Hello and welcome to the 55th issue of Place! We had a bit of an unexpected editorial delay on a few essays that are in the works, so today we’re going to take a look back at the global paths that Place has taken in the last few months. From nostalgia in Uruguay to a portal to South Africa to inked brushes in Taiwan, we’ve seen how a deep relationship to place is a universal experience. The highlighted passages are some of our favorite reflections on this shared sentiment.
ICYMI! We recently honoured our first birthday by launching a brand new pitch guide because we really want to hear your stories! And the great news is, we can now pay our contributors thanks to our generous subscribers who have supported us through our membership program. We already have a couple pieces coming up that we are super excited to share with you all, and can’t wait for what’s to come.
At Place, we believe that the experiences, sensations and conversations we have as we move about the world stay with us, stacking up as the years go by, forming who we are and the way we view the world. Do you have a letter to share? Send it to us at placeletter@protonmail.com. If you are interested in writing for Place you can find our pitch guide here. If you’re the social type, follow us on Twitter (@place_letter) where you can share your favourite pieces and Instagram (@placenewsletter) for a visual feast. Yours, The Place editorial team.
Uruguay: The Queen of Nostalgia
“In December 2019, I flew back to Uruguay from Denmark, where I currently live, for the first time in a couple of years to visit friends and family. I landed mid-morning and was met with the humid heat wave of early summer in the southern hemisphere and greetings with the very distinctive Spanish accent that replaces the pronunciation of y and ll with a stronger 'sh' sound. Everything seemed a little better than I remembered. Downtown Montevideo appeared cleaner, and an afternoon spent at the Rambla didn’t seem like a waste of time anymore. I even bought my first mate. In the past, I had regarded our cuisine as rather bland and monotonous, with its lack of diversity and countless ways of combining beef and carbs. This time around, I understood that the use of rich seasonings and marinades is unnecessary when the high-quality of Uruguayan ingredients take the center stage. A few of the buildings that I recalled as being grey, had now been repurposed as art spaces or food markets, and stood out to me for their historic relevance. The boring emptiness of the flat countryside now felt comforting and serene. A chance to hear the crackling sound of wood burning in a bonfire, of crickets singing in a warm night.
On some levels it felt like I had never left, because almost everything still was where I had left it. At the same time, there were many changes, improvements, growth. Still, I didn’t feel like I had missed out. Quite to the contrary, going away is what I needed to discover my country with new eyes.”
India: A City Without Its Sea
“There have been too many moments recently where I want to scream, arms to the sky, hot tears on my face, asking why the people in charge of this country want to see it bleed. We have had to watch the farmers who cultivate our crop, who put food on our tables be beaten with wooden sticks. We have seen pogroms and protests, fire and fury—we have witnessed this country descend into something it is not. The Great Mumbai Coastal road feels like a sharp, unnecessary wound on a body already battered: another decision designed to disrespect our land, its people, and the ability for some to call it home.
From my window above the city, the highway is only a dent in my already crisp view. But when running barefoot in rubble, holding my grandfather’s wrinkly hand, or taking a breath for my uncle on his fresh green bench, the midnight clangs of the lone crane are an ever looming threat to the collective legacies that make Bombay what I’ve always known.
Bombay is a resilient city—she will live on, she will live strong. My Bombay, though, is dying. Just as my eyes and ears hang heavy, greedy for the golden past of my mothers and hers, I imagine my future children with the same yearnings. I pray against the day I have to tell them of a sweet time when the sea was still ours, the city was sometimes calm, and I could walk for hours in quiet parks full of stories.”
Taiwan: The Inked Brush
“This breakfast shop was like any other in Taiwan, equipped with a long counter in the front for takeaway orders, small tables with a sauce tray for the classic soy/hot sauce pairing and cylindrical shaped holders for chopsticks. Breakfast places like this are usually a mix of indoor and outdoor dining with a spinning fan blaring throughout the premises to keep the temperature cool (customers must be creative with their plastic chopstick wrappers so they don’t fly away in the wind). Operations at such establishments are usually run in a quintessential Taiwanese style, which is to put simply, organised chaos. Any step out of line threatens to disrupt this balance.
A few moments later, her manager came out and started asking her why there was a break in the assembly line of orders to the chef as the customer queue started growing. She tried her best to keep quiet but I could hear her saying to her manager: “This guy over here didn’t order on the piece of paper so everything got messed up.” My aunt later told me that the entire country of Taiwan orders their breakfast by marking the items on a paper menu and handing said piece of paper to a server. My simple transgression felt that it didn’t just make life a little harder for this waitress, but like I screwed up the entire country’s breakfast workflow.
She didn’t have to point me out to her manager; the way I conducted myself just by standing at the corner waiting for my egg pancakes gave me away as an outsider already and I felt the attention from other customers, like they detected an intruder.”
Italy: Extending an Olive Branch
“We need collective spaces for sadness and for joy, and we need them, I think, in person. There is a necessity in bringing what we experience in isolation in the rooms of our homes to public places, to cross the threshold from the inner to the outer life, and meet each other there. To be able to bind our emotions up in physical consecrations – in the leaves of olive trees, in the smooth surface of a piece of paper with a loved ones name on it – and show them to each other, in lieu of words that may never come.
Walking through the fragmented crowds on Palm Sunday, I felt my own hand more obviously empty than before. Heading back up the stairs to the old town on the cliff, the breeze slowed and the crowds thinned. I heard a sort of rustling and looked up to see an elderly man leaning over a low wall that lined the stairs with his head in the boughs of an olive tree. After a few moments I heard a muffled snap. He stepped back from the wall, holding a small olive branch, and walked past me down the stairs, towards the centre of town.”
South Africa: Little Pockets of Limbo
“During my layover at Istanbul’s airport, the international departures terminal felt relatively populous. Most shops and restaurants were open. But amidst the crowds, the unusual elements stuck out: Turkish Airlines’ flight attendants wore Hazmat suits instead of their usual tailored uniforms. Or perhaps it was me who felt unusual, sporting a KN95 mask, a face shield, and the lingering scent of hand sanitiser, intending to ensconce myself as much as possible from the outside world - a world which, when travelling alone in normal times, I relish being a part of.
The people around me seemed to build their own bubbles, too. Walking to my gate, I encountered a striking image. A family—a father with five or six small children—sitting on the floor in the shadow of a large pillar, all happily sharing a single large takeaway container of kebab. They had arranged themselves in a circle around this shared styrofoam box: one symbiotic multigenerational entity, armed with forks. Their luggage sat behind them as both backrest and ringed fortress, a formation familiar to me from years of camping out in unwieldy corners of airports and train stations for hours.
Whether the kebab shop wasn’t offering seating, or the family just felt safer away from the crowds, I can’t know. There was just something about the way they were, literally, a self-contained unit: their backs to the terminal, their faces turned inward toward each other, a nucleus of quietude within the larger, wilder mechanisms of the airport and a discomfiting world. I suppose I’m always struck by the myriad ways that humans make homes even in unlikely places.”
Place Recommends:
Hamburg’s high street improvisations,
The hidden stories of Britain’s Chinatowns.
Join us next week in exploring what makes a house a home.