::postcards::presentation::

“Once upon a time, major service providers around the world introduced a short message service allowing people to send multiple messages to each other for a nominal fixed fee. Typically the message space was small, and as a result people invented methods to deal with this by cramming in as much information as possible using shorthand, acronyms and restricted grammar. It became very popular, creating upgrades to services infrastructure, and employing additional people, all despite the fact that people were already using the same service provider to communicate with each other using similar services. Sounds familiar?” Rob Hellstrom, 2006

We’re talking about postcards. Yup, postcards. Think about all the ways we communicate: talking, listening, text messaging, instant messaging, emailing, writing and reading letters, watching television and movies, sending and receiving postcards?

Why postcards? Why do we communicate this way? In a digitized world, why do we keep using such an out-dated method of communication?

The idea of the postcard came to me in class on Tuesday. Our classmate Adam is about to embark on a great adventure (living in France for a quarter, lucky duck!). I asked him to send me a postcard, because I collect them. Of course I don’t collect them and keep them in a book in a drawer; I’m no entomologist. I don’t collect dead butterflies, shoving needles through their bodies and pinning them down, encasing them in glass for all eternity.

Nope, I collect postcards. I hang them up in my kitchen. Sometimes I take them down and read them. Sometimes, I even frame them. Having lived abroad, I absolutely adore getting postcards from my friends’ home countries or places they’re currently visiting. I love the pictures, the little notes, the funny dorky postcards, the panoramically breathtaking city view postcards ... I love them all.

This got me thinking about my impending presentation. Travel writing is a lonely profession (so says Robert Kaplan, whom I’ve mentioned before in class). I could stand up here and talk to you about how digital communication has drastically changed the world of travel journalism over the years. Truthfully speaking, however, everything would be old news to you. There are no computer programs that teach you how to travel better, how to write better, nor much less how to live better, and these are the three things that I feel sum up travel writing: writing, traveling and above all, living.

So I decided to share with you my silly little obsession with postcards. Hopefully I can connect the dots, so to speak, with how we change our world with technology, even though we may be using old habits to do so.

First, let me give you a quick history of the postcard.

The postcard was a major innovation of John P Charleton who patented the first private postcard in 1861 in Philadelphia, USA, and after 10 years it had been introduced in a number of countries around the world.

By the early 1900's postcards were enjoying a golden age of popularity. Around this time, the camera had been invented, mass picture printing had improved and all of this saw the introduction of picture postcards which only added to the popularity of postcards. Cameras became cheap enough to allow people to begin manufacturing their own picture postcards.

So ... why were postcards so popular? Here are a few reasons.

∑ Coverage (i.e. submission & delivery areas) was the same as normal mail;
∑ Postcards cost only half the price of a letter. This put written communication within reach of a greater number of people, including younger demographics;
∑ Being prepaid, it offered a convenient transactional engagement model to support greater penetration of the market;
∑ Postcards offered a choice of styles, pictures, and templates. Suddenly communicating was fun, compared to the formalized and stilted method of letter writing;
∑ Postcards were particularly popular with less literate classes because they were cheaper, there was neither room nor need for the complexity of a letter which had a strong social etiquette, a formalized structure and was generally difficult to compose. So the language became less formal and highly abbreviated to fit onto the smaller space. Spelling and punctuation were not essential in the hasty notes.
∑ Picture postcards became cheap and convenient souvenirs.
∑ Color picture postcards offered appeal in a time when most images were black and white, and they became highly popular to collect and swap.

All of these reasons for the success of the postcards can be applied to current technologies like text messaging or emailing.

“Instant Messages have been to email what postcards were to handwritten letters, The global mobile phone network created an opportunity to write a short message or more lately, to send a picture from a tiny device which sits in the pocket. Pricing differences meant that it was cheaper to send a message than to call someone.” (Hellstrom again)

A quick web search of “postcards” turns up some great websites. Today, postcard collecting is huge and my measly collection is almost embarrassing compared to some that are out there. Recently I discovered this amazing website which I think you all should try: www.postcrossing.com. The premise is simple: you send a postcard, and someone sends one to you. If you never send any, you never get any.

