Discovering your hometown

5 Exercises to love your city a little more!

Arts

Discover the museums in your area. Most towns have a museum dedicated to local history. Some museums have special exhibitions about temporary themes like special painters or artists which may appeal to you. Look for unusual museums. For example, I discovered a comic museum in my home town. Furthermore Colleges and universities often have art exhibits, plays, and symphony performances available to the public. Look up your city's arts association for local exhibits or classes.

Farmer's market

A farmer's market can provide delicious local food. It will often have other vendors hosting booths for gift shopping. Sometimes, your town might combine a farmer's market with a street fair offering live music and entertainment. In Nijmegen you have markets every Saturday and Monday where you can buy fresh produce, locally grown.

Wandering around

Allow serendipitous discovery. The next time you visit your Main Street, or any other district in your area, wander into a shop you've never visited. You may find out the store's products are made locally by folks living around the corner from you.

Bring a camera with you

The last time I took a camera and started taking pictures around, in my local Park and around the famous river, the Waal. You can also buy a travel guide for your own city for a fact-checking assignment. It was quite a strange experience, to have locals smiling and looking at me like I was a tourist with a camera. If you set out with the intention of taking pictures with your camera, you are far more likely to pay greater attention to details around you and to keep an eye out for the mildly interesting to the potentially intriguing. You'll look twice, once with your eyes and the second with your camera. You'll be able to soak in details you might not have seen otherwise, and you'll be able to look back on your photographs with fond memories.

Eat at a place that sells food from a different culture

Most of us probably do this often enough, but we tend to treat it as a special evening out when we do so. If there are immigrant enclaves in your own city, perhaps you might want to try pretending to be overseas while still being in your own city by visiting these little pockets and eating at places where they sell the kind of food the local immigrant population craves just to get a taste of home. It can be as simple as an onion pancake from a Chinese vendor, a Doner Kebab or even something more formal in a European restaurant. Even if it is in a kitschy restaurant with slightly over-the-top furnishing, it's probably the closest you can get to a temporary get away from the familiar as you immerse yourself in a foreign place on familiar territory.