Maps are Hard
Although this blog is filled with useful tips I’ve picked up from my travels, the truth is that much of my advice comes from times that I did things dead wrong. I never want to come across as if I think I have it all figured out when it comes to traveling, and so today I share a truly embarrassing story of one of my earliest travel blunders during my study abroad.
“This is fine. I’m fine. I have plenty of water. This is a very safe city, and I have a map. I can totally figure this out.” These were my thoughts for the first 10 minutes of being lost in Sevilla. I can’t say that I found my way to the train station so much as that I took turns that looked vaguely correct from my rudimentary understanding of Sevilla geography and managed to lose my way to the train station. In any event, I had made it.
Well, I had made it through the first leg of a three leg trip from my school to my homestay. Luckily the next leg was just riding the train to Dos Hermanas, and it’s pretty hard to get lost on a train. I mean, I’m sure I could have found a way, but on this particular day, I listened with fervent attention as the train voice cheerfully announced each upcoming stop. Now came the real challenge: making my way from the train station to my home stay.
My confidence had been boosted by my success in finding the train station in Sevilla (I chose to ignore the fact that it should have taken me 15 minutes to get to the station, but it had actually taken closer to an hour. I had sort of done that on purpose, right? I was exploring, getting lost to find myself, some other platitude that would look good on a Pinterest graphic…) With half a bottle of water and a misguided self-confidence, I set off into the maze that is Dos Hermanas. It had seemed so simple that morning as I walked with Marta, one of my home-stay sisters. There were four, maybe five turns, max. I could easily remember 5 turns. And I had looked at the street signs this morning, too. I definitely knew the names of the streets. Absolutely. I was certain.
Even allowing for some wrong turns, it shouldn’t have taken more than 20 minutes to get to the house, but an hour had passed since I left the train station. My water bottle was long empty and the afternoon sun was beating down mercilessly on the clueless American girl on Calle Louis Ortega Bru. Also, why are the street names so long? Who thought this was a good idea? I’m sure that Louis did a lot of great things for Spain, but can’t we just give him an award or something? How am I supposed to remember street names that are six words long? And multiply that by the five different streets that I need to find to get from the house to the station. That’s 30 words I need to remember, and they’re all in Spanish!
On a scale of one to ten, with one being taking a nap while soft jazz music plays in the background, and ten being walking across the Grand Canyon on a tightrope that is burning from both ends while someone reads your middle school diary to everyone you’ve ever wanted to impress, I was about a 6 for anxiety. Not exactly panicking, but also vaguely aware that I could potentially die from this. Admittedly, I didn’t know any stats on how long it would take someone to die of thirst, but it felt like I was reaching the point where I should start being concerned about that. Stress is a funny thing, because I was legitimately concerned about becoming dehydrated to the point of death while standing on a populated street in a residential area.
So yes, my anxiety was at a 6, but on the outside, I was exerting a lot of effort to come off as a 2. No one wants to be the panicked foreign student who can’t figure out road names. It’s just embarrassing. Apparently, I was only achieving, at best, a 4 on the exterior, so I had attracted the attention of a kindly elderly gentleman. It was as if this man had done a Google image search of the word “abuelo” and modeled himself accordingly. I tried to explain that I was just trying to find Calle Montevideo, and that it was definitely close by, I just didn’t know where. It should be noted that the additional worry of feeling like I was inconveniencing someone had pushed my internal stress level to an eight, cracking my carefully constructed calm exterior . I was also horrified to discover that eight is the level where my sympathetic nervous system thinks to itself, “Do you know what would help this situation? Tears.”
Abuelo also seemed horrified by my rising stress level, and called out, somewhat alarmed, “Macarena…” For a moment, I thought he was trying to make me stop crying by yelling out the name of random dance moves to confuse me. But suddenly, a young woman’s head popped out the door of a nearby house. Abuelo explained my dilemma, and Macarena called back into the house to see if her mother knew where Calle Montevideo was. I would later discover that I was more than a mile away from my intended destination. For my own peace of mind, I am glad that I do not know exactly what Macarena saw when she looked at me, but it must have been pitiful enough to move her to help me.
Together we set off in what was probably a random direction, but in my mind Macarena knew exactly where she was taking me. Macarena knew everything. Macarena was a beautiful land mermaid. Macarena the Great. As we traversed the streets that had left me helpless, Macarena asked everyone we passed if they knew the location of Calle Montevideo, even going so far as to run into an intersection to ask a passing motorist. Luckily, Macarena’s intrepidity earned us our prize, our Holy Grail: the direction of Calle Montevideo. Macarena for President.
Nothing is worse than being lame, and nothing is lamer than crying in front of your sixteen year old home-stay sister. With that being said, First Prize in Being Lame: Me. As we rounded yet another corner, I finally spotted my other home-stay sister, Sarah, and I had never been so relieved to see anyone in my life. A bewildered Sarah led me back to the house where my home-stay mother simultaneously pampered and scolded me as only a mother can. I didn’t need to speak Spanish to understand the worry and relief that washed over Chari’s face when I walked through the door. Although not the way I would have chosen to be initiated into the family, I was, from that point forward, officially one of her daughters.
Just in case the moral of this story isn’t abundantly clear: You will NOT remember the street names. Take a picture.
Have you ever had an embarrassing travel moment? Tell me about it in the comments so we can laugh at our blunders together.