A combination of ambition, stupidity, and wanderlust typical of twenty-somethings landed me a job in Berlin right out of college. My due diligence was to watch a few Rainer Werner Fassbinder movies and call it a day. I had visited the city before and socialized with lovers and casual acquaintances, but there was no sense of how I would build a life there or in a new place. I was challenged by the practical problems of adapting to a new city. After work, I wanted to walk around the city with a purpose, but I didn't have anywhere in particular to go. Weeks at the office, lonely weekends spent crying on a mattress on the floor of Charlottenburg without waiting in line at a club, and the thought of another aimless walk filled me with anxiety. Ta. A fun decision I made in haste, despite its adventurous benefits, left me feeling lost and alone.
So I sent an email to a writer I admire who was in his 20s and lived in Berlin. She didn't introduce me to an apartment rental company or a language school. Instead, she immediately responded with a series of links to her Google Maps. There are anarchist cafes, independent movie theaters, Sichuan restaurants and antique stores. The highlight was the toilet themed bar. I bookmarked the author's location on my map and set out for the nearest blue pin Chinese restaurant. That night, as I stuffed my face with mapo tofu, I felt something akin to peace. I was sitting at her one-seater table, and this mundane digital gesture of him, being directed to a certain place and walking in the path of the person who came before me, made me feel like I was being taken care of. I felt that there was.
I mainly used Google Maps for subway directions. I opened the app every day and never thought of its social features. Sure, I was saving spots here and there and maintaining a “bucket list”. It was filled with names of trendy restaurants that I would never refer to again. From what I've learned, the real fun begins when you start using Google Maps in multiplayer mode. You can share shared lists of saved places with others, create them for others, and remotely add tiny pins to your digital landscape. It's a simple action that evokes an increasingly rare sense of virtual care.
Creating a shareable map requires memory-intensive work. I started creating shared maps as a key to my own psychogeography, a way to stay in touch with far-flung friends, and to give loved ones a glimpse into my world. I printed out her QR code with a link to the shared map and gave it to her as a birthday or wedding gift. When my German best friend told me she was planning a trip to New York, I moved to Manhattan at the age of 18 and remembered my own sense of being overwhelmed as I walked through Manhattan. Ta. I felt as if the city was swallowing me whole. I wanted to make my large land more manageable, so I made her my Google Maps. I took her to her favorite places. As I listened to her report, I felt like my past was intertwined with her present.
The Internet once promised this kind of communal reverie, evoked by the talismanic word “connection.” The truth is, with today's information overload, it's rare to find what you're looking for. If you search for things like “best bars in Berlin,” you're likely to freeze due to information overload. The results are cluttered with paid placements and his SEO word soup, turning the user experience into a labyrinth of algorithmic fodder. That makes me all the more grateful for the quirky affordances that remain. It might be a stretch to say that working with a few friends to create a list of natural wine bars can be considered using a search engine in reverse. Still, something about shared mapping seems contrary to the spirit of modern technology, which dates back to the early days of the internet, a space of play at the margins of commercialization. The joy of sharing Google Maps comes from the social fabric that users create with what they are given.
Every drop of a pin works its magic, transforming one person's nostalgia into another's new sense of belonging.
On a dark winter day in Berlin, I shivered and complained to my friend: “All I want from this sinful life is a bubble bath.” She couldn't provide me with a bathtub, but she did try her hand at “Spa Life🫧,” a crowdsourced guide to hot water (and some dry saunas) for globetrotters. They even provided Google Maps. Both are equally quoting from friends' actual information. And fantasy travel. It's annotated with helpful information (where to find a cold plunge, where to cook hot spring eggs) and inside jokes (“you must bathe if you take a bath”), and our Combined explanations have accumulated over time. The prospect of making a pilgrimage to the many spots it included was surreal, but scrolling through the list filled me with detailed daydreams of skinny dipping at his five-star hotel in Gstaad. It added warmth to that monotonous afternoon.
Even if you're a stranger in a foreign city, the reassurance that you have somewhere to go is the kind of feeling you'd expect from German, which includes long compound nouns. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, none exist. The closest thing to me is the richness of shared maps. It reflects the peculiarity of meandering in a collective, whether in real travel or pure imagination. How rare that we have Big Tech tools that foster such genuine gestures of connection. There's something magical about strolling through the city, mesmerized by the reminder of your friend's presence, whether on foot or on screen. Every time a pin is dropped, magic is made, and one person's nostalgia turns into another person's new sense of belonging.
Adina Glickstein I'm a Colorado-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in Artforum, Hyperallergic, and Spike.
