A map is not a catalogue

I built this so I wouldn't have to open fifteen tabs every time I decided where to go. It's a practical tool and nothing more: it tells you whether you'll be cold in March, what a flat costs, and whether the wifi will hold a video call.

What it doesn't tell you is what people there live on, what gets celebrated in May, which neighbourhood has spent twenty years refusing to disappear, or why that building stands where it stands. A city with centuries behind it, boiled down to four figures, is easy to choose between and just as easy to mistake for a product. It isn't one. It's somebody's home.

If you go, go like this

These aren't anybody's official rules. They're the ones I try to keep, and they're short on purpose.

• You're the one who adapts. Lunch at four, the street noise, the shops shut on Sunday, the queue that isn't a queue. None of that is broken. It's just how it is. If everything annoys you, the problem with the trip isn't the destination.
• Learn ten words. Hello, thank you, please, sorry, how much is it. Your pronunciation will be terrible and it doesn't matter: it's the difference between passing through a place and being in it.
• Don't haggle for sport. Arguing over fifty cents with someone who lives on that isn't a travel anecdote. Your salary and their prices aren't in the same economy, and nobody knows that better than you.
• Leave the money nearby. The bar on the corner, the market, the bakery downstairs, the coworking in your neighbourhood. What you spend in a chain leaves; what you spend there stays.
• Housing is the delicate one. Those of us who work remotely pay rents that pull everyone else's up. A website doesn't fix that, but you can rent long instead of short, avoid the flats that were neighbours' homes until two years ago, and not complain about the price in front of someone earning a quarter of what you do.
• Ask before you shoot. People, homes, funerals, prayers, children. Something being in plain sight doesn't make it yours to photograph.
• Respect what you don't understand. Some of what you see will strike you as absurd, unfair or impossible to follow. Some of it will be. None of it is yours to fix on a three-month stay, and having loud opinions is free only for the person who leaves.
• Leave no trace. The rubbish, the water, the noise at three in the morning, the beach. The same as you'd do at home, which is exactly what this is for somebody.

My own share of it

This page points at me too. The map sorts cities by how well they suit you: it puts your comfort in the middle and everything else in the background. That's the way the tool looks at the world, and I don't know how to build it otherwise.

What I can do is not hide it. No city is ever hidden from the map or marked as a bad one — the colour says whether its weather resembles the weather you asked for, and nothing else. The numbers describe the climate and the cost, never the people. And when someone who lives in a place writes to correct a figure, their word beats my model.

Tell me if I got this wrong

I wrote this from one particular place, with my own blind spots. If you live in one of the cities on this map and something here grates, or something obvious is missing, write to me. This page can change.

Contact