The Distances Between Us
I once ran a focus group for a class of fourteen year-old schoolboys. It involved my getting them to consider what was essential and what was inessential through the following hypothetical:
You are all alone on a desert island. You have been only able to bring one thing with you. What is it?
Every boy but one wanted to bring an electronic device with him, be it a personal computer, a stereo, a PlayStation (trademark) or an HDTV. The one boy who did not answer as the others did, said he would bring his German Shepherd.
Which makes me think of our "connectivity"and the proposition that the distances between us have shrunk as a result of computers. In some ways the distances are greater: I now interact with a host of people I have never met who are essential to the orderly conduct of my life, such as wireless internet and cable TV personnel, customer service representatives at banks and mutual fund companies, health insurance company employees. --Even my accountant, who "tweets" to exchange information, information I cannot digest because the brevity of the message lacks the context I need to make sense of the text.
As Isaac Babel entitled one of his short stories, "You Must Know Everything". Yet you cannot reach understanding. There are too many intermediaries, each doing only his assigned little task outside a larger context. The person who understands best and could explain it to you is the furthest away from your reach, because in giant organizations serving thousands, if not millions of customers, you are slotted into the work-flow chart as a consumer, not an individual. Your understanding of the world of the internet, of financial services, of health care, is mediated by number-crunchers and management consultants and marketing specialists, rather than professionals with whom you interact face-to-face. Because it is too expensive to provide professional services at rates that are competitive with all the other participants in the market. So these businesses are driven by the number-crunchers and the management consultants and the markets, whose job it is to segment transactions into their smallest possible components and then hand the bundle of tasks to human resources departments, which distribute them out through the organization to the lowest rungs of the organization, which are the ones you interact with.
The appeal of travel is that we are the fulcrum of the experience, and our understanding cannot be taken from us or interpreted for us by another. Which is why so many of us strive to record our journeys, whether in images or words. To focus on preparing for a journey is to begin it, to shatter the routine, and challenge the notion that the coordinates of our lives are fixed. But it is also to break free from the drivers of our daily existence, from the numbness that successive interactions with them inevitably produce. To break free after being "plugged in" to our jobs, day-in-and-day-out .
So if you were to ask me why I would undertake a trip as open-ended and potentially arduous as I have previously described, I would have to answer,
Because I'm looking for the dog.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Monday, February 27, 2012
The Home Stretch
The German Vodafone seems to be unblocked, so I will try to set it up when I get to Frankfurt, if not Vienna. If there is an Vodafone Anschluss, I might be able to get the phone working one week into my trip, which would be helpful.
Every day from now until Saturday, March 10, I have to hoist my backpack on my shoulders, strap it on, and walk to 42nd Street and back along the Hudson, then bicycle the Cherry Walk along the Hudson up to Fairway and back, 7 miles and 3 miles, respectively. I realize that my knapsack, carrying all my electronic equipment, medications, trip file and more, will weigh at least five pounds more than what I am carrying daily. I have already removed the extra jacket I packed from the pack to make it lighter, and I need to fish out the travel alarm clock, which isn't essential, for the same reason. I will have to figure out how to attach the knapsack to the backpack, or carry the knapsack in front of me. In either event, I am going to look like a peddler of pots, pans and silver, with my aluminum water bottle hanging off the side, along with my walking poles and folding stool. Which is appropriate, I suppose, as my maternal great-grandfather peddled these sorts of items in Galicia in the 19th century, and thereby I come full circle, in a sense, going back to the Old World from the New, just as laden.
I am walking and bicycling every day to give my body a fair test of the challenge I will face starting April 13, when I start walking along the Camino de Santiago. The website of the Confraternity of Saint James, an English site devoted to the Camino, advises that being able to walk about eight to twelve miles a day is optimal for those who want to walk the Camino's entire length in thirty days. I am not so ambitious, but I have a torn left meniscus. It gives me no pain, although my medial joint (the one on the inside of the knee) is tender to the touch. If it acts up between now and two days from my departure, I can still go to the orthopedist for a cortisone injection to keep me going during the trip. The Confraternity website suggests training and then taking off the month before embarking on the Camino, exactly my plan. A month doing no more than hoisting the pack onto trains and dumping it onto hotel room floors will be wonderful after this last phase of preparations.
