As you get down from the South Street Station in Boston and walk towards Emerson College there is a very ordinary turn. Outside some superstore, there is a tree and people usually sit there when they either have nothing to do or are sick with too much doing.
As a kid I had fantasies of being a timeless traveller and that's perhaps the reason why I collect shot glass souvenirs of every city I visit. They sit on my refrigerator door and quietly remind me of the places that I can mark as visited on a rather obsessive map.
These travel fantasies from the past make me do really crazy things if travel is involved-I can carry reams and reams of paperwork through travel with a promise of sitting through a night in a dorm and meeting writing deadlines if it is a place I have never visited before.
At times I have sat through planes journeys of more than 24 hours but the place-ness of the destination is something that can relieve all travel related stress and I have found myself obsessively walking through city streets and figuring things out.
But this one road crossing in Boston- a place, a non place, an every place.
I can't say if I dreamt it the night I reached the city but the third day as I walked through it the first time, I had a feeling I had been here before.
And no. Not in my wildest fantasies had I been a traveller to Boston.
In the deja-vu, that place is inhabited by a Chinese family-the father wearing a white hat to ward off the sun. His fiver year old son perhaps whining for an ice-cream. A woman in red-aloof, apart. She is the mother to the boy.
It is this image that refuses to go. In doing so it reminds me of the ways there are places that look so similar to this-they are points on a map that spreads over Delhi, Bombay, Toronto, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Madrid, Jakarta...perhaps even more.
In post globalized times as places and markers collapse, what is it that defines a place?
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