A city that especially stood out to me was Esmeralda because of several reasons. Firstly, the name of the city reminds me of a childhood game that I used to play with my family. It was a card game where each player had to make predictions about how many card combinations they will be able to play out based on the available cards in their hand. The combinations were set by the game’s rules and each person’s turn was affected by the decisions and actions of other players, therefore it was not easy to predict the right amount of combinations you would be able to play out. At the end of each round points were calculated based on how many predictions each player got right. In addition to counting points among the players, my godfather had come up with an additional set of rules which included Esmeralda – an invisible player who also scored points after each round based on the performance of others. The ultimate goal of the game was to beat Esmeralda and score more points than her. I remember being very bewildered about who Esmeralda was when I first started to play the game when I was young. I always associated her with a mystical creature and was almost afraid of her “presence” in the game. Only when I grew up I learned that Esmeralda was purely an invention to make the game more dynamic, interesting and challenging, yet my strong perception of her as a mystical creature never went away.
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Secondly, out of all cities described in the book Esmeralda spoke to me the most because it immediately reminded me of New York – a city that I lived in for four months during my Junior Year Spring semester. “And so Esmeralda’s inhabitants are spared the boredom of following the same streets every day…each inhabitant can enjoy every day the pleasure of a new itinerary to reach the same places” – this quote resonated a lot with my personal experience in New York which was to always try to take a new route to get to my destination, as there are countless parallel streets in the city. Although they may seem similar from the outside, each street is different from the previous – I always discovered either a new coffee shop, a new park or dog day care on each street that I walked on. I loved exploring New York on foot, as the city seemed so walkable despite the occasional bike rider nearly crashing in me and cars honking everywhere. Whenever I had to go somewhere further, just walking was often not an option, especially if I was in a hurry. Then I had to explore other transportation methods that New York offers. “…the network of routes is not arranged on one level, but follows instead an up-and-down course of steps, landings, cambered bridges, hanging streets” – this quote reminds me of the type of public transport that I used the most in New York – the iconic subway. The subway system in the city seemed so vast and almost always I could count on finding a station nearby and teleporting one level down to continue my journey in the underground. The subway system was also always full of rats which is also mentioned about Esmeralda: “below, the rats run in the darkness of the sewers, one behind the other’s tail, along with conspirators and smugglers”. The second part of the quote also reminds me of New York, as it was a city where I sometimes experienced some dangerous and frightening moments because of people’s weird and unpredictable behavior.
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Lastly, another quote about Esmeralda that reminded me strongly of New York was: “a map of Esmeralda should include, marked in different colored inks, all these routes, solid and liquid, evident and hidden”. The part about different colored inks reminded me of the New York subway map which is filled with seemingly tangled colored lines, each color representing a metro line. The map was especially hard to navigate in the beginning when I moved to New York. In addition, New York’s map is filled with tangible and intangible routes. For example, the dotted ferry lines on the Hudson river seemed far less tangible than solid streets represented in the map and took more time to learn to navigate. However, once mastered, they opened up new and unexpected ways to discover the never-ending city of New York.
