Glancing Askance: Keeping it real on the road

By MARC WOLLIN

There are many reasons to travel. Top of that list is to see new places and things that you don’t see in your own neighborhood. Depending on where you call home, it might take days to get there, be it the fjords of Bergen, Norway, or the ruins in Ephesus, Turkey. 

But you don’t have to go that far. From our locale, it’s just a few short hours by car to the Berkshire Hills Sculpture Garden, 5 hilly acres of farmland with a dozen large-scale sculptures in Hillsdale, or the gorge at Watkins Glen, with its cliff walks and 19 waterfalls.

Harder, though, is to find shops and restaurants that are truly local and different from your usual haunts.

The globalization of our consumer culture has meant that while there are still small family-run and independent establishments, many have been crowded out by goods and cuisines that cater to a worldwide mass market. It hit me many years ago on one of my first visits to Hong Kong, when co-workers offered to to take me out to dinner at their favorite local place. Where should we rendezvous, I asked? They took a look at a map and mentioned a halfway point between me and them: the Disney Store, they suggested. It was hardly the local landmark I was expecting.

That was at least 25 years ago, and the trend has continued and accelerated.

As you walk down the street in the center of Berlin or San Francisco, Chicago or Paris, you come across the same stores. On one corner is a Nike store, on the other an H&M, opposite that a Microsoft store, all squared off with a North Face. The same can be said of coffee shops: it’s difficult to list a city that doesn’t have a smattering of Starbucks or other similar outposts. Even stores that were formerly associated with a single place have jumped oceans, so you see Joe and the Juice in Amsterdam, and Pret a Manger in Los Angeles. This results in a lot of cultural cross-breeding. In London I walked past the Great Portland Street Deli with a sign out front featuring their New York’s Famous Bacon Egg N’ Cheese sandwich.

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t travel, that everything is so homogenized as to be the same. It does mean that you have to work harder when you do venture out, and get away from the centers of town to where the locals are — the better to be, well, local. Yes, that also means that you have to take a chance on a place that doesn’t have a website, much less a 5-star Yelp rating, or buy something from a store to which you have no chance of returning the goods once you go back home. 

I have firsthand experience in both. 

In London years ago I bought a hat for a gift, one that struck my fancy and I hadn’t seen elsewhere. But while the recipient appreciated the effort it took to pick it out and carry it back across the ocean, it was not to their taste and never worn, and there was no Amazon to return it to. More recently there was the little restaurant we stumbled onto in Kyoto for lunch. It wasn’t in any guidebook and likely hadn’t hosted someone outside the neighborhood in years. Certainly the plasticine food displays the proprietress took us to see in the window hadn’t been dusted in at least that long. But we managed to make ourselves understood, and got a couple of delicious bowls of soup with no spoken words between us. Well, that’s not strictly true. When she brought us our food, she gestured at the two of us and used the one word of English she knew. “Honeymoon?” she asked. We assured her it was not.

The key is to roam off the beaten path. There’s nothing wrong with seeing the sites downtown, or taking the highways to get there quicker. But some of the most memorable meals or keepsakes or experiences we’ve had or bought have been when we zig-zagged off the main route to simply wander. One time that meant stumbling onto a local square in Tokyo that had a bunch of food trucks and a small stage. We ambled about, seemingly the only westerners in the place. We found seats as a succession of J Pop groups came on and performed. At one point a scruffy looking guy came over out of nowhere and put two beers in front of us, said something in Japanese, smiled, bowed and left. We had no idea why. Being a little early to drink and not wanting to insult him by just leaving them, I carried them back to him and a pal. I placed them in front of them, patted my heart and said thanks in Japanese. He nodded and said in halting English, “Where from?” I said “New York,” and he smiled back. “Ah, Canada!” His geographic mistake was easy to forgive.

It may be trite, and we’re talking real journeys, not metaphysical ones, but Robert Frost said to take the road less traveled. That route can indeed be a little harder to follow, but it also won’t have a Cheesecake Factory on it. And that will make all the difference.

Marc Wollin of Bedford loves to explore new and old places. His column appears weekly via email and online on Blogspot and Substack as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.