One of the hardest aspects of this trip will be not carrying carrying a bound book with me. I love having one in my hands, taking the upper right hand corner of a page between my thumb and index finger and turning a page forward; or, back. The IPad2 has a few classics (Jane Eyre, Sherlock Holmes) downloaded free via Kobo, (the trademarked online book application), I hope will stand me in good stead, but I venture out into brave new world, relying on electronic equipment and mountaineering gear to mediate my experiences. In contrast, over the past few years, I have made many of my trips in the company of an enormous bright green hardcase zippered suitcase that can wheel three-hundred sixty degrees in either direction, and hold over fifty pounds. I have tested it on many an occasion, and it has never failed me, although I have occasionally had to unzip it and extract a volume or two to stay under the maximum allowable weight limit on flights. "The Green Monster" a/k/a "Kermit the Frog", purchased at Galeries Lafayette in Paris a few years ago, is instantly recognizable on the baggage carousel --and anywhere else. It has proved indispensable to me on my book-buying sprees in London, saving me the cost of United Kingdom postal shipping rates, which are exorbitant. It cannot go on this trip with me, and neither can the books. Truth be told, the idea of traveling book-less is perhaps the most frightening thought I have about this trip. I have yet to hear anyone extol the sensual pleasures of holding an IPad's metal casing between the fingers, but perhaps reading on the road, I will be converted.
The German Vodafone seems to be unblocked, so I will try to set it up when I get to Frankfurt, if not Vienna. If there is an Vodafone Anschluss, I might be able to get the phone working one week into my trip, which would be helpful.
Every day from now until Saturday, March 10, I have to hoist my backpack on my shoulders, strap it on, and walk to 42nd Street and back along the Hudson, then bicycle the Cherry Walk along the Hudson up to Fairway and back, 7 miles and 3 miles, respectively. I realize that my knapsack, carrying all my electronic equipment, medications, trip file and more, will weigh at least five pounds more than what I am carrying daily. I have already removed the extra jacket I packed from the pack to make it lighter, and I need to fish out the travel alarm clock, which isn't essential, for the same reason. I will have to figure out how to attach the knapsack to the backpack, or carry the knapsack in front of me. In either event, I am going to look like a peddler of pots, pans and silver, with my aluminum water bottle hanging off the side, along with my walking poles and folding stool. Which is appropriate, I suppose, as my maternal great-grandfather peddled these sorts of items in Galicia in the 19th century, and thereby I come full circle, in a sense, going back to the Old World from the New, just as laden.
I am walking and bicycling every day to give my body a fair test of the challenge I will face starting April 13, when I start walking along the Camino de Santiago. The website of the Confraternity of Saint James, an English site devoted to the Camino, advises that being able to walk about eight to twelve miles a day is optimal for those who want to walk the Camino's entire length in thirty days. I am not so ambitious, but I have a torn left meniscus. It gives me no pain, although my medial joint (the one on the inside of the knee) is tender to the touch. If it acts up between now and two days from my departure, I can still go to the orthopedist for a cortisone injection to keep me going during the trip. The Confraternity website suggests training and then taking off the month before embarking on the Camino, exactly my plan. A month doing no more than hoisting the pack onto trains and dumping it onto hotel room floors will be wonderful after this last phase of preparations.
One of the hardest aspects of this trip will be not carrying carrying a bound book with me. I love having one in my hands, taking the upper right hand corner of a page between my thumb and index finger and turning a page forward; or, back. The IPad2 has a few classics (Jane Eyre, Sherlock Holmes) downloaded free via Kobo, (the trademarked online book application), I hope will stand me in good stead, but I venture out into brave new world, relying on electronic equipment and mountaineering gear to mediate my experiences. In contrast, over the past few years, I have made many of my trips in the company of an enormous bright green hardcase zippered suitcase that can wheel three-hundred sixty degrees in either direction, and hold over fifty pounds. I have tested it on many an occasion, and it has never failed me, although I have occasionally had to unzip it and extract a volume or two to stay under the maximum allowable weight limit on flights. "The Green Monster" a/k/a "Kermit the Frog", purchased at Galeries Lafayette in Paris a few years ago, is instantly recognizable on the baggage carousel --and anywhere else. It has proved indispensable to me on my book-buying sprees in London, saving me the cost of United Kingdom postal shipping rates, which are exorbitant. It cannot go on this trip with me, and neither can the books. Truth be told, the idea of traveling book-less is perhaps the most frightening thought I have about this trip. I have yet to hear anyone extol the sensual pleasures of holding an IPad's metal casing between the fingers, but perhaps reading on the road, I will be converted.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Preliminaries
Leaving the country for three months with only a backpack and a small knapsack presents special challenges. Foremost in my mind at the start of my planning was the matter of so little underwear to change, but as I approach "lift off" it has been overtaken by the global cellphone challenge.
