Quora great question of the week

How can I be a tourist in my own city?

I think the most important thing is to find the right way of looking at things.

• Take time to pay attention to details: what colour the buildings are, what kind of shapes they have, what the people are wearing, what their umbrellas look like.

• Practice until you can find the unique in the ordinary.

• Take days off with no schedule. Just walk the streets without a destination, pop in cozy cafés, stop to listen to buskers, let the music carry you away.

• Find out which the small and unusual sites in your town are.

• There are always little museums almost no one knows about; take time to explore them, go to art galleries and bookstores.

• Buy postcards. Walk in a park and sit on a bench and write down your impressions on the cards. Send them to your best friends.

• Find out in which houses some popular people lived. Plan walking routes around those places. If they were poets, read their poems in the nearest café.

• Climb to the highest tower of the city. Try to see everything as if it was the first time. Count the other towers you can see.

• Eat breakfast in a fancy hotel. Listen to all those people who speak languages you don’t understand. Go to the opera. Go to the theatre.

• Choose the most beautiful spot in your town and go there. Then open a bottle of fizzy and pour it into a beautiful glass. Feel that you are alive.

• Eat in that restaurant you have always wanted to try but never found time for.

• Try new things: let that street artist paint a portrait of you, go roller-skating, go canoeing, take a river cruise or a balloon flight.

• Go to antique shops, feel the dusty smell of old wood and let the seller tell stories about all those old things and times gone by.

• Go to see an art film. And when you come out of the cinema, feel the soundtrack of your life; go to a small wine bar if you feel like it, and think about your life as art. 301 Views · 1 Upvote