I’ve spent the last few days exhausted in the city I will call home in a few short months, trying to find a good home where I can feel comfortable, close enough to campus to be able to walk to class, but far enough to not be woken up by early morning frat parties. I’ve never before tried to find a place to live in a city I know nothing about, and it has been surprisingly difficult — from determining what type of building I want to live in, to which side of the river, with considerations about safety (when I have no idea how I’ll feel walking home at night until I try it), freaking out about pests (when, realistically, everyone in Philadelphia has mice and/or roaches), and having no idea where my social life will be centered (though my college roommate has insisted that she has cultivated a ready-made friend group for me west of the river). It’s a giant tossup, and I’m not sure where it will end up, even after viewing over a dozen different apartments.

Some things that I do know:

1. Philadelphia is a walking town. Transit routes are more widely spaced apart than in New York, which means more walking between buses, trolleys, and subway stations. This is probably an unfair statement. Revised: Any city whose transit system I haven’t quite figured out will probably be a walking town. I have decided that this is a good thing. See below.

2. Whenever I get a chance to spend a day by myself, just walking and exploring a new place, I can usually find a way to fall in love with it. It’s going to be slow going with Philadelphia — I’ve visited three times in the last four months, and it wasn’t until today that I realized we were probably going to make it after all. Then again, I also had mono the first two times or so, so I guess if I’d fallen in love then it probably would have been in a haze of sick delirium.

These two items combined led to one of the most perfect days I’ve had in a long time. After three days of not finding Home, with a bus ticket to my last Home idling in my back pocket, I decided to walk down Locust Street till I hit the Schuylkill, writing down phone numbers off every “For Rent” sign I could find.

When you just walk down streets for the heck of it, sometimes you find things that strike your fancy.

I know this goes without saying, but Philadelphia really is alarmingly steeped in history. I recently finished David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, and I really do love simply knowing that this is where our country essentially gestated*. Every few steps along any street will yield a different blue historical marker. And then every now and again, if you duck down a side cobblestone street, or look up often enough, you’ll find an interesting shingle, or an ornate hitching post.
 

When I hit the river, I marched back down Chestnut, turned down a pretty street, walked back towards the river on Sansom, and, just as I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to make it to dinner without a little something, stumbled upon the gelato place that my college roomie and her parents had been raving about for days. So I stopped in and got what was, without a doubt, one of the top ten most delicious confections I have ever, EVER had the delight to eat. Behold, Capogiro gelato, half ginger and half dark chocolate:

I’m not just including this picture to make anybody who stumbles across it salivate as much as I am right now just thinking about it. I’m including it because this gelato actually proved something important, something that I think I somehow managed to cultivate over a mere three days in Philadelphia — and something I hope I can incorporate into my new life there.

I stopped into the gelato place because a) I was hungry; b) I’d heard amazing things about said gelato shop; and c) I was actively trying to experience a place and time, namely Philadelphia, now. I had a moment’s pause, out of habit: Should I really be having gelato in the middle of the day? Isn’t this a naughty thing to do? I ate so much homemade cake yesterday at my friend’s birthday picnic. And yet, this only hit me for a split second, not enough to cause me physical pause as I walked in and reveled in gustatory delight.

This was just a continuation of the decision I made yesterday when I ate the homemade cake. And cupcake. And half of the other cupcake somebody different had made. They were delicious, unique experiences that I should not have had to miss out on because I happen to wear a “plus” size. I ate them and I did not feel bad. I ate them, and I walked for miles and miles and miles until my feet hurt, not out of penance, but out of a desire to see more — and the next day I put on a different pair of shoes and walked for miles and miles and miles and ate gelato and bought sandwiches from my favorite deli, Koch’s, where they take their sweet time to craft a brilliant sandwich, and where the results are worth the wait. I bought my brother a Penn Special, and myself a sandwich that one of the workers created for me last time I visited: vegetarian cheese steak with vegetarian crab cakes stuffed into the sandwich. It was and is one of the best sandwiches I’ve ever had. While waiting for the sandwich, a writer who’s biked across America twice and across Europe and Africa gave me his phone number. Apparently, in Philadelphia, the menfolk like a lady who can eat her weight in hoagie.

For some reason, in Philadelphia this week, something felt like it clicked. I liked this feeling, being active and fit and capable of discovery on foot, and also capable of eating without guilt, even when the food I was consuming was on the condemned list of arbitrary no-nos. I wonder if these two go hand-in-hand — an easy activeness and a guilt-free appetite**. It makes sense that they should. But I never really felt like they were achievable for me.

Maybe this was what Elton meant. We’ll see.

Watching the Empire State Building grow as we approached, I realized that this is the first time in eight years that I’ve come back to New York without it being a homecoming. And yet, here I am, once again.

*Sorry, too gross?
**I never noticed that “petite” is in “appetite.” Weird. Etymology time!