To me, this simple system epitomizes what technology does for us in the loosest sense: it brings people together in new and exciting ways. The postcard has been around for over a century now. In the internet age, we use it differently. Now we use it not as a necessary means of communication, but as a means of connecting on a human level with others.

Throughout the quarter, I’ve had my share difficulties trying to connect travel journalism with communication technologies. As a creative field, the best writing is done, at its simplest, with a pencil and paper. Having a laptop in the middle of the ocean isn’t going to come in handy if you can’t plug it in anywhere. Travel writing is about people, it is about places, and it is about what happens to you in those places with those people.

Our world seems to grow increasingly smaller every day. To me, the smaller the world gets, the bigger it feels. For example, my older brother lives in Hong Kong. Compared to fifty, even twenty years ago, it’s so much easier to go to Hong Kong for a few weeks these days than ever before. However, my brother has lived in one of the most amazing cities in the world for almost two years and I’ve yet to visit him.

As my friend James Bennett put it, “I think the greatest change is in the provision of vastly greater capacity at a low cost, meaning that more places benefit from travel dollars, although apparently this is the peak of the cycle. As fuel becomes more expensive, availability of travel capacity will diminish greatly over the next 50 years. I’m glad to be at the peak.”

As I said before, travel writing is about three things: writing, traveling and living. It’s about people and it’s about places and it’s definitely about good writing. The prolific travel writer Tim Cahill had this to say about his job: “I am living out my adolescent dream of travel and adventure. I do not mean this as a pejorative: adolescence is when we are the most idealistic, the most open to the new and the novel. I try to keep that almost childlike attitude; consequently, I am seldom as cynical as I might otherwise be. I think this is a good thing.” I agree.

Let’s finish where we began, with the postcard. What will happen to the postcard as technology changes at a quicker pace these days? Writer Rod Eime wrote this in his article The World In A Postcard: “What about the postcard? Will it be relegated to museums, libraries and art galleries as a 20th century curiosity? Or will it rebound as people rediscover the simple pleasure of handcrafted communication via the letterbox? Only time will tell.”

Let’s hope we can hold on to the postcard.

Resources:

Comment: Was SMS invented in 1861? By Rob Hellstrom
http://www.160characters.org/news.php?action=view&nid=1955

www.postcrossing.com

The World In A Postcard by Rod Eime
http://members.ozemail.com.au/%7Erodeime/postcards/

Interview Review: Barbara Glass

Barbara Glass is an energetic individual. Her office is covered in pictures of her children and grandchildren and post-it notes are stuck on most surfaces. A well-thumbed copy of Successful Writing at Work sits atop a filing cabinet, highly appropriate as Glass is Coordinator of the Professional Writing Minor at Ohio State.

Glass has worked in the publishing field in one way or another for the last twenty-odd years. She now coordinates internships for students minoring in Professional Writing. In an interview last week, Glass discussed her love for the personal computer as well her thoughts on the direction technology is taking the publishing field.

Much of the conversation revolved around the positives attributes of a technologically-focused work environment, but Glass has had her share of horror stories. “Sure, I’ve had a virus” that destroyed an entire harddrive, she said. Much of her work had to be recreated, but Glass chalked it up to the risk you take while using a computer.

In the computer world, patience truly is a virtue. While Glass says her husband gets easily frustrated when he runs into computer trouble, she tries to calm down and focus on what the problem might be, rather than turning to the phone and her twenty-six-year-old son (coincidentally the owner of a Computer Science degree)

Though Glass has had moments, like all of us, in which she curses the technology she depends upon, she does have high hopes for what new advances will come her way in the next few years. Glass described what she calls “e-books:” a tablet-sized computer that holds “an entire library:” a veritable iPod for books. “Books” would be purchased and downloaded for a mere fraction of the current textbook cost. In this scenario, shipping and energy costs would be drastically reduced. However, it may take more than one generation of students to throw away books and accept reading everything on a computer screen.

“The personal computer is the greatest thing in the world,” Glass declared when asked what her “desert island” technological item is. A quick look around her office, however, shows that while Glass relies heavily on the PC, she still uses some “stoneage” technologies: when she recieved a phone call during the interview, she used her planner, held open by many rubber bands, and wrote everything down on a yellow legal pad with a No. 2 pencil. During all this, she did not use the computer once.

