When you travel like I do, sometimes the only thing you want is to be somewhere that feels familiar. You miss your home, the streets you know, and that joint that has become your "Cheers" - where everyone knows...well, maybe it's just Don, the bartender with the lazy eye...at any rate, someone remembers your name. Or even if they call you the wrong name, like Norm, at least they're consistent.
Most travelers collect something on the road to help with coping - it makes it feel like the trips are part of a quest. I happen to collect postcards, primarily because they are cheap. However, I have very stringent requirements - whatever is on the postcard must be something that I personally saw or experienced, and it must have the name of the city or country. Until I find the card that meets those requirements, I will not buy it, so there have been numerous frantic search runs at airports on my outbound trip just to get that momento.
These requirements have served me well, though, because my goal in collecting the card is to jog a memory - to call up a heart-print. I remember faces, places, and sometimes names (though I generally assign them to the wrong people), but the postcards bring all of those jumbled details back into perspective. The visual represents something to me that stimulates my mind, and acts like a photograph of an old friend - or possibly someone I never want to see again, like in the case of a city in Mississippi that will go unnamed*ahem*Jackson*cough*pleasedon'tmakemegobackthere*AHEM!.
It's my third trip to this city, and it has become for me a bit of a European headquarters. Each visit, I've learned something new. I've conquered the train and tram system, mastered the art of avoiding those deadly bicycles, and heck, I even hugged a windmill (one of the REAL ones, not those new-fangled sound abatement ones). Despite doing all of these things, I realize that you can learn the facts and history, the geography, and you can take a lot of pictures of a city, but you can't truly create a feeling of comfort within that city until you are exposed to its soul. The only way to do that is through the people.
You have to get out amongst the people, and you have to meet a few of them. You must build that base that will provide that feeling of comfort and familiarity. Lucky for me, I have some friends (met them in China, believe it or not) who live here and were obliged to introduce me to my first hyper-local Dutch restaurant (and the owners). This is what a traveler lives for - that new favorite, introduced by a local, and run by good people who can personify that city for you always. And La Cacerola is that place for me now. Incredible food, a warm welcoming environment, and bubbles by the glass (natch), gave me that precise combination of local flavor and worldliness.
It may not be a restaurant for you - it may be a pub, it may be a park, but it really is the conversation and the laughs that happen there, the feeling that you are sharing a part of someone's sphere of influence that makes that place feel comfortable, familiar. It is that feeling that makes you think, "Hey, I can come back here time and again, and I will feel like I know these people and this place, and that they know me. This could be my 'Cheers'. "
...Even if they pronounce your name wrong.
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