June 7, 2009 →
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I went to Beijing a few years ago for work and found time on the side to do some exploring. I had a lot of trouble speaking Chinese — mainly because I don’t know Chinese. :) Beijing is a large city. It was hard to expect every cab driver to know each and every small street. Every morning I would leave my hotel and have the concierge tell the cab driver where to take me. But what to do after a long night out when it came time to come back to the hotel? Luckily for me, the hotel business cards had a small map on the back side. No matter where I ended up in the city, when it came time to go home, I would take out my card and point it at the driver. And so found my way back home.

Why do I blog this? I was recently thinking about how locators worked before we all had something digital in our hands. Sometimes, we don’t need anything fancy to find our way, just a single flat structure that says “this is home”. Timo has a good collection of locators called “Here“.

Tags: beijing, maps, travel