As a frugal traveller, I have made comparisons of every available detail of the trip: I have wrestled with the labyrinthine rules governing ATM withdrawals --you must know the difference between a "usage fee" and a "foreign transaction fee"-- and you must ask your bank to tell you specifically at what rate they exchange your currency for a foreign brand before basking complacently in the certitude that as a client, you are favored. However, nothing quite compares to the problem of setting up an international cellphone number at a reasonable rate.
If you use your U.S. phone, you will pay dearly. If you have a foreign phone and have relied on a SIM card in the past, it probably was linked to the country you are in. If, as I will, you are visiting Italy, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain and Ireland, juggling sovereign state SIM cards is an annoyance. So, I hightailed it to the local STA Travel agency in my neighborhood and let Sophia, the very smart twenty-something agent, sell me a global SIM card with a U.K. phone number. It cost forty dollars, but it does nothing more than open the international portal: you must make over an initial sum of money before you can start calling. Incoming text messages are free, but not outgoing, and there is a ten cent charge on every phone call you make. The customer service person in India who explained this to Sophia and me, originally said that this was just a charge that was levied at the start of a phone call, but when pressed, agreed that whether it was levied at the start or at the end of a call, it was a ten cent per call fee.
Sophia told me that in the U.S. cell phones are blocked so they will not sell global SIM cards for U.S. phones. In Europe, SIM cards are generally unblocked she said. Mine excepted. Try as I might, dredging up every pamphlet that came with my Orange (trademark) phone; using the cellphone numbers and PIN codes that I wrote down on a scrap of paper and attached to the company literature; trawling the Orange website, has proved a dismal failure. Calling the UK customer service line, I spoke with a nice young woman with a British inflection that was easy on the ear, but got nowhere. I went back to the website and followed the prompts as I understood them, and was routed to an interactive customer service program which emitted a series of numbers, some of which were part of the phone number of my Orange phone. I plugged them into the phone and got a message back that I had put in too many numbers. So I plugged in my PIN number: I had put in too few numbers. With each try I lost a turn. I have gotten down to three more turns before I am --banished? cut off? disconnected?
If I cannot get my Orange phone working before I leave I will probably not have a functioning cellphone until I reach France, a month after I start out. That is because when I am in Italy, Austria and Germany, each country will have its own cellphone providers, eager to sell me one of their phones. That is how I ended up with a Vodafone, a German cellphone, purchased in Baden-Baden, a few years back. The amiable and knowledgeable salesperson explained many things about how to use the phone I was purchasing, except that once I went over the border to Strasbourg, the phone would no longer work with the SIM card I purchased to go with it.
I thought I would try to see if my Vodafone might be, like the majority of European cellphones, unblocked; but I didn't get the chance to test the proposition, because the phone has run out of energy and needs to be charged. It has a very funny charger hole --just a tiny pinprick of a hole-- and I can't find the charger among my drawer-full of chargers for Blackberries, cellphones, and foreign electrical converters.
I did find the charger for the Orange phone, though; but it doesn't fit into my electric plugs because it is French, not American. So I searched for the converters I bought when I purchased the IPad2 to take on the trip, but they only seem to work on IPads. So I went to a drawer in which free headsets, earplugs for flights, and converters bought on earlier trips are kept. Here I found a European converter which plugs into my Orange charger cord, which plugs into my Orange cellphone. However, the Orange phone doesn't have an outside screen to let you know that the phone is charging, so I opened it up. At last some success: the screen said "Chargement". Perhaps I can find my German cellphone charger, and when I do, I can charge my German Vodafone, and when it is charged, I can see whether, like most European cellphones, it is unblocked, and I can put my Global SIM card in it behind the cellphone battery, and contact the UK number so I can give them some money so I can make some telephone calls in Italy, Austria, Germany and Switzerland.
I have one last resort, if I cannot find the charger for my Vodafone: I am going to take my Orange to my French class, and see whether my French teacher can help me out. I am bringing a prepaid U.S. phone card with a toll-free access number with me, so if need be, we can call France, and try to find out why I cannot unblock my Orange. If that doesn't work, I just won't have a cellphone until I reach France, a month later. Which means that I will have used up one month of my three-month license to make international calls using my UK-originating global SIM card, without having made one phone call.
