A city, not a checklist

My face was upturned, warm from laying in the sun. "Let’s just stay here forever," one of my friends said, and I murmured in agreement. We had spent the past two days in Barcelona visiting museums and checking things off our itinerary. But with some free time that day, our group found a big park to wander around. We spent the afternoon strolling its paths, sitting by the pond and watching struggling tourists canoe around in circles. That's how we eventually ended up laying in a random patch of grass for twenty minutes, letting our legs rest and soaking up the sun.

"I should perhaps do the reader a service by telling him just how a week at Perugia may be spent. His first care must be to ignore the very dream of haste, walking everywhere very slowly and very much at random, and to impute an esoteric sense to almost anything his eye may happen to encounter."

This advice was given to visitors of Italy by author Henry James. James was a self-described flâneur, or idle stroller, who loved to let "accident" be his guide when visiting cities. "It served me to perfection," he wrote in his book "Italian Hours," "and introduced me to the best things."

"Flâneur" derives from the Old Norse verb "flana": "to wander with no purpose." The term was popularized in 19th French literature to describe a certain type of urban, gentleman stroller. Artists and writers added their own associations to the word: poet Charles Baudelaire described the flâneur as a "botanist of the sidewalk" and Walter Benjamin described them as a pedestrian with "a detective's nose." The flâneur had the ability to wander society while also being detached from it, his one and only purpose to observe his surroundings.

Although an outdated and privileged archetype, the romance of the flâneur is understandably alluring to travelers, myself included. When I look back at Barcelona, our afternoon wandering the park stands out as one of my favorite memories. I certainly enjoy seeing the highlights of places I go, but while abroad, I've realized that there are two very different ways to travel.

The first is like the tourist. This is the person who spends half their time almost afraid of the city: clutching Google Maps in an effort to not get lost or frantically looking up museum hours, fearful of missing a top sight. They plow through a city in a half-unconscious state, checking off TripAdvisor attractions in an effort to maximize their time.

The flâneur, on the other hand, embraces the city. They take the pressure off of curating a perfect experience, instead slowing down and making room to appreciate the rhythm city life surrounding them. I was reminded of this when I visited my friend studying abroad in Copenhagen, where some of my favorite memories were walking the streets while she was in class, wandering into a tea shop and baking banana bread in her friend's dorm room. I loved the canal tours and castles, too — but found that seeing the everyday, slower side to life there made me leave with an even greater love for the city.

To me, "flâneuring" is less about wandering aimlessly and more about curiosity. It's being aware that as a newcomer, you're barely scratching the surface of a place, a place that someone else calls home. While the right way to travel is probably somewhere in between the "flâneur" and "tourist" (it would be dumb to visit Paris and not see the Eiffel Tower), the point is not that you can't make any plans: it's about experiencing a city rather than consuming it.

Now that I'm back in Ireland, I realize how much it would be a disservice to reduce Dublin to just the Guinness Storehouse or Trinity's campus.

Dublin is also the smell of fresh rain and the feeling of uneven cobblestone under your feet. It's the ring of the crosswalk turning green exactly when you get to the curb, or almost getting hit by a bus when you jaywalk instead. It's eavesdropping on two women gossiping about their neighbor in SuperValu and the "cheers" exchanged at the checkout counter. It's the walk over to pre-drinks at someone's kitchen, the discovery of a new pub that all the Irish students go to, and the kindness of the bouncer who lets you in for free, just because. Dublin is the late night Centra runs and sleepy ride home on the 39A just as much as its Top 50 TripAdvisor attractions.

Every city is its own place, not a checklist. Attempt to incorporate some flâneuring into your life — whether it's by slowing down when you travel or paying more attention to the world as you go about your daily business. You might not have a specific destination in mind, but arrive somewhere nonetheless.