where the vehicle was standing?
It was more than an hour spent with walks, several questions to residents and more walks, during which we circulate throughout the city, from end to end. When our fame was beginning to give what to say “Look there, Mom! The Brazilians who lost the car are passing here again!” we found the vehicle.
The mistake made was one of the most basic when it comes not to get lost: we did not have the name of the parking lot, we did not decorate any significant reference point (a staircase and a wall) and, worse, we do not remember to mark the location of the parking lot on Google Maps. Anyway, the kind of story that has appeared here other times, either with me, in Mumbai or with Luíza, who is eternally lost, but refuses to ask for information.
While we were going to Montalcino and saw the sun go down and the temperatures fall, I remembered another time when I did not know the direction of home, even though I was careful to decorate (part) the hotel address and even some reference points. It was in Puebla, Mexico, in 2017.
The Tuscany and Tuscany
We left the place where we were staying, we memorized the name of the street, the Poniente, and a restaurant nearby, the Fonda de Santa Clara. Add this to a cell phone loaded and with internet: it was impossible to get lost.
But, paraphrasing the dictation, if we start doing what is necessary, then it goes out for the possible and ends the cheklist with the impossible. The first stage, quickly taken from the list, was won when the cell phone downloaded at the end of the day. Without Google Maps, the way was to ask.
The realization that we were lost only came when we received the third indication of path – three completely different directions. And an outdoor revealed part of the problem: the Fonda de Santa Clara was not just any little restaurant, but a famous one with five units in Puebla. Therefore, each person to whom we ask has indicated the way for one of the establishments.
Not only that, say, little problem, we later found that the streets of Puebla have no names, but numbers, and follow the logic of the cardinal points. That is, all the streets that are in the direction of the poniente, the western cardinal point, were called so, varying in the numbering: there is Avenida Poniente 2, Avenida Poniente 3, Avenida Poniente 23… are dozens of Avenidas Poniente, and the numbering of unique numbers are on one side and the pairs on the other of the city.
You have logic, I know, just not ours. Eventually we ended up arriving at the hotel – despite being absolutely lousy with addresses, until I have a reasonably good sense of direction. The learning is not enough to decorate the address and some points of reference. You have to make sure that these coordinates take you to just one place, the right one.
Puebla, Mexico
Lesson that I obviously did not learn, as the experience in Tuscany shows, two years later. Later, talking to my grandfather, I understood why. And I accepted that there’s nothing I can do to improve.
He told me that during a visit to Brussels in the 1970s, he left the hotel and decorated a name that appeared on a sign in front of the establishment. They were two words today common even in Portuguese, but that fifty years ago globalization had not yet brought to Brazil: Stella Artois.
It was only when trying to return to the hotel, asking for guidance where Stella Artois would be, that he discovered that it was not only a beer advertisement, but the most ubiquitous of them.
It’s no way, it’s genetic. The fruit never falls too far from the foot just so as not to risk getting lost on the way home
