Posted from India
Lizzi and I aren't the only ones getting sick on this trip. Unfortunately, our laptop gets a nasty bug every once in a while too. It's really our own fault. Wireless internet has been available in some of the guesthouses we've stayed in but not many. All of our photos and blog posts are composed on the laptop and then transferred to a flash drive, which we connect to a computer in an internet cafe. This is the computer equivalent of shaking the hand of someone who has just sneezed and then licking it. Sometimes you're going to get sick. So far, the flash drive has contracted at least one virus and a couple of gnarly bits of adware. As best as I can figure, the adware is from Thailand (looks to be something Google Toolbar coughed up), and the virus came from a dirty machine in Goa.
Viruses and adware are just a few of the bugs for which there is no vaccine. If you're going to take a laptop, which I recommend, be sure to turn on the antivirus software, download and run Ad-Aware regularly, and just be smart about what you connect to your machine, even indirectly. Just like people, your computer has a history. If you plug your flash drive (this goes for cameras too) into a different computer and then stick it in yours, your computer will be infected with everything the other computer has. The old adage holds true: wrap it before you tap it.
Showing posts with label gear. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gear. Show all posts
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Friday, February 22, 2008
We Interrupt This Broadcast
Posted from Alleppey, Kerala, India
Q: do you ever watch tv? i can't imagine there is usually a set in you room, but i was curious as to the local programming...
A: There have been a few occasions when we've been lucky enough to have a TV in our room. In Southeast Asia, the TVs were usually hooked up to a satellite service, and we could watch CNN, BBC, Animal Planet, Cartoon Network, and a couple of English-language movie channels. When we were in Siem Reap around my birthday, we couldn't bring ourselves to leave the air-conditioned, posh comforts of our hotel room, so we turned on the movie channel and watched some lame Ray Liotta chick-flick. Totally worth it!
Of course, now that we are in India with a thriving local media, the televisions are no longer connected to satellite systems, and most programs are in one of the innumerable local languages. But that doesn't mean that we haven't tried to wring at least a modicum of entertainment from them. Unfortunately, there's only so much not-getting-it that we can take. From what we've seen, Indian TV seems to be comprised of cricket matches, which are even more boring than golf, and Hindi Pop request shows, where you send in your long-distance dedications via text message. Somehow, "im srry i skrud ur sis, luv u so much" doesn't have the same heartfelt apology behind it as hearing it from Casey Kasem. Oh, and, of course, there's Dora the Explorer. In Hindi.
Needless to say, we couldn't be happier that we brought a laptop and bought all 10 seasons of Friends from some shady guy in Vietnam.
Q: do you ever watch tv? i can't imagine there is usually a set in you room, but i was curious as to the local programming...
A: There have been a few occasions when we've been lucky enough to have a TV in our room. In Southeast Asia, the TVs were usually hooked up to a satellite service, and we could watch CNN, BBC, Animal Planet, Cartoon Network, and a couple of English-language movie channels. When we were in Siem Reap around my birthday, we couldn't bring ourselves to leave the air-conditioned, posh comforts of our hotel room, so we turned on the movie channel and watched some lame Ray Liotta chick-flick. Totally worth it!
Of course, now that we are in India with a thriving local media, the televisions are no longer connected to satellite systems, and most programs are in one of the innumerable local languages. But that doesn't mean that we haven't tried to wring at least a modicum of entertainment from them. Unfortunately, there's only so much not-getting-it that we can take. From what we've seen, Indian TV seems to be comprised of cricket matches, which are even more boring than golf, and Hindi Pop request shows, where you send in your long-distance dedications via text message. Somehow, "im srry i skrud ur sis, luv u so much" doesn't have the same heartfelt apology behind it as hearing it from Casey Kasem. Oh, and, of course, there's Dora the Explorer. In Hindi.
Needless to say, we couldn't be happier that we brought a laptop and bought all 10 seasons of Friends from some shady guy in Vietnam.
Friday, December 14, 2007
Like, Um, What Are You Wearing?
So do you ever have the Forest Through the Trees problem? I do. And it happens to me most often when I’m in the middle of planning something huge. I tend to get fixated on the wrong thing, and then there I am, stuck and fixated on this wrong thing, and I can’t get unstuck or un-fixate until I’ve dealt with whatever I’m stuck on.
