Directions!

I'm terrible with navigating through directions, I feel as though some people have this innate ability to brew up what comes next. I'll be honest, the first week and a half I had no idea how to get around this city. I would literally wait for people to lead me into the city, and never thought in my wildest dreams I'd be able to figure out the metro system. Now that I think about it, the metro is not difficult at all but what I feel overtook me was a sense of being overwhelmed at everything I would face for the next couple of weeks. I seriously would be given the same directions and still get lost for the first week, but as I started to repeat the same behaviors it wasn't merely a fact of learning the directions anymore I felt as though I had mastered it since I had chose to independently try things. Through the encouragement and guidance from the fellow NC State-ers, directions started to come naturally to me. I feel as though individual exposure is key, everytime I would go with other people for some reason I would allow them to guide me through the city but when I was on my own, I had to take the initaitive to find my way around the city. For this reason I experimented trying to go to the grocery store, gym, and mall on my own.I feel as though getting lost was probably key in getting any clarity where the certain locations were at. I had to reorient my self everytime I would get lost, but I had leverage of knowing some streets(prior knowledge) and trying to go from there. When I personally get lost I end up asking people around me how to renavigate, ovbiously for various reasons its difficult here to do just that. I have managed to ask over 20 people on the streets for direction and have interacted with many czechs, germans, and international lay people. Everytime would be a challenge but I will never forget this one woman was was probably one of the most compassionate human beings I have ever met. I was kind of desperate for proper directions and managed to write down walking directions off of google maps for something that was supposedly only 10 minutes away. I managed to get lost for the first 45 minutes, and asked this lady who was manuevering her stroller for directions at first she just gave me a no with the movement of her head, that kind of conveyed to me that she was either not interested in helping cause she had places to be or she did not understand english. I kept trucking along forward because at that time going back would be a waste of 45 minutes. I continiously walked for 10 minutes, and hear this yell, I turn behind me and that same lady is running with her baby stroller. I was in almost in a state of disbelief, that this woman had gone out of her way to do a 10 minute sprint with her baby stroller to direct me to the right route. I kind of wanted to cry, it made my day. As you can see you can never master a task without ever routinely practicing and implementing it into your life, I have incorporated a lot of the directions into my working memory since I am actively trying to facilitate the information.