As a frugal traveller, I have made comparisons of every available detail of the trip: I have wrestled with the labyrinthine rules governing ATM withdrawals --you must know the difference between a "usage fee" and a "foreign transaction fee"-- and you must ask your bank to tell you specifically at what rate they exchange your currency for a foreign brand before basking complacently in the certitude that as a client, you are favored. However, nothing quite compares to the problem of setting up an international cellphone number at a reasonable rate.
If you use your U.S. phone, you will pay dearly. If you have a foreign phone and have relied on a SIM card in the past, it probably was linked to the country you are in. If, as I will, you are visiting Italy, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain and Ireland, juggling sovereign state SIM cards is an annoyance. So, I hightailed it to the local STA Travel agency in my neighborhood and let Sophia, the very smart twenty-something agent, sell me a global SIM card with a U.K. phone number. It cost forty dollars, but it does nothing more than open the international portal: you must make over an initial sum of money before you can start calling. Incoming text messages are free, but not outgoing, and there is a ten cent charge on every phone call you make. The customer service person in India who explained this to Sophia and me, originally said that this was just a charge that was levied at the start of a phone call, but when pressed, agreed that whether it was levied at the start or at the end of a call, it was a ten cent per call fee.
Sophia told me that in the U.S. cell phones are blocked so they will not sell global SIM cards for U.S. phones. In Europe, SIM cards are generally unblocked she said. Mine excepted. Try as I might, dredging up every pamphlet that came with my Orange (trademark) phone; using the cellphone numbers and PIN codes that I wrote down on a scrap of paper and attached to the company literature; trawling the Orange website, has proved a dismal failure. Calling the UK customer service line, I spoke with a nice young woman with a British inflection that was easy on the ear, but got nowhere. I went back to the website and followed the prompts as I understood them, and was routed to an interactive customer service program which emitted a series of numbers, some of which were part of the phone number of my Orange phone. I plugged them into the phone and got a message back that I had put in too many numbers. So I plugged in my PIN number: I had put in too few numbers. With each try I lost a turn. I have gotten down to three more turns before I am --banished? cut off? disconnected?
If I cannot get my Orange phone working before I leave I will probably not have a functioning cellphone until I reach France, a month after I start out. That is because when I am in Italy, Austria and Germany, each country will have its own cellphone providers, eager to sell me one of their phones. That is how I ended up with a Vodafone, a German cellphone, purchased in Baden-Baden, a few years back. The amiable and knowledgeable salesperson explained many things about how to use the phone I was purchasing, except that once I went over the border to Strasbourg, the phone would no longer work with the SIM card I purchased to go with it.
I thought I would try to see if my Vodafone might be, like the majority of European cellphones, unblocked; but I didn't get the chance to test the proposition, because the phone has run out of energy and needs to be charged. It has a very funny charger hole --just a tiny pinprick of a hole-- and I can't find the charger among my drawer-full of chargers for Blackberries, cellphones, and foreign electrical converters.
I did find the charger for the Orange phone, though; but it doesn't fit into my electric plugs because it is French, not American. So I searched for the converters I bought when I purchased the IPad2 to take on the trip, but they only seem to work on IPads. So I went to a drawer in which free headsets, earplugs for flights, and converters bought on earlier trips are kept. Here I found a European converter which plugs into my Orange charger cord, which plugs into my Orange cellphone. However, the Orange phone doesn't have an outside screen to let you know that the phone is charging, so I opened it up. At last some success: the screen said "Chargement". Perhaps I can find my German cellphone charger, and when I do, I can charge my German Vodafone, and when it is charged, I can see whether, like most European cellphones, it is unblocked, and I can put my Global SIM card in it behind the cellphone battery, and contact the UK number so I can give them some money so I can make some telephone calls in Italy, Austria, Germany and Switzerland.
I have one last resort, if I cannot find the charger for my Vodafone: I am going to take my Orange to my French class, and see whether my French teacher can help me out. I am bringing a prepaid U.S. phone card with a toll-free access number with me, so if need be, we can call France, and try to find out why I cannot unblock my Orange. If that doesn't work, I just won't have a cellphone until I reach France, a month later. Which means that I will have used up one month of my three-month license to make international calls using my UK-originating global SIM card, without having made one phone call.
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