It was in Moscow, early one jetlagged morning, where I fell in love with walking, later to morph into running, on the red trails of Southern Colorado and green ones of North-West Portland, but the walking started in Moscow.
I’d managed to get a little out of shape, years of sitting on my ass as a digital marketer and love of Mexican food were taking their toll. I was still smoking. I wasn’t yet thirty, and I was gettin– I was chubby. The photo of me in front of St. Basil’s in Red Square holding the sign with the rough count of how many miles to one of my favorite Mexican restaurants in LA (hey, it got me on the wall), is all the proof necessary.
I couldn’t sleep any longer and it was already light (turns out that doesn’t mean the same thing in Moscow in the Summer as it does back home). So I put on my shoes and left the apartment on the third ring road encircling the Kremlin like a bullseye, and set out at random.
Moscow is a city where you can see the layers left by history, where the grand European apartments were at some point modernized with satellite dishes spread over them like pastry shells, power and data lines lashed willy-nilly, each strata remaining, settling, pointing up long forgotten optimism and the deprivation that would follow. It’s a place of parks and broad squares and a subway whose stations house great chandeliers (a palace of the people, it’s said, and where it’s said, too, the many Moskovite street dogs get on trains at one stop and get off again at another, their intended destination). And pastry shops.
I think it was the discovery of the pastry shop, just as you turn the corner into a cozy neighborhood with a pocket plaza, a very European pastry shop, all glass and polished wood and endless, dainty, flaky and soft treats, the pastry shop that would serve as reward at the end of the first lightly etched feedback loop: walking = discovery (= pastries?).
Later, E and I, getting lost on purpose around the inner ring, walking down into a broad, dead-end alley, despite knowing it would go nowhere, or perhaps following some interesting graffiti, would find that in fact it ended at the best (if perhaps then only) Georgian restaurant I’d ever been to. The interior was a series of cozy rooms, each like someone’s homey, modern living room. Contemporary furniture which didn’t match but worked. Walls different colors. And the food… Hunters’ food, rich and hearty food, sometimes heavy food. And wines of which they’re rightly proud (claiming, with evidence, to have invented grape cultivation). I’d return several times, eating inside and out, on the stepped roof, in just as interesting if completely different setting from the interior, on comfy couches under pergolas strung with lights or grape vines. And always the food.
So too Il Caminetto on the road into Strada in Chianti, in the countryside 30 minutes south of Florence; Amigos Mexican restaurant in Shenzhen (the only, until a Taco Bell was added (with white tablecloths, full bar and a menu with nothing we’d recognize from the chain here)); and on and on and on, all walking, all more than worth the effort. And more than that, the walking had become not a chore but the thing in itself, the speed of discovery.