Without phone service, maneuvering through a city takes a good amount of work. It takes consulting maps, asking for directions, backtracking, counting blocks, looking for landmarks, and waiting for long periods of time for your friends to arrive at the designated spot. It sometimes means arriving after being lost for over an hour only to discover that the coffee shop does not in fact have WiFi or that the milk tea place is not in fact open until 11:30.
Journeying around Hong Kong today, I realized more and more how impatient I am with getting where I want to go. I like to go from point A to point B, stopping for snacks and to look at flowers along the way but nonetheless arriving where I mean to go in order to do what I want to do.
Today, I felt like the city was playing one giant trick on me. I was surrounded by an infinite well of knowledge dispersed between the minds of the people around me. Unfortunately, I could barely access any of it. When we finally did get directions from a man in a shop who smiled at us and complimented Jake’s Cantonese, I was poked again by the universe, reminded that I can’t do things completely on my own. Distantly, I could hear the city laughing.