I’m back at the airport in Boston. Today’s journey already feels a little bit familiar.

I’ve spent the past two months or so at home. I’m from New Hampshire (Concord) but as I’ve come to learn and accept, I am not from an independent and proud capital city of a place with its own individual identity and cultural background. I’m actually from Boston’s largest suburb by land area.

And although I’ve been slowly weaning myself off of the car (maybe watching too much urbanist YouTube and listening to too much of the War on Cars podcast), Concord has excellent bus access to Boston. It’s a little expensive, but I really haven’t had much to do for the past week or so.

On Friday, I came down by bus and took on the challenge of riding a segment of every transit system in Boston in just one day (not getting too specific — all the subway lines, commuter rail, ferry, trolleys, BlueBike). I was more successful than I had even imagined I was going to be. It was fun, but might not have been too smart to acquaint myself with the sights and sounds of the inside of a moving metal box just a couple of days in advance of today.

Although if this is the challenge I choose to subject myself to whenever I get to a particular place, I haven’t cut out very much work for myself in the next destination city — I can ride the bus to the Wuri HSR station, Green Line to the Costco, take a slow train to South District and a YouBike to Wufeng and be finished.

Taichung sounds like an urbanly-explorable place.

I’ve been having the time of my life radicalizing myself to such extremes as becoming a cycling train enthusiast — for as much free time as I have in the coming three months (I’m still not sure about the work:life balance to expect), I’m sure I’ll get to have a good time on some cross-island train journeys and with the street-width dichotomy between the north and south that I’ve heard about online. I mean, how bad could the birthplace of such memorable transit mascots possibly be?

Being from the Northeast, I think I’m a little spoiled as far as neat cities go as compared to most other Americans — we have neat brick streets, narrow roads, lots of buses and pretty good and colorful metro systems, lots of history, and plenty of tree-lined streets.

Even Manchester (in NH) has lots of frequent buses, a good commuter coach-bus system (called the “Zip Line”), really cheap fares (but still fares, which is important — you need to collect money to pay for the buses. Concord has not yet figured this one out).

I do really agree that it is important to get the basics right if you want to have a nice place for people to live their lives. I’m certainly considering a lot of what I see when I explore locally in the context of my future — I can explore close to home, I can explore far from home (coming soon, as you know), and someday all of this knowledge might come in handy if I have to put myself down somewhere at some time in the future.

One of the neatest ways to explore a city, I think, is to ring around it on its buses. You’ll both get a good feel for how easy it is to get around in the city, and you’ll get neat views out the windows (especially if it’s one of those level-boarding citybuses that are so common these days. They’re nice, but Concord has also not yet figured this one out).

You can explore the more livable parts of Concord on foot without the assistance of the green school buses if you want — they’re mostly for commuting from other parts of town to Main St, though.

Cities with streetcars are especially cool, but the only ones I’ve ridden are the ones in Toronto (kind of abused) and the Mattapan Trolley (pretty cool, but there should be more of it).

I’ve been lucky lately with how much world-viewing I’ve been getting to do.

But I think it’s all really because the best thing a person can to do stay sane is to get out and explore as much as is possible (even your own city!), make friends, get with friends, spend as much or as little on transportation as you want, and maybe get one of those excessively-sugary Thai teas at your local American suburban mall. I think I’ve been stuck for too long on the “grass is greener on the other side” mentality that kills — it’s really not about where you are, it’s about what you do with it, right?

That’s kind of always relevant in any context. I’m just happy I’ve reminded myself about it.

Slowly into the future I go.

And onto a plane in about two hours.