Pronouncing the name of a street, the one you want to visit, in a language you don’t know – practicing it, it is difficult until you get there and all the sounds just fit.

Being there, where the thing you look for, could be just the language, lives and is part of the style and very air of that place….it replaces all the guide books, tutorials, and lessons.

Reading is good. It is. But you enjoy the moments of learning by being, doing and living so much more. Indeed books come alive when you have lived in some of those streets, observed some of the characters and even worked on the principles described by doing the dishes (as George Orwell did before creating the freshest gritty writing for decades, in his “Down and Out in London and Paris”, for example).

Today, going about the normal palaver of things, this concept might just change the prosaic and repetitive, almost-invisible, into a masterpiece of discovery and understanding.

And smiling lightly…the odd laugh, why not!

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