Home is where the Google Pin Is

My unexpected Google Maps diary and the comfort of being a regular.

By Zoe Gallis

Illustration by Selin Ho

Pandoras is a Berlin church repurposed into a coffee shop by day, gay bar by night, serving lethal G&Ts at all hours of operation. Francis and I had spotted the red brick basilica from our dorm window during our first week of our summer study abroad program and we wandered over to it, unaware of the religious experience it offered. We sat outside on a hot afternoon, next to a table hosting a children’s birthday party, and did our readings for ArtHum. The rest of our day, like most of our days in Berlin, consisted of a museum visit and a long walk around Kreuzberg ending with an ice cream at Vanille & Marille or an impromptu movie at Kino Central. Later, to kick off the evening, we’d have a negroni at ERNST, the bar around the corner with the unfriendly bartender who, I’m sure, was tired of seeing the same two faces appear at the start of every night. We’d eventually make our way over to Neukölln or Prenzlauer Berg where we’d sit in half-empty bars like Rabauke, which played The Strokes or Honey Lou, which drew us in with its intense gold light before ending up at our beloved Tresor where the hours of the night got lost in techno music. We made a note to keep track of all of the spots we loved, promising that we’d return to the city in seven years time to experience them all again and to see the doors of the Pergamon Museum finally reopen. By the end of our six weeks there, we had enough movie ticket stubs to fill our pockets and over a hundred Google Pins covering East and West Berlin. 

Had our trip taken place before the time of Google Maps, perhaps I would have imitated what I’ve often seen in movies and taken a thick black Sharpie into bathroom stalls to mark my name on the walls—solid and lasting proof that I had been there. But instead, I was left with a digital scrapbook depicting all of my regular spots—one I could scroll through and feel a sudden pang of nostalgia for those hazy days and bright nights in Germany. 

It’s a funny thing to admit that the closest I have ever come to keeping a diary has been accumulating pins on Google Maps for the various cities I have spent time in. Like most Columbia freshmen, when I first moved to New York I sought out places to frequent around the massive city in an effort to make it more digestible, more my own. I began with what was in my ten mile radius and saved places like The Hungarian Pasty Shop, Tom’s Diner, The Heights, Book Culture 112th, and gone-but-not-forgotten, Absolute Bagels. 

As I would look at the map on my screen and see the many miles that separated me from my family in Greece, the pins that resided just outside my dorm brought me a comfort I held on to. I would return to these places often, seeking to build the familiarity I felt was missing from my new life in the city. I continued this ritual with the help of friends and locals and, soon enough, lower Manhattan and Brooklyn became equally populated with pins, and my map of New York began to look a lot like my map of my Athenian hometown—that is, lived in.  

In only a few months time, I knew that I could go to Tom’s and speak Greek with the cashier, I knew the waitresses at Hungarian knew my name, I knew whose recommendations to ask for at Book Culture, and I knew the secret treasure of Absolute Bagels was their Thai iced tea. 

Seeking “a place where people know my name” is a cliché I dismissed too quickly before I experienced moving away from all I had known. I mistakenly interpreted the saying as an expression of desire for fame or legacy, but my understanding of it has since changed. Now what I hear in that phrase is something simple: I am looking to be witnessed. Becoming a regular somewhere was not about leaving behind a specific impression of myself, but about experiencing those brief moments of recognition and familiarity that reassured me that I was standing on my own two feet. More than this, it was also about building friendships and discovering small corners of the city that accumulated into a community that I can call my own. 

When my parents came to visit me towards the end of freshman year, we were deciding on a place to get coffee when I opened my Google Maps, now covered in pins. I showed it to them proudly, as if to say: Look at all the life I’ve gathered here.