The next place shouldn’t look like the last place
Back in high school, one of the more interesting courses dealt with urban geography. A new discipline, in a world where the curriculum was carved in stone, the better to bury student curiosity. And the only course than invited me to look around, at the world outside of my classroom. I did, I learned, I started to wonder.
Now, if your travel budget is limited, the major contact with “other” places comes from the cinema, and television documentaries. I watched a great one about Rome, earlier. So much history, under the history. Waterworks that our municipal governments couldn’t hope to surpass (we have trouble with simple, leakproof water mains). Floodways. Canals. Self-cleaning pipes. And, I’m left to wonder.
Why can’t we offer this level of content to students, inside the 180 days per year that society requires for an education?
Back to travel (and my need to start doing some: I’ve been told). The point of a famous landmark is that you see it, and you can name the place. A sort of trivial pursuit. But. Cinema also needs to “anonymize” locales, in order to produce content without building Potemkin communities (although I’m sure they already do). Are you surprised when you watch a film and find out later that it was actually shot in Toronto, or Cleveland, or anywhere else that bears only superficial resemblance to what we thought we saw? I excuse the convoluted sentence structure; not everywhere looks like Toronto, so why should Toronto look like anywhere else? Agreed, hide the Tower and what have you got.
When I get around to travelling, I don’t want my destinations to look like somewhere I’ve already been.
