There is a moment in every city I visit when I figure out how it actually moves. Not how the tourist map says it moves. Not how the hotel concierge suggests. The real rhythm — where the bottlenecks are, which transport options quietly fall apart after 9pm, and what the people who actually know the place do when they need to get somewhere without drama.
After forty cities across six continents, I have made most of the mistakes there are to make. I have waited forty minutes for a taxi in Tokyo that
