“Neighborhoods Give Our Journeys a Pleasing Singularity”
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 10.04.04 | 7:17 PM ET
It took years for the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s Thomas Swick to come to terms with it: When he travels, he’ll take a commonplace neighborhood over an iconic monument any day. “Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, belong to every visitor to Istanbul, but if one evening you slip into a Beyoglu tavern and share small green plums with a table of Turks, those Turks, and those plums, are yours alone,” he writes in a column Sunday. “It takes some effort. True neighborhoods are usually far from chain hotels and equestrian statues. Tour buses never clutter their streets. You know you’ve stumbled into one when you pass a barbershop. See men in coveralls. Feel out of place. I wear Rooster ties, now found only in vintage clothing stores, so even if a trip doesn’t enhance my collection it leads me to boroughs I might otherwise miss.”
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
