The street you know by smell will never fit completely into directions.

Knowledge of a place is built from things that cannot be written down. Bread at a certain hour, a dry cleaner’s warm gust, a bin day, the way one corner sounds different in rain. Directions transmit the route and lose all of that, which is why a stranger following perfect instructions still arrives without knowing where they are. Familiarity is made of sensory detail with nowhere to go on a map.

When you tell someone how to find somewhere, add one detail that is not geographic. And when you are new somewhere, allow yourself the months it takes to collect the parts nobody could have told you.