London was not designed on a grid system. It was not even built as a city based on layers of concentric circles. Rather, it’s a hodgepodge of streets and squares and alleys that somehow makes up a city that 9 million people call home. This means that, if you’re walking, unless you have a good general idea of where you’re going, you will become lost. Larger, more prominent streets veer off into slim side streets, which then veer off into even slimmer side streets, which inexplicably lead to a small park, which contains a small cafe that might have WiFi. And by the time you reach that small cafe in that small park off that slimmest of side streets, you realize that you are way off from where you thought you were, and that you are both exploring and lost in a city that you are totally unfamiliar with but will be your home for three months.
Also, you have been here for a week and have yet to buy a UK SIM card. So, whenever you leave your flat, your phone turns into an iPod, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it gives you an excuse to not be on your phone. But it also wrestles the raft that is the “Maps” app from your arms, leaving you to rely on your own sense of direction, which is poor, and then—when that strategy inevitably fails—ask help from strangers, which is just the kind of social interaction that you have spent a good amount of your life avoiding.
Every day of my first week in London, I have become lost. And, every day, I’ve had to swallow the pill dry, and ask a stranger for directions. On Wednesday I ran around Bloomsbury frantically trying to find UCL’s main quad for my enrolment appointment. It took me half an hour to finally admit defeat and ask for directions from a police officer. By the time I found the quad, I was sweaty, late for my appointment, and annoyed by the fact that I had basically been told that I’d been in panicked search of a street I’d been walking directly parallel of for half an hour.