Not sure what you mean by …have no palaces that seem familiar to me to use for memorizing…
You have no place you are familiar with???
When I wait in the bank for twenty minutes waiting to complete a transaction, I have sufficient time to get familiar with it to use it as palace. It is simple to pick out ten obvious features of the bank on the outside and again on the inside. That’s two palaces with ten stations each. The fifteen minute bus ride on the way to the bank provides me with ten features of the inside of the bus that are easy to remember if I make a point of doing so. A little recall practice of the features while on the bus, a couple immediately after while walking to my destination. Again, while walking back and then confirming the accuracy while on the bus on the way home. That’s three palaces in a couple of hours.
There are at least a dozen sites in my favorite mall that I can make my way to without any difficulty whatsoever. Each one has at least a dozen locations inside that just need attending to for them to become part of one station in that particular mall palace .
In my favorite supermarket there are dozens, maybe hundreds of things that I know how to find without giving it a thought. In fact, in the supermarket the problem is an overwhelming number of stations that I can visualize easily when thinking about it. The trick there is choose only the ones that stand out for some other reason so as to reduce the mental energy needed to keep it all straight.
A memory palace doesn’t have to be something that you could navigate around blindfolded before you even thought about using it as a palace. When I leave my apartment, I have the hallway as part of a memory palace, the elevator is another one, then the hallway from the elevator, the trip though the parkade and finally my car (outside and inside).
Simply going to my car is an opportunity to practice a hundred German words every day. To keep it from getting boring I started expanding the words attached to each station. A cafe became an expensive cafe, then a noisy, expensive cafe, followed by my favorite noisy, expensive cafe, then my favorite, noisy, expensive cafe downtown. Then I just play with it. How do I find, leave, get to my favorite, expensive…, how do you, they, everyone, no one, etc.
Of course, I could just stand there frustrated and bored while using the elevator, or waiting in the doctors office, sitting in the airport terminal, waiting to pick up my car. But even if I am there only once it is sufficient if I have to spend any time there. Of course, I have to take proper, lasting note of it.
If I am walking or driving there is the intersection that I immediately cross almost every day with its more than usual number of posts with traffic controls on them. I look directly at them every day. Each one has easy to remember features that I have seen on traffic lights all my life. All I have to do is draw it on a piece of paper after picking the features I want to put in the palace and then put it into an excel file. Then spend a few minutes at spaced intervals remembering it over time.
Palaces are the easiest part of memorization. Even house bound people can build there own with Minecraft. Sitcoms usually have a standard set they use. Simple to freeze frame and find ten stations. You even have strong characters to assist with the difficult part which is association.