Navigating life without a smartphone: A study abroad experience for the 21st century

How — and why — one Baker College sophomore traded mobile apps for paper maps

Students often return from semesters spent studying abroad with a better grasp of another language, a greater appreciation for a different culture or simple gratitude for the comforts of home. Baker College sophomore Sarah Siddiqui returned from a summer in France with a newfound appreciation for something a little more specific: Google Maps.

Texas native Sarah Siddiqui had an unexpectedly lo-fi experience while studying abroad in France. (Photos by Fernanda Leal)

After accidentally losing her smartphone to a power surge in Provence on her second weekend in the country, Siddiqui had to learn something many American undergraduates don’t during study abroad programs: how to navigate a foreign country — indeed, how to function at all — without a phone.

Siddiqui, a psychology major who’s also studying French, landed in Aix-en-Provence during the middle of the FIFA World Cup. That was exciting for her as a soccer fan, but it meant that the city’s streets often were unexpectedly shut down by blockades of French supporters celebrating their national team’s series of wins. To complicate matters, many of the street signs in the ancient city — founded in 123 B.C. by Roman consul Sextius Calvinus — were in the equally ancient language of Provençal. Some were crumbling, making them even more difficult to read.

But Siddiqui was enchanted by it all. And then, that power surge placed a less enchanting stumbling block in her way. A trip to the giant Apple store in the city center did no good; getting a new American iPhone would take weeks, by which time she’d already be back in Texas. So she settled for the next best thing.

“I got a Go phone that was exorbitantly overpriced with a SIM card that you had to pay for by the minute,” she said. “It couldn’t have apps, couldn’t text. You could just barely call. It was a phone and just a phone.”

It was as if the power surge that took out her phone had also transported her into a new reality – or maybe an old reality. There was no Spotify to listen to music, no Facebook for catching up with family back home, no camera to snap photos for Instagram. And most trying of all, there were no mapping apps to help her make sense of the Roman-era city and its winding streets.

“Not having apps while traveling, I realized, is so difficult,” Siddiqui said. Luckily, at least her friends were able to snap photos of the trip.

“Not having apps while traveling, I realized, is so difficult,” Siddiqui said. “You can’t text people and you can’t use Google Maps, which was the main problem.”

Her first stop after purchasing the Go phone, which became an emergency-only device for the rest of her trip, was the tourist office in Aix-en-Provence to request a paper map of the city.

“They said, ‘Oh, you can look it up on your phone,’” Siddiqui recalled with a laugh.

She could have just grabbed a map from the recycling bin outside, she later noted, where other tourists had simply thrown them away.

But soon, Siddiqui was employing skills she’d never had to use before, navigating by paper and stopping to ask for directions when the Provençal street signs didn’t match up with what was on the map. Her French improved with each interaction. She met new friends and older couples who were eager to show her around and walk her wherever she was going.

Without texting, she and her friends would leave paper notes in the library with instructions on which café to meet at and what time. Without apps to absentmindedly scroll through while she waited, Siddiqui mastered the art of people-watching and making small talk.

“People-watching was probably the most interesting part of learning how to live the French life,” she said. “La vie en France, as they call it, is just more relaxed than American life. You have to disconnect a little bit.”

Siddiqui admitted she was initially shocked to find that she had become so dependent on her phone.

“I knew that my mom’s generation lived like this for the first half of their lives, so it’s not impossible,” she said. “I had to make my peace with existing without a phone. I was learning survival skills.”

Still, she said, she remained reflective about technology’s vital place in her life — something she’d never really considered before the trip.

“Any modern commodity can be criticized as being too soft or leading you to live too easy of a life,” Siddiqui said.

“Any modern commodity can be criticized as being too soft or leading you to live too easy of a life,” she said, citing air conditioning — another extravagance she also missed while in France.

“People say we’re too reliant on technology and it’s bad for you, but in the end it’s a tool that was created by other people in order to make your life easier and to make you safer,” Siddiqui said. “I think there’s always a purpose, otherwise we wouldn’t be so dependent on these things.”

The trip even gave her a fresh appreciation for her parents’ own international experience, when they immigrated to Dallas from Karachi, Pakistan, in the 1990s. With her laptop spared from the power surge, Siddiqui said, she bonded with her mother in the evenings after long days spent tracing directions on maps and navigating soccer fan-filled streets.

“I would FaceTime my mom and be like, ‘I don’t know how you did it when you immigrated to the States and you didn’t know the streets and it was a different language, and on top of that you had to use paper maps!’” she said.