The google in my head

I carry maps in my head. I'm wondering if Google has somehow infiltrated my gray matter?? (And if so, why in heavens name did they pick my head? Clearly, they could have done better.)

For example, if you said "hmmm, I feel like going out for Italian tonight. Any recommendations?", I would get a map in my head of DC and areas with concentrations of restaurants -- Barracks Row, Dupont Circle, H St. NE., etc. -- would be highlighted. Italian restaurants would have little dots on them.

If you then said "....but I don't feel like going very far", I'd narrow my focus (sorta like that zoom slide dohickey on Google maps) and just show Capitol Hill, which would give me H St. and Barracks Row.

By now, we'd be down to a handful of places and you'd get my list. (You would not, however, be able to click on my forehead and get a link to each restaurant's website, no matter how often you poked me in the head.)

If, instead, you were visiting and said "I am completely out of underwear. Where can I go to get some more?", a whole different set of maps would show up (right after I pointed you to my washer and dryer and tried really hard not to imagine what happened to all your underwear).

You probably have a similar function in your head. We've built our maps up over time, learning our way around our environment, going shopping, discovering new places, getting lost (who, us?), etc.

I don't have those maps for Brisbane, not even for the Central Business District, yet.

Today, I needed clothes hangers. We're moving into our apartment tomorrow and I remembered that it had, oh, 4 clothes hangers in the closet. As you can imagine, we need more. But where does one buy clothes hangers?

In DC, my "household goods" overlay would show up on my DC map with the Target in Adams Morgan, Fragers Hardware on Capitol Hill, CVS on Bladensburg Rd., etc. Here....I don't even know the names of stores that carry clothes hangers, much less where to find them.

The CBD is chock-full of shopping. Just lousy with it. And virtually none of it has names I recognize. Oh, there's the occasional Starbucks (far fewer of them than you'd imagine and I know for a fact they don't carry clothes hangers) but no Target, CVS, Wal-Mart, etc.

I asked one of the girls (she's under 30, I'm calling her a "girl") in the hotel lounge here and she looked at me like that was the most unusual question anyone had asked her in a week. Her look said "Doesn't everyone know where to buy something as inane as clothes hangers? Is this American woman possibly deranged? She's got an awful lot of white hair, perhaps she's too elderly to be wandering out here on her own much less attempting to purchase household goods. I wonder if that nice young man I've seen her with is her son."

Or at least that's what her look said to me. Her reply -- "why, anywhere on Queen St." -- was not so helpful. I know for a fact that the copious cell phone stores do not sell clothes hangers. Ditto the coffee shops (also copious), bookstores, and news stands.



So, I wandered out un-aided today, after having packed the contents of our hotel room into 8 (count 'em: 8) suitcases. (See? We really are going to need more than 4 clothes hangers.) I wandered in shops somewhat aimlessly but managed to score on almost my very first try.

The Big W is somewhere between K-Mart and Wal-Mart and has an impressive supply of, you guessed it, clothes hangers. Wire, plastic, and wood.

I am saved! No thanks to the girl in the hotel lounge, thankyouverymuch. But if you come to visit, be assured: you will get a clothes hanger of your very own!

Side note: why is it that people who work in hotels often know less about their city, in useful terms, than even the scary-looking guy in the gas station? I have had more hotel desk clerks not be able to give me directions to their hotel because "I never come to work from the interstate" or something like that. Seriously, I can't be the first person to ask that kind of question! If I wanted to know how to get to the most expensive restaurant in the city, they'd be right on top of that. Need to buy clothes hangers....well....