The biggest city in the world

There’s been this shift with me and cities going on a couple years now. This week, I finally figured it out.

The big city has been good to me. Coming from LA, I figured I could take on any city.

Nope. But I’ve been trying for forty years, and I started with the biggest one.

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Swept up in a rolling sea of humanity, I pushed my way across the current, reached the safety of a wall and slid down to sit on my green duffel bag under a big sign, hoping my friend would find me. I couldn’t read the sign, I couldn’t speak the language and the letters made no sense to me.

The smart phone hadn’t been invented.

I was in Shinjuku, the biggest train station in the world. Millions of passengers streamed around me, through a labyrinth of platforms, in and out of hundreds of exits.

I fought to stay awake. The flight from LA took 11 hours. The train from Narita into Tokyo took me another two. The time difference was 16 hours. Tokyo was three times the size of my home town of LA — 30 million people, then the largest metro in the world.¹

I was a stranger in a strange land and I went a little crazy after two weeks, hitting the streets on a Japanese whisky fueled vision quest for Oreos, Coke and some sense of normal. But it was the future. We rode the Shinkansen to Hiroshima eating bento boxes screaming past Mt Fuji at 150 mph.

I was hooked. From then on I signed up for every international adventure I could find, and once my kids got old enough we took them too.

I went to Europe to meet JFran’s family for the first time. We had tea in London with scones and clotted cream and strawberry jam. Proper. Rode a red double decker bus cozy in the very back with JFran, ignoring all the sights. Saw Miss Saigon.

Europe became a regular stop once business travel ramped up. Paris, Prague, Barcelona. Grandma roots trips with the kids — Vienna, Budapest, Auschwitz.

European cities are comfy.

Thirty years after Tokyo I got back to Asia by convincing my boss I needed to teach a class in India. JFran joined me for week two, and we did the Golden Triangle: Delhi, Agra, Jaipur. A Sikh named Grover drove us around in a Land Rover with TOURIST stenciled across the front. We were the foreign species and they fed us lots of Biryani.

Delhi topped Tokyo’s strangeness. I can still smell both those cities. Humanity packed in everywhere. India is super dense — four times the population of the US in a third of the space.

To celebrate making it to 50, we went to South America. We started in Cusco, Peru, but this wasn’t about the city, it was about the trail. The Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. My college crew struggled, but fueled by coca leaves and pushed by porters, we made it. Cuy ² and pisco sours. Time on the trail beat the destination. When we finally got to the ruins it was overrun with tourists and school buses.

A few years later I was back in South America, this time for business. São Paulo is big at two LAs. Twenty million people sprawling across hills that roll through a broad valley surrounded by Favelas,³ punctuated by clumps of high rise, high density apartment buildings jutting from the ground randomly like so many bunches of celery.

And then, I was done.

My interest in new cities waned. Now, the bigger the city, the smaller the world feels to me.

On our honeymoon, we went to Oaxaca. We stayed on the square or zocalo and ate at a different restaurant with different color tablecloths each morning. The second week we went to the beach in Puerto Escondido. We sat on the beach eating cacahuates and drinking cerveza.

Cities munge together for me now, while the other 99% of the world — deserts, beaches and mountains — each feel like its own world.

This week we drove the coast up into Oregon. Oregon, with its moody fog, lush rainforests and broad beaches is different than Northern California’s towering redwoods and craggy cliffs.

When I was 17 and a senior in high school, I took a road trip with three friends. We piled in Dennis’ mom’s crusty tan Honda Civic and drove up the coast to Berkeley to check it out. Once we cleared the LA basin, past the long string of towns to the north, we pulled over at a beach and swung big strands of seaweed over our heads like cowboys.

1. Not any more. Jarkarta, Indonesia has 42M, Dakha, Bangladesh has 37M to Tokyo’s 33M.

2. Guinea Pig

3. Slums