The Best Time to Learn a City Is on the Way There

There is a stretch of every trip that nobody schedules. The two hours on the train. The flight out. The forty minutes on the airport bus. The evening before, in a hotel room, with a phone.

It gets spent on a feed, and that is fine — but it is also the only part of a trip when you are guaranteed to be sitting still with nothing else to do, which makes it the single best time to find out about the place you are going to.

What you are actually doing

The instinct is to treat this as homework: learn the dates, memorise which king built what, arrive informed. That does not work and it is not the point. You will forget most of it, and the bits you remember will be the bits you had no use for.

What you are actually doing is planting recognition. You are not trying to be able to recite anything. You are trying to arrive in a state where the large building on the left of the square is not an anonymous large building — where something goes oh, that’s the one.

That single moment changes how the rest of the day goes, because the alternative is what most people actually do: stand in front of something impressive, feel vaguely that they should know what it is, take a photograph as a substitute for knowing, and move on. Recognition is what stops the photograph being the whole transaction.

It is also why audio suits this better than reading. You cannot read a guidebook on a bus without feeling sick, you cannot read one on a plane without the light being wrong, and you certainly cannot read one while dragging a suitcase. You can listen through any of it.

The three journeys, and what each is good for

The journey out is for breadth. You do not know what you will end up caring about yet, so this is the leg to let the whole city go past without trying to hold on to it. Something will catch — a period, a district, one building — and that becomes what you actually go and look at.

The arrival leg — the airport train, the bus from the station — is for orientation, and it is short and specific. Twenty-five minutes on the metro from Lisbon’s airport, about 15 to 20 from Schiphol into Amsterdam, roughly a quarter of an hour from Copenhagen’s terminal to the middle of town. That is enough for the four or five places you will walk past in the first hour, and no more.

The journey home is the underrated one, and I would argue it is the best of the three. You have now stood in front of the things. You have the referents. A story about a square you crossed four times lands completely differently from the same story told to somebody who has never seen it — the names attach to something, and the details you half-noticed at the time resolve.

It is also the leg where you find out what you missed, which sounds like a cruelty and is actually the most reliable way anyone ever decides to go back.

How long a whole city takes

This is a genuinely useful number and almost nobody publishes it, so: a city playlist in Neywo prints its own length when you open it.

• Madrid is 116 stories and 3 hours 54 minutes.
• Berlin, the largest in the catalogue, is 480 stories and 7 hours 48 minutes.

Which maps onto real journeys rather neatly. Madrid is a long train leg or the flight from northern Europe to almost anywhere. Berlin is a transatlantic flight, or a fortnight of commutes. A smaller city is an afternoon.

You would not sit through Berlin end to end and you are not meant to. The order is landmarks first and then alphabetical, so the front of the list is the part that earns its place, and there is a highlights filter that cuts it to the top tiers when four hundred and eighty is obviously the wrong number. Start at the top, stop when you have had enough, and the rest is there.

The one mode that needs no signal at all

Worth being precise about this, because it is the practical advantage. A location-triggered audio guide needs to know where you are — that is the whole mechanism — which means GPS, and a map underneath your position.

A playlist needs none of it. There is no location, no route, nothing to be in the right place for. It is a programme, so it works in a plane at 900 km/h, in a tunnel, on a train through countryside with no coverage, and in a hotel room on airport wifi. Download it before you go and the phone can be in airplane mode for the entire journey, with the battery cost of playing an audio file and nothing else.

It also picks up where you left off — the position is kept for a month — which matters more than it sounds when the journey is split across a bus, a gate and a flight.

Your own city, on the way to work

The case nobody thinks of. You have a commute, and it goes past things.

The problem with the street you have walked two hundred times is not that it is boring, it is that you have stopped seeing it — and unlike a city you are visiting, you will never get the fresh-eyes version back. Listening to your own city on the way in is the closest available substitute, and it is oddly effective, because you already have every referent. You are not planting recognition; you are getting an explanation for something you have looked at for years.

If you would rather do this on foot, roam is the version that runs while you walk and lets each place speak once. But on a bus, in traffic, the playlist is the one that works.

What it is not good for

Three honest limits.

It is not a substitute for being there. It is a preparation and a souvenir. A story about a building is a fraction of standing in front of the building, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

There is no route logic in it. A playlist is ordered for listening, not for walking, so two consecutive stories can be three kilometres apart. Do not try to derive an itinerary from it — that is what a researched route or the build-a-walk function is for.

You will forget most of it, and that is the design rather than a failure. Twenty per cent retention on a four-hour listen is plenty, because you are not being examined — you need enough to make five or six things on the street feel familiar.

The practical bits

• Download before you leave the wifi. Obvious, universally forgotten.
• Headphones with a cable are still better on a plane than pairing over Bluetooth to a phone in airplane mode, and much better than a seatback jack.
• It is in 11 languages, and you can change language mid-story without losing your place — useful when two people are sharing one journey and not one first language.
• Don’t do it in the last hour before landing. Do it early in the flight. By the descent you want to be looking out of the window, which is its own orientation exercise and a better one.

Which leg gets which mode

A rough allocation for a city break, using the ways in:

When	What
Flight or train out	City playlist, highlights filter, breadth
Airport train in	Playlist, the first four or five places
First morning	A researched walk — the route someone has already sequenced
Awkward hour	Build one from where you are standing
Third day, no plan	Roam, and let the city interrupt you
Flight home	Playlist again, the stops you actually saw

None of it needs booking and all of it is free. If you would rather judge the writing before committing a flight to it, the samples page has real clips with transcripts, and every city guide is free to read — which is, incidentally, another perfectly good thing to do on a train.