In a typically brilliant meta-move during his personal golden age of comedy, Steve Martin would come on stage and announce “It’s really great to be here!” As any performer would, he then walked toward the other side of the stage, but after repeating: “It’s really great to be here!” would add: “It was great to be over there, but now it’s great to be here!”

After a week in Kyoto full of the ups and downs typical of foreign travel, I am surprised to find myself feeling a sense of something like a homecoming upon returning to Tokyo –a place I had never been until recently and where I know no one. To some extent this is just a predictable quantitative degree of difference: trading the unfamiliar for the slightly less unfamiliar. And a large part of it is being connected again (though briefly) to friends and family through the umbilical cord I am using to post this. But it is also a testament to the powerful effect of first impressions, to the inappropriate but undeniable sense of propriety and identification one feels after getting one’s bearings in a new place.

In the brief moment between the end of the Cold War and the start of the New World Order I lived in Berlin. Before that, the night I first arrived in Berlin as part of a week-long field-trip, I went with a group of fellow undergrads to a café near Savigny Platz and at the end of that week, during a conversation with a friend over pizza in a restaurant just a block or two from there, decided to move to Berlin when the study-abroad program in not-yet former West Germany ended the following week. While the area is generally unremarkable, I continued to feel a special fondness, even a sense of home, whenever I passed through there in the year that followed. There’s a nice bookstore, where I would browse but couldn’t afford to buy anything; a good art house theater, where I saw Gus Van Sant’s first film Mala Noche, and it’s not too far a walk to the Italian restaurant where I first had tiramisu, which, since I had grown up in a place that missed the yuppie revolution, was a minor revelation. But I never lived there and all told didn’t spent much time there compared to the places I lived, worked, shopped, pub crawled, or watched the Reunification celebrations and protests, yet it continues to be one of the first places I think of when I think of what is now the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany.

I don’t remember at what point in the course of our relationship my wife and I became conscious of the fact that we tended not to travel like other people. While we do certain things that appear in travel guides, in many ways, we realized, we acted as if we were living in the place, even if visiting for just a few days. More precisely: like we were living there and having a day out on the town, but nonetheless if, for example, there was a famous zoo and a minor museum, we chose the latter because, well, that’s what we do. We spend entirely too much time in cafes, tend to have a meal bought at a grocery store, and walk when we could see and do more things if we would embrace more efficient means of transport. As if we were trying the place on for size, even with no intention or even desire to stay for long or to return.

In the past two weeks I’ve been through an earthquake, caught the edge of a typhoon, and, due to an ATM situation not worth explaining, lived two days on about twenty dollars in a fairly expensive cash-only country. Back on the umbilical cord something inspired me, for the first time, to get an account and download a song, an old favorite: Talking Heads “This Must Be the Place.” My introduction to Talking Heads was the 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense, which I saw at the one art-house theater in the city closest to the small town where I grew up. Although I’ve been to that city many times since, I haven’t been back to the theater, but when I think of that city, it’s still the first place I think of.