Some of you may remember that this happened when I was planning my wedding. There I was, twenty-four years old, just finished my first year of law school, about to make the biggest commitment of my life, and the only thing I could think about was the fact that the chairs at our reception venue were ugly. And to be fair, I’m not talking run-of-the-mill ugly. I’m talking straight-up, flat-out, UGLY, ugly. Fugly. And even though Julie assured me that no one was going to be looking at the chairs, and my dad assured me that there was no way in hell that he was paying for chair covers, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fugliness of those chairs. They haunted me, those chairs. Ultimately, I managed to pull my head out of my ass and realized that chairs were low on my list of priorities next to such important things like, oh, the fact that I was getting married. But there was a time there, a shameful, egocentric time, when chair covers mattered a lot more than the vows I was about to take.
The chair covers incident became a marker for me. Whenever I find myself getting fixated on the wrong thing, I tell Matt that I’m being all "chair covers" about it. But now that I’m the one making most of the decisions in my life, I have the luxury of being all "chair covers" about something without having to worry that I’m going to screw up my dad’s idea of the perfect wedding by demanding that chairs be covered at the expense of feeding his guests, or something.
Lizzi, get to the point! Okay. Here it is: I’m coming clean about my chair covers incidents for the trip. There were two. Yes, I know, TWO. But these two particular chair covers incidents were enormous to me. So huge, in fact, that I dreamed about them, night after night. And here, in a moment of cathartic revelation, I am going to share them with you.
Chair cover # 1: Wedding Bands
Yes, Matt and I are already married. And yes, we have perfectly acceptable wedding bands that we wear every day. Except when we go to bars and take them off. Just kidding! Ha! Fooled you. Anyway, wedding rings. I love my wedding ring. But somewhere many, many months ago I read some stupid thing on some stupid website about the fact that we shouldn’t wear our actual wedding rings on this trip. And I got it into my head that we needed NEW wedding rings and that they needed to be gold wedding rings and that they needed to match. As if we don’t look enough like Americans already, right? Right. So I spent weeks, WEEKS people, looking online for wedding rings. Um, I found them. Online. They’re fine. And ever since we got them in the mail, I’ve totally and completely forgotten about my incessant obsession with wedding rings. Oddly, the space leftover in my brain did not immediately make room for physics equations as you might think it should. It moved onto obsession number 2.
Chair cover # 2: Like, um, what are YOU wearing?
Clever readers will notice that this is the very same title of this post. Clever readers will realize that this was the crux of my issue for several months of planning this trip. And even cleverer readers will realize that it took me THIS long just to make the point I set out to make in the beginning here. I have GOT to get better at sticking to my point.
So here’s the thing: when you’re leaving on a trip like this, you can only take a backpack. One backpack. And as the name implies, you carry the backpack on your, uh, back. So it has to be as light as possible. When you factor in the fact that you have to carry a pharmacy with you for all of the just-in-case illnesses you might acquire, as well as seven different Lonely Planet guides, a computer and two cameras, you quickly realize that you cannot, under any circumstances, take too many clothes. And even more disastrous, you must limit your choice of shoes. If you are me, and you get stuck on stupid shit like what you’re supposed to wear to a temple in Thailand, this clothing issue becomes a catastrophe. And the catastrophe mounts into a full-on chair covers incident. And then you find yourself staying up late revising your “List of Things to Pack” and telling Matt that if you only take one pair of yoga pants instead of two, you can take two pairs of shorts, even though you really don’t like shorts all that much anyway.
And then, if you’re lucky, help finds you. And it finds you in the form of one lovely world-traveler named Holly. Holly can be found at www.nothingbutbonfires.com where she wittily writes about life and travel and love and The Bachelor. She’s a seriously gifted writer, and I don’t mind at all if you go over there and read her blog more than you read mine. I would if I was sitting on the other side of the computer.
So a little over a year ago, Holly and her partner went on a trip that was really similar to ours. You can read all about it in her archives, brilliantly titled “Travel—Or How I Lived on $10 A Day For Three Months.” I did. I read every single post she wrote about that trip. I read them so closely that I felt like I was EATING her posts. Because there she was, traveling about, enjoying it, and seemingly not at all worried about what she was wearing. And I knew right then and there that I HAD to email her. So I did. I emailed a perfect stranger and told her about my chair covers and asked her to please help me. Holly delivers, people. She delivers. She wrote me back within a few days and gave me a list of things I’d want to take with me, assured me that it was okay to take more than one pair of flip-flops, and generally just wrote my packing list for me.
These are my favorite excerpts from her email, which I printed out and ate, just in case that would help me:
I mean, she’s a genius, right? I have never met this woman, and she lives all the way across the country in sunny California. But I’m so not even kidding when I tell you that she’s partly responsible for my sanity right now. Because I’m glancing over at my pack, filled with all of the things that she told me to take, all of which worked beautifully on their test-trip to Africa, and I’m feeling calm, and as though all of my chairs are covered. Now it’s just a matter of donning those new wedding bands, putting all of those clothes on my back, and reminding myself that the point behind all of the madness is actually way more exciting than the madness.
