The Soul of a City

When we last left our intrepid travelers they had settled into a new apartment and went to IKEA. They followed this up by realizing you can't cook on a mattress and went back to IKEA the next day for pots, pans, replacement pillows (turns out Gosa Klätt actually wasn't the right call), bath mats, shower curtains, and all the 20 kroner accouterments that make a house a home... plus three extra things that they'll never use but thought they needed at the time.

Now might be a good time to talk about the soul of the city. First the good news: it has one. I talked a lot of trash about Milan and one reason why it was so professionally terrible was it was soulless. But even if I feel it when it's gone, I'm still not sure what makes a city's soul.

To investigate further, I listened to Empire State of Mind and watched full seasons of How I Met Your Mother. These works of art/entertainment are love letters to New York. They express appreciation for the things that are only possible because of this city.

So maybe the city's soul is the feeling of what can happen there.

Recently, the A.V. Club posted Patton Oswalt's thought experiment, "Where and when would you live for five years in a five mile radius?" In some of the answers, the idea of golden ages of a city kept cropping up. There were these great periods in a city's life when everything was happening, everyone was there, and anything was possible.

A city's just a place, but it's a place where people go when they want something. Even if they might not ever get it, it means something that the people who cared the most about movies all went to Los Angeles, the people who cared about improv went to Chicago, and the people who cared about accents went to London.

When you're in a new city, you have to think about why someone would come there in the first place. It's the desires of the citizens that create a soul.

Why are people in Copenhagen? They're here for the 500 year-old University. They're here for Michelin stars, either earning or eating. They're here for the music scene which is dripping with good jazz. They're here for physical evidence of fairy tales being true. (In which case they'd be disappointed, as the Little Mermaid statue is still on loan to China.)

And us? We're here because everyone speaks English flawlessly and we have a romantic notion of how old cities look when you're pedaling through them on rented bikes. We're here because it's close to everything we want to see in Europe. We're here because there are ristet pølser to eat, Mikkeller beers to drink, and a new language full of words that sound like talking with food in your mouth.

But the funny thing is, there's no way to know why we're really here. In three months there's no telling if Anders, the janitor who sells me washing machine coins, will be an important person in my life or another stranger. The same goes for Rasmus, the guy who just opened the Coffee Syndicate, or the Iraqis who rented me a bike from their shop. This city is full of beautiful, random possibilities, and it's that chaos that sparks it to life and gives it a soul.