Call me, beep me, try to reach me

The bus wasn’t coming. Twenty minutes later, it still wasn’t coming. And I was late.

The terrible irony of it all was that I was standing in the midst of a city renowned for its transportation options, but I had schooled myself to memorize a commute involving only one godforsaken bus.

Which wasn’t coming.

London is big. It’s crowded and it’s confusing, completely lacking the square-shaped uniformity I grew up with in New York and D.C.

The streets often aren’t labeled, for one thing. They’ll flow silently into one another — the way Franklin Street turns into 15-501, but with fewer signs — and you’re left to wander in circles, begging yourself to remember whether or not you’d already passed that pub.

I take classes on Bedford Square, for example. It’s a quiet, tree-lined and nondescript little street, different in location (but not in name) from Bedford Lane, Bedford Avenue, Bedford Place and Bedford Street.

I’ve yet to make it to class on time.

But tougher than the challenge of navigating the medieval turns is the challenge of navigating them blindly, without a GPS. Without the directions I’m so used to having reliably shouted into my ear at every turn.

Here, I’m lost — literally — without my smartphone.

Some days in London I feel a little bit like I haven’t actually left Chapel Hill. With Wi-Fi, I can iMessage my friends, tweet at them, like their Facebook posts and read their updates on Tumblr.

I saw the 9/11 flags in front of Wilson Library 47 times on Instagram on Wednesday. I attended a tailgate via FaceTime before the football game on Saturday. Hell, today I still even write for this paper.

Occasionally, though, the internet runs out. When I’m not at home — or at work or school, or inside a coffeeshop or a bookshop or any of a thousand places offering free Wi-Fi — ah, well, that’s where the new experiences really begin.

It happened on my first day, when I stood alone in the airport upon landing, utterly unable to communicate with the girls I was supposed to share a cab with.

It happens time and again, now, when I meet someone new and have to exchange email addresses for contact details, ashamedly admitting that I don’t have a working phone number here.

And misery knows no bounds like having a full bladder but not being able to Google the location of the closest public toilet.

These are meager attempts at disconnecting myself from the digital world, to be sure. But I’m separating myself, little by little, from the life I left behind in Chapel Hill.

Even as technology begs me to stay.

I hadn’t expected to feel so connected to UNC after leaving the continent. But if I switch my phone off and try to find my way to work on my own, or if I’m eventually able to give someone else directions when they ask, then maybe I’ll finally start to feel more like a real Londoner.

At least until I find Wi-Fi again.