The Foreign Service Journal, April 2003

80 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 3 I live in Suva, which is a nice, quiet, friendly town of about 100,000. There are two build- ings of more than 10 stories, a movie theater, about a hundred Chinese restaurants, a market, and some streets full of low-rise little shops. In Fiji, the dress code is strictly 1950s Biloxi on a Sunday. I like it here, but once in a while I need an urban escape. To me, a real city is not just about size or population. First, it’s a place where you can feel movement, energy — the collective forward force of civilization. Real cities have a tangible atmosphere of ancestral achievement: monuments, noble public buildings, museums, the- aters, and restaurants, testaments to an enduring culture. The easiest way to tell a tell a proper city is by the smell – not the familiar hard- ship-tour pungency of diesel, drainage and dung-fires, but a fine blend of the sophisticated and the elemental: competing ethnic cook- ing vapors, coffee, car and bus fumes, baking, perfume and garbage juice (the ineradicable fluid that seeps out of a pile of black trash bags over a three-day summer trash strike). That combination of smells, mixed with the hot-dough baking steam of pretzels, takes me back to summer days in New York (let’s face it, the ur-city) when I was a kid. Some years ago I met our family lawyer, an octogenarian who had worked for my great-grandfather’s firm. Despite being blind since his teens, he had traveled the world — India, Africa, Europe — by ship. I didn’t ask but I imagine he told each place apart by its distinct cocktail of odors. Lastly, a real city has serious shopping. In Fiji, there is not much to spend one’s money on. In Sydney, by contrast, I wander into places where I can’t afford any- thing. In one mall off Market Street, I see nothing but boutiques in which scarcely a pair of socks is within budget. I wander in and out of several of them in guilty awe before buying an espresso and two small chocolates from Godiva ($5) as an excuse to stay and watch the people. Hong Kong is worse. In the mall below our hotel, there are three floors of Euro-designer stores all using a hundred square feet to display three handbags and a pair of shoes. (You can imagine what the shoes must cost, to afford that rent.) There are no price tags and a short- sleeved shirt costs a whole day’s per diem. I feel like I have been plucked out of 1970s Smolensk and dropped into the Mall of the Americas the week after Christmas. It is good for the ego to realize that, whatever one’s apparent economic status in a Third World country, there are plenty of places where a State Department salary is barely bus money, and plenty of people who put more cash on their backs in a year than I put in my Thrift Fund. After two days of only being able to afford the food court, I’m starting to feel a little 214b, so I go to Kowloon and buy 10 watches for 15 bucks and a handful of “silk” ties that, when unwrapped, seem to have been tailored for Herve Villechaize. After a week, I am happy to be back in Fiji. The peaceful, traffic- free drive back from the airport takes me past quiet, burned-out sugar cane farms, criss-crossed with sluggish, overloaded, miniature cane-trains; through a pine-forest; and on via the coast road with its beautiful bays full of shallow, clear, blue water and waves breaking on the distant reef. But back in Suva, driving down its low-rise main street, the countdown starts ticking for my next big city fix. A short-sleeved shirt costs a whole day’s per diem. Simon Hankinson is a vice consul in Suva. The stamp is courtesy of the AAFSW Bookfair “Stamp Corner.” R EFLECTIONS Big City Fix B Y S IMON H ANKINSON