Beginner roller skating
A City Is an Obstacle Course That Happens to Have Shops
This is why street skating hooks people. You are not doing laps, you are reading a route: a kerb here, a drain there, a bollard to go round, a stretch of good surface to open up on. The traps are real and the surface is mostly fine, and the whole pleasure is in handling the small problems as they arrive rather than removing them. It's a playground with traffic in it.
Ask street skaters why they keep going back and the answer is not speed. It is that a city is a course: there are traps in it, the surface is mostly fine, and you spend the whole ride reading what is coming.
A kerb here. A drain cover there. A bollard to go round, then a clean stretch where you can finally open up. None of it is arranged for you, and that is the point — you are not doing laps of something designed to be done.
The small difficulties are the ride. You avoid one, you roll over another, you step up a third. Take them all away and what is left is a car park, which is exactly where you learned and exactly what you eventually leave.
It is a playground with traffic in it, and the traffic is the reason the entry conditions exist at all.
Keep going: this is one section of the full Roller Skating for Beginners guide — sizing, gear, stopping, and where to skate, in one page.