Ways To Wander: Google the name...

I was on the lookout for tours to take and, coming up a blank in my local vicinity, I thought it better to take matters into my own hand. I looked in the book Ways To Wander which is a collection of proposals for walks, the majority of which come from walking artists, whatever that term precisely means. I selected number 28: Google the Name... a walk written by Blake Morris. It goes like this: 

The problems began right away. As I am in China, Google Maps does not work properly. There is both an effort to block it and it is not regularly updated. When I searched for my neighborhood of Tangjia it didn't offer a clear choice and some of the options were placed in the sea. This brings up the issue of efficient mapping being a precondition for prosecuting an effective war, trade or otherwise. I heard the Chinese equivalent service Baiduu Map doesn't work properly in the US.

The places it suggested were quite definitely not the centre of Tangjia and the centre of the screen was a mountainous park next to Zhongshan University. Plan B was needed.

I switched to Baidu Map which didn't give me the satisfaction of a pin, either, so I had to zoom in and mark a crude X on the centre of what it said was Tangjia. I studied the digital map carefully as I would not have access to the phone once I set off. It seemed to be in a place I hadn't been to before.

The walk to the centre of Tangjia was more focussed than a typical walk. Having a purpose, a destination and no phone to distract you from the here and now, is a good condition to think about how the software came up with this destination. I imagined satellites in the sky above assisting this mapping. A near full moon shone brightly too, it was a clear warm night. The stars were somehow on my side.

When I came to what I thought was the centre of the map I saw a single lane road with houses on either side of the two high walls which lined it. I walked back and forth surveying it carefully and according to my estimate the centre of Tangjia is one of two places. It is either a tree with long, green shiny leaves that hang over the once white two-meter wall or it is the hand-written sign that sits a meter or two to its left. The sign read: 美女上門 and underneath, a telephone number. It was an ad for call girls. 

I made my way along the road and weaved through a residential area till it came to a bustling evening street with shops open late and people still eating. I had to reflect that the location I was sent to was not where I would have placed the centre of Tangjia. When I saw both this lively road and the tower blocks under construction nearby, I had to reconsider: maybe the centre was indeed further south, maybe even around here. 

We all seem to live in our bubbles with our own conception of the city and if this walk did one good thing it was to merge the virtual and real spaces by inviting me to view one from the perspective of the other. In doing so, I could see how the neighborhood is viewed with quite different centers of gravity. This was only reinforced as I walked back past a new live house where a local pop band were playing and a long line of teenagers were waiting to get in and see their idols.

A final thing that I realized when I got home is that while I hadn't looked at the phone, it had been recording my footsteps all the same. I'm trying to walk around 10,000 a day, as that is healthy. This tour didn't quite take me there but that's largely my fault for not braving the sticky sauna of daytime Zhuhai earlier in the day. I shall try a few more walks from this collection and review them here.