Can you even imagine walking through a foreign country with a paper map? When we travel we can do so much on our phones- maps, translators, taxi apps, googling history, social customs and expectations, laws, what to do in an emergency, and exchange rates…
Whenever I go somewhere that I know my grandparents visited before I was born, I have to consider how they were even able to do it. They had paper maps, they had to call the airline for tickets, they had to bring cash with them to convert, they wrote paper letters back home, and I know they didn’t speak the language at all. I can’t even fathom how they were able to find their way around in the day to day.
Things have changed so much for us and become so much more accessible. Being afraid of a language barrier is no longer an excuse for not visiting a foreign country. There are so many resources that have popped up even in the past 10 years that completely change the way we travel.
I went to Europe for the first time in college, in 2016. At the time it was pretty tricky to get set up with a sim card for your phone- you needed to register for it, pay for it in cash in person, and you needed to change the settings deep in your phone to even get it to work. On that trip I went to 5 different countries- starting and ending in Spain, so that’s where I got my SIM card. At the time, when you crossed a county’s borders you lost service, so I would always make sure to download the language on google translate and a section of the map on google maps before we went so I could still access it without wifi. Within 2 years, even that changed! Now if you have a European sim card, it’ll work throughout the EU!
On Christmas day in Prague, my boyfriend got so sick with food poisoning that we needed to find some medicine. I remember using our hostel’s wifi to open the route to a hospital, only to find it was closed. I found free wifi at a cafe and mapped to another hospital, also closed. I did it 4 times before finally giving up. I went all over the city and I felt like such an idiot having to stand outside windows and steal wifi. Even that was better than having no smartphone and no map though.
Having the technology we have today means you can go anywhere and deal with any situation that might have held you back before.
Finding Eden 