Many years ago I made a rule for myself. That is to never walk on the large major streets, rather to always walk through the maze of smaller streets and alleys between those major streets. The reason being that the major streets are all the same, office buildings, luxury apartments, and up scale boutiques. The real flavor lives on all the smaller streets.
This is where i've stumbled across some of the best restaurants, shops, and oddities in the city. Recently i've been reminded that i shouldn't always stay off the main streets. I've been researching where to get some of the harder to get things, almost invariably it leads me to some store on a major avenue. But instead of it being one of the big expensive shops, it's underneath them.
On those big roads, there is occasionally the smallest of openings that is for a set of stairs leading down. I never really paid attention to what's down those stairs, as I figured it lead to the seedy underbelly of the city. However it seems like more and more the shops i've been going to, are located in places like this.
All this has pushed me to spend more time looking down and checking out what types of shops are down those ominous stairs around town. For example this second hand record shop that I came across last week. I was in a bit of a hurry, so didn't have time to go check out what they actually had, but i hope to do that soon. Iphones play records right?
