Getting lost is one of the most underappreciated parts of life.
After 21 years of living in Texas, it is nearly impossible for me to get lost. With the advent of new technology such as the iPhone, MapQuest and even cars with navigational systems, the average college student has no reason to ever get lost. Yes, you sometimes feel lost when trying to find your car after a UT football game and yes, you sometimes feel lost moving three mph in traffic on Interstate Highway 35. But follow the guiding star that is the UT tower and you can always get to where you need to go and never feel the sensation of being completely lost.
Upon arriving in Europe, I can now say I appreciate the brilliance of feeling — and actually being — lost. I have never experienced being completely unfamiliar with anything in my peripheral vision with no idea of how to pronounce any of the streets in view and absolutely no familiarity with where I even need to go.
It sounds stressful, and, at times, it is. When I recently traveled in Latvia and found myself being led in circles by the few people who spoke English in the town of Riga, I was certainly on the edge. I had 30 minutes to get back to a boat unwilling to wait for a lost American tourist, and I did not have any credits left on my pre-paid European phone. I turned into the typical American relying on intuition rather than a map.
I eventually found my way back to the dock and had some strange encounters along the way. I met a 50-year-old man who moved from New York to marry a 22-year-old Russian girl, two 12-year-old Latvian girls who tried to give me a ride home and two French girls who insisted that I was drunk and tried to suggest some good vodka for me to buy. Although only one of the three groups of people actually provided me with help in getting back to the boat, they all provided me with fodder for laughs. I feel I left a little part of my heart in Latvia with them.
I am not going to lie and say that the first time I got lost in Europe I handled it with typical Texan class. One of the first weeks I was in Europe, I attempted to travel from Uppsala to Stockholm by myself to check out the surroundings and dabble in some gambling at the casino. I got up bright and early at 2 p.m. to start my day and walked to the Uppsala train station. I forgot until I had been walking for 30 minutes that I had no idea where the train station was.
I called up my parents complaining about how confusing Sweden is and how irritating it is not knowing where you are. I went on a furious rant about everything from the quality of the people to the diluted, carbonated version of Sprite that is a shoddy knock-off of water with a lime squeezed in it. After talking to them for around 10 minutes, I looked to my left and realized I was a block away from the train station. Out of pure embarrassment, I hung up the phone pretending like I was still lost and walked to the train station with the pace of a shamed man.
I have enjoyed the trials and tribulations of having to navigate unfamiliar environments. Sometimes getting lost can lead you to finding things you would have never normally seen. When I eventually did get to Stockholm, I got lost trying to get back to the train station and ran in to a Tex-Mex restaurant called Macho (with an exclamation point at the end to emphasize just how macho Tex-Mex really is). Nothing that the world can throw at me will ever shock me as much as finding a Tex-Mex restaurant in Sweden.
Getting lost is truly underappreciated, and I know in the next month I will have plenty of opportunities to bask in its glory.
Tolan is a journalism senior.
1 comments