Puzzle pieces

It's been fun to learn the layout of a new city and country. I think of the process as being like putting puzzle pieces together - to start with, you only know about one piece, the area just where you arrive. For me and Tanya this was around our initial hotel in Lausanne, plus the way to get to the administrative buildings. Then you start to add pieces to the places you know, but they are distributed and not connected. Underground transport is particularly good at creating this effect, because you can travel to a completely different part of the city and emerge from the station blinking in the sun, not knowing how that place connects with anything else. So as Tanya and I explored we started to know certain metro stops, EPFL, and parts of the city centre. Our exhausting apartment search really accelerated this process, because it took us to all corners of the city as we visited prospective apartments.

A map! Having it the right way up helps too.

After that comes the nice moment when one or more of the pieces suddenly fit together, and you start building on one integrated map. Suddenly you realise how two towns that you might know independently are only separated by one line of hills, or that a pathway connects two neighbourhoods. And you can start talking about the place as if you know it! I'm at this connecting stage now with Lausanne, and as the puzzle pieces fall together the whole picture is growing.