Some of you may remember that this happened when I was planning my wedding. There I was, twenty-four years old, just finished my first year of law school, about to make the biggest commitment of my life, and the only thing I could think about was the fact that the chairs at our reception venue were ugly. And to be fair, I’m not talking run-of-the-mill ugly. I’m talking straight-up, flat-out, UGLY, ugly. Fugly. And even though Julie assured me that no one was going to be looking at the chairs, and my dad assured me that there was no way in hell that he was paying for chair covers, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fugliness of those chairs. They haunted me, those chairs. Ultimately, I managed to pull my head out of my ass and realized that chairs were low on my list of priorities next to such important things like, oh, the fact that I was getting married. But there was a time there, a shameful, egocentric time, when chair covers mattered a lot more than the vows I was about to take.
The chair covers incident became a marker for me. Whenever I find myself getting fixated on the wrong thing, I tell Matt that I’m being all "chair covers" about it. But now that I’m the one making most of the decisions in my life, I have the luxury of being all "chair covers" about something without having to worry that I’m going to screw up my dad’s idea of the perfect wedding by demanding that chairs be covered at the expense of feeding his guests, or something.
Lizzi, get to the point! Okay. Here it is: I’m coming clean about my chair covers incidents for the trip. There were two. Yes, I know, TWO. But these two particular chair covers incidents were enormous to me. So huge, in fact, that I dreamed about them, night after night. And here, in a moment of cathartic revelation, I am going to share them with you.
Chair cover # 1: Wedding Bands
Yes, Matt and I are already married. And yes, we have perfectly acceptable wedding bands that we wear every day. Except when we go to bars and take them off. Just kidding! Ha! Fooled you. Anyway, wedding rings. I love my wedding ring. But somewhere many, many months ago I read some stupid thing on some stupid website about the fact that we shouldn’t wear our actual wedding rings on this trip. And I got it into my head that we needed NEW wedding rings and that they needed to be gold wedding rings and that they needed to match. As if we don’t look enough like Americans already, right? Right. So I spent weeks, WEEKS people, looking online for wedding rings. Um, I found them. Online. They’re fine. And ever since we got them in the mail, I’ve totally and completely forgotten about my incessant obsession with wedding rings. Oddly, the space leftover in my brain did not immediately make room for physics equations as you might think it should. It moved onto obsession number 2.
Chair cover # 2: Like, um, what are YOU wearing?
Clever readers will notice that this is the very same title of this post. Clever readers will realize that this was the crux of my issue for several months of planning this trip. And even cleverer readers will realize that it took me THIS long just to make the point I set out to make in the beginning here. I have GOT to get better at sticking to my point.
So here’s the thing: when you’re leaving on a trip like this, you can only take a backpack. One backpack. And as the name implies, you carry the backpack on your, uh, back. So it has to be as light as possible. When you factor in the fact that you have to carry a pharmacy with you for all of the just-in-case illnesses you might acquire, as well as seven different Lonely Planet guides, a computer and two cameras, you quickly realize that you cannot, under any circumstances, take too many clothes. And even more disastrous, you must limit your choice of shoes. If you are me, and you get stuck on stupid shit like what you’re supposed to wear to a temple in Thailand, this clothing issue becomes a catastrophe. And the catastrophe mounts into a full-on chair covers incident. And then you find yourself staying up late revising your “List of Things to Pack” and telling Matt that if you only take one pair of yoga pants instead of two, you can take two pairs of shorts, even though you really don’t like shorts all that much anyway.
And then, if you’re lucky, help finds you. And it finds you in the form of one lovely world-traveler named Holly. Holly can be found at www.nothingbutbonfires.com where she wittily writes about life and travel and love and The Bachelor. She’s a seriously gifted writer, and I don’t mind at all if you go over there and read her blog more than you read mine. I would if I was sitting on the other side of the computer.
So a little over a year ago, Holly and her partner went on a trip that was really similar to ours. You can read all about it in her archives, brilliantly titled “Travel—Or How I Lived on $10 A Day For Three Months.” I did. I read every single post she wrote about that trip. I read them so closely that I felt like I was EATING her posts. Because there she was, traveling about, enjoying it, and seemingly not at all worried about what she was wearing. And I knew right then and there that I HAD to email her. So I did. I emailed a perfect stranger and told her about my chair covers and asked her to please help me. Holly delivers, people. She delivers. She wrote me back within a few days and gave me a list of things I’d want to take with me, assured me that it was okay to take more than one pair of flip-flops, and generally just wrote my packing list for me.
