The Places We Just Don’t Get
On the shame of not connecting, the courage to confess it and the revelation that place was never the problem
I’m guessing we all have at least one, maybe even a handful. They aren’t so much regrets as they are misinterpretations, misunderstandings, possibly even unavoidable misalignments.
Over the years, mine have changed but not necessarily for the better. I might argue all I have done is traded out one cringeworthy, embarrassing faux pas for another, equal in shame and cultural criminality. Each has consistently and acutely felt too consequential, too gauche to speak of out loud.
Always fearful any admission behind them held the power to discredit and flatten me, it’s taken me 58 Tessera to work up the courage and conviction to tell my stories of encounter, recognition and becoming with each of them.
I’m talking about the places we “just don’t get” when we get there.
These are the places that everyone hypes up and dotes over but leave us curiously unaffected and numb. They will and should be different for each of us, but the way they leave us wanting, swimming in doubt and confusion, will land the same. To move about a place like this is to carry a sharp sense of unbelonging, an uneasy feeling that we’ve been disinvited, spitefully only permitted to approach and view from the outside looking in.
Why do I seem to be the only one in the world who doesn’t get Copenhagen?
And before that? Gulp.
I once said the same thing about… Barcelona?
Before anyone unsubscribes, swipes me off-screen or slams their laptop shut in disgust and reproach, let me first say this.
I adore Barcelona today.
The 24 year-old version of me, however, just didn’t get Barcelona the first time she passed through it. Barcelona was my second city ever visited in my second country ever recorded outside of North America. And I don’t think it did me, or this fabulous city any favors, that I arrived in Barcelona from Paris, which makes a glossy-good, romanticized first impression on a novice, doe-eyed traveler.
I see now, though, I just wasn’t ready for Barcelona or Spain.
I didn’t just not get Spanish food – I didn’t like it. My disdain for its flavor, preparation and combinations took up a whole page in my diary 23 years ago. I had more to say about what I didn’t like or feel in the Catalonian capital than what took my breath – La Sagrada Familia, La Rambla, the Gothic Quarter, the Mediterranean Sea.
Had a work trip not taken me back in 2016, I’m not sure I would have the same relationship with Spain that I do today. Untangling that twist of fate further, I’m not sure I would have the same relationship with travel, taste or myself that I have today.
For this reason, I have come to believe we must always leave the door open for second chances and destination do-overs. These calls to reconsider are far from meaningless cosmic coincidence. Nor are they divine lectures disguised to assault and humiliate us. They are signals of our own deployment and longing, nudging us toward those lessons that can only come from another take in a place that, whether we liked it or not the first time. Deep down we know they activated something real inside.
When that beacon of opportunity homes in on us, we must trust our gut and gather the gumption to revisit. Our acceptance that we evolve, that our tastes evolve, that our connections to places evolve too is how travel becomes a lifelong journey of self-discovery and provocation.
It is also what inevitably transforms us, all but proving our own boundaries are blissfully and intentionally malleable and imprecise. We are meant to grow along their blurry edges. What we might assume are our unshorn weak spots are really access points, soft, not weak, always thirsty for more growth and redefinition.
Since I first cursed Spain’s blood sausage, patatas bravas and tortilla españolas, it has unquestionably become one of my favorite places in the world for exactly why I used to find it so off-putting. Having misinterpreted it when I was too young to fully digest it, I finally get Spain and I can’t get enough of Barcelona.
In rewinding the footage all the way back to city #2, and then watching life play forward again, I realize as much as I gave Barcelona another chance, it gave me another one too. Spain’s piquant culinary expressions, its elegant but bold fashion and art scenes and of course its rioja, cava and vermut, each in their own right set part of who I am today in motion.
So rather than cast harsh judgment on that younger, callow relic of myself, the one who wasted a meal in Barcelona at McDonald’s, I choose instead to focus on and applaud the gateway she opened up for me today.
Decades later, in an effort to examine the places that strike us funny, wrong, late or not at all, she’s given me the permission and confidence I need to embrace travel the only way I genuinely can and should, through my own mind, body, gut and soul. Following not everyone else’s proclivities and preferences, just my own compass.
Still, I’ve always felt ashamed I didn’t get Copenhagen. It has long represented a most outstanding and enigmatic layover on my travel resume. Its charm and universal appeal seemed to dart around me. I assumed I had to be lacking a certain cultural fluency and range.
And while both Barcelona and Copenhagen started off as places that I just didn’t get when I got there, I can only say, at least for now, that Barcelona has called me back while Copenhagen has left me hanging.
I know not every place, especially the vogue, trending, postcard perfect ones, can move us all the same. And I know too, I likely brought a lot with me to Copenhagen that clouded my estimation of the four days I spent there. But I still can’t help but wonder, mostly from a place of ego and pining, what I missed, where our wires crossed and why I didn’t connect with a city that’s seduced so many.
When I arrived in Copenhagen in 2018, I wasn’t yet a full-on taste-led traveler, although Taste, my Compass was becoming the singular, guiding force in my research, planning and on-the-ground execution. So I did have terrific meals there – tartare at Manfreds, a late lunch at Restaurant Palægade and breakfast at The Union Kitchen. I stayed at a quintessential Scandinavian hotel, The Nobis. And best of all, I discovered the cardamom bun on a day trip to Malmo, Sweden.
And if that cardamom bun was all I was ever meant to take away from Copenhagen, then maybe that would actually be enough…
Kidding aside, I liked Copenhagen well enough. I just didn’t connect to it like I have other places. For the four days I was there, Copenhagen housed not hosted me. And I made it worse. I ran through the motions instead of letting the city move me on its own.
Since then, I have spent eight years scrutinizing my movement and choices in Copenhagen, but I am no closer to understanding why we didn’t take to one another than when I boarded my flight back home.
I’m less put off by the fact I missed what everyone else seemed to get and more thrown off by the fact that Copenhagen on paper is my perfect place. It is a taste-led traveler’s paradise known as much for its food and cocktail scene as for its obsession with art and design.
For years, I have convincingly nodded my head in agreement as people raved and went on about Copenhagen. And for years, below the surface, I have felt like a fraud and imposter.
Then my fingertips, which have been unstoppably hammering out Tessera 59, suddenly stop. I go from writing an uncomfortable but heartfelt traveler’s confession to stillness and shock.
I realize I’ve inadvertently written myself into a stand-off with truth and memory. And I know if I try to put a pretty bow on this version of Tessera 59, I will only be covering up the real omission of truth on Copenhagen, the one that settles unapologetically in front of me right now.
Copenhagen didn’t leave me hanging.
When I arrived in Copenhagen, I was in proud, desperate escape mode. I wasn’t traveling with intent. I was traveling as an insatiable glutton, hungry for status, social capital and countries to tick off my bucket list. I was moving to hurry and outpace. I wasn’t moving to relish or feel.
I was an imposter.
I didn’t get Copenhagen because to do so would mean I’d have to finally get myself.
And Copenhagen was the one place where I couldn’t hide from that disharmony.
And so, as it turns out, I was right about one thing. Copenhagen was my perfect place.
Every week, I send one new Tessera Blog on taste, travel and the truths we collect along the way. If this piece resonated, I’d be honored if you’d share or subscribe.
