Lost in Budapest | Nicole Rosenstrauch

Before meeting the group in Hamburg, my sister, Kayla, and I traveled a bit.

We did not get a data plan on our phones which made navigation around the cities

a little more challenging. Thankfully, we had learned a trick about using maps

without service, but it only worked if our original location had access to Wi-Fi.

This typically worked very well for us when our excursions started from our hotel,

but we got a bit tired of searching for the nearest Starbucks or café with open Wi-

Fi every time we needed to start maps. Since Wi-Fi in Budapest seemed to be harder to come by than the other cities that we had visited, we decided to go old school and use a real map. So, we marked off all the sites that we knew we wanted to see that day and created our own walking tour around the city. This was going great and we found every single site that we wanted to.

Just when we were about to head back to the hotel we realized that we had

made one flaw during the preparation for our tour. We did not mark where our

hotel was on our map. This would have been okay if we were in a main point in

the city where Wi-Fi could easily be found, but at this moment in time we seemed

to be in the worst possible area to search for Wi-Fi. After about half an hour of

choosing random directions to walk in hopes to recognize something or find a café

with internet we decided to sit and think. This is when we found a screenshot on

Kayla’s phone that had one street name near our hotel on it. Trying to find this

street on our tiny map was like trying to find Waldo. Nonetheless, we found our

road and eventually were able to make it back to our hotel safe and sound.