These are my favorite excerpts from her email, which I printed out and ate, just in case that would help me:
Okay, as to what sort of clothes I brought with me, I'll tell you this: NOTHING WHITE. Seriously, you can't imagine it right now, but ANYTHING white that you bring will get dirty within three seconds of you putting it on.
You will bring WAY more than you need. You just will. And I would encourage you to really, really, really try not to -- you'll end up wearing the same things over and over and over again anyway, so you really don't need that much variety.
I also brought a pashmina, which I found invaluable, since it doubled as a wrap when it was cold, a cover-up in temples, and a blanket on buses. (So I guess it tripled. But whatever.)
I mean, she’s a genius, right? I have never met this woman, and she lives all the way across the country in sunny California. But I’m so not even kidding when I tell you that she’s partly responsible for my sanity right now. Because I’m glancing over at my pack, filled with all of the things that she told me to take, all of which worked beautifully on their test-trip to Africa, and I’m feeling calm, and as though all of my chairs are covered. Now it’s just a matter of donning those new wedding bands, putting all of those clothes on my back, and reminding myself that the point behind all of the madness is actually way more exciting than the madness.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Planning for the Geek
All of this planning, in terms of itineraries, visas, and vaccines, is fun to a point. However, what really matters is can we communicate and capture memories on the road. Much of our early technology plan centered around whether we were going to take a worldwide smart phone (like a Treo) or a laptop.
A Treo-like device would be perfect because it's small and exceptionally lightweight. We could also make regular voice calls, which could be a nice lifeline to have. On the downside, service may not be universal, and the fees could easily blow away our budget, particularly fees to upload many megabytes of photos to Flickr. Plus, there's no room on the handheld to store photos.
On the other hand, a laptop offers quite a bit of flexibility, although it will be quite a bit heavier. We can watch DVDs when we want to spend a night in. Storing photos is no longer a problem. We can also burn CDs of pics as we go, so if we lose the computer or the camera, we're not completely out of luck. Plus, connectivity through wired or wireless connections may be easier than trying to connect to
A Treo-like device would be perfect because it's small and exceptionally lightweight. We could also make regular voice calls, which could be a nice lifeline to have. On the downside, service may not be universal, and the fees could easily blow away our budget, particularly fees to upload many megabytes of photos to Flickr. Plus, there's no room on the handheld to store photos.
On the other hand, a laptop offers quite a bit of flexibility, although it will be quite a bit heavier. We can watch DVDs when we want to spend a night in. Storing photos is no longer a problem. We can also burn CDs of pics as we go, so if we lose the computer or the camera, we're not completely out of luck. Plus, connectivity through wired or wireless connections may be easier than trying to connect to
Friday, April 20, 2007
Gear and Stuff to Do
For the past couple of weeks, I've been carrying around a list of the things that I think we need to either buy for our trip, or just not forget to bring with us. I realized this morning that I could just post it (the novelty!) so that it would be around on ye olde Internet for when I need it next. Brilliant!
What we need to buy/bring:
Backpacking Packs -- that's as opposed to hiking packs
Shoes -- super sturdy day hiking shoes + sandals
Quick-dry towels
Things we need to do:
Finalize our will
Square away our Life Insurance -- make sure we've named appropriate beneficiaries
Deal with our cats
Put our crap in storage
Deal with our bills
Pay our taxes
Get Vaccines -- ouch!
Get a New Passport for Lizzi
Get Travel Insurance
What we need to buy/bring:
Backpacking Packs -- that's as opposed to hiking packs
Shoes -- super sturdy day hiking shoes + sandals
Quick-dry towels
Lightweight Jackets -- that will also keep us warm when we hit winter
Ponchos
Eating Utensils + Bowls
Digital Waterproof Watches
Sleep sacks
TSA approved locks
Emergency First Aid Kit
Bug Repellent
Pens and Paper -- to give out to people who don't usually have pens and paper
Motion bands for motion sickness
Toilet Paper
Wet Wipes
Hand Sanitizer
Prescriptions
Melatonin to help with sleep adjustment
Benadryl to help with sleep adjustment
Camera -- Matt's in charge of buying a new camera that's actually small. He's psyched.
Laptop/Pocket PC?
Cell Phone?
Stuff to Skype with?
Plug Adapters
Extra Passport Pics for both
Some Clothes -- longer skirts/dressyish pants for Lizzi, zip-off pants for both of us, bathing suits
Nonoffensive tshirts that we're cool with throwing away when we get back
Things we need to do:
Finalize our will
Square away our Life Insurance -- make sure we've named appropriate beneficiaries
Deal with our cats
Put our crap in storage
Deal with our bills
Pay our taxes
Get Vaccines -- ouch!
Get a New Passport for Lizzi
Get Travel Insurance
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