Though the PC affords many conveniences, some things are best left to pencil and paper. Old habits die harder than technology would like them to, it seems.

Interview Review: James Bennett

This is an email-interview conducted with a great friend of mine, James Bennett of Perth, Australia. First of all, let me give you some background on how I got to know this fine gent (photo details: left to right, James Bennett and Cair Pierce. We are visually demonstrating the vastly different ways Australian and American fish use their gills, though I'm sure I didn't need to point that out, as it's rather obvious just from looking what we are doing).

When I moved to Sweden, the first step off the bus in Uppsala I was met by the friendliest-of-friendly-Aussies. Apparently I looked a little out of sorts. I had not slept in a day and a half. This, combined with the two insanely large suitcases I was dragging while simultaneously attempting to navigate using a rapidly-deteriorating map, may have tipped off James to inquire if I was, by mere chance, lost. James and I discovered we lived in the same building and thus began a fantastic friendship.

James has travelled pretty much all over the place, yet if asked, he will ramble on about how he feels woefully insignificant because he's never been to Antartica. At least not yet, I'm sure. Having completed his combined law and arts degrees in Political Science and French, James now works as a journalist in Western Australia for the Australian Broadcasting Company, doing mainly radio work as well as some television-dabbling.

In honor of James' dual citizenship (oh, the joy of having a British father and Aussie mother!), I'll leave all his unnecessary U's intact. Darn that Queen's English.

What new technologies do you like/use frequently? Why?

I really like using MSN Messenger and Skype because I like staying in contact with people. I’ve been fortunate to meet some really cool people and would hate to lose contact with them. Those technologies will hopefully prevent that. Of course the ubiquitous iPod must also rate a mention.


What technologies do you dislike? Any horror stories?

Hmmm hard to say really…I lost an interview I’d just done with a minister on some voice recording software at work the other day. That was really not so fun, because I felt like a tool having to call him back and blame technology.

What would you change about technology?

I’d make it more usable outside, like make screens really super bright so you could be out in the sun and still use it if you wanted. Something on user friendliness would be good too: keypads for people who can't type – could you use a clickwheel [from the iPod] to type? That thing is awesome.

How has technology changed what you read? What you view? Wow you interact with others?

I still read books and newspapers, but everything else I guess – I call on the internet, I use text messages because I’m a tightarse [Ed. note: Australian for cheapskate] and I check websites for news updates constantly.

What piece of technology goes with you to your desert island?

A nice camera.

Do you feel the increase in technological advances has helped overall in your particular line of work?

Yes. Having used old school tape recording compared to digital voice and picture editing software…well I can use the digital stuff, but wouldn’t have a hope in hell in retro-land. Computer program lets my stories be sub-edited instantly and lets me see what other journalists are working on at the same time.


If you have a problem with a piece of technology, to whom do you turn?

Right now, anyone else in the newsroom, because they're all more experienced than me. At home I tell my sister to fix the net because she's lazy and I don’t know how to do it.

What does your crystal ball tell you about the next five years in technological advances?

There will be a trend towards further integration. I remember some marketing dude say that people will only ever carry three things – phone, keys and wallet: so the phone must also be a decent camera, mp3 player, organizer, email compatible, et cetera.

Technology obviously has changed the face of journalism quite drastically in recent years. Technology has also made traveling very different. How have each of these fields changed in the recent past on their own merit?

Skynews, Foxnews, all rolling 24 hour news: do things happen all the time? Cast your net wide enough and I suppose so – but are those things of interest? Perhaps the variety of mediums through which we can access news means that its relevance or perceived importance may be diminished. For example, why read the paper when you saw it on the net yesterday afternoon or some cute girl told you?

While these advances improve the time until you can access news, it does not give you more detail, so maybe the change isn’t as great as it may appear – newspapers still seem to turn a profit.

Travelling has changed because you can tell more people about what you are doing/did faster and in more detail. People still travel to places on word of mouth, but the costs overall are lower.

I think the greatest change is in the provision of vastly greater capacity at a low cost, meaning that more places benefit from travel dollars, although apparently this is the peak of the cycle. As fuel becomes more expensive, availability of travel capacity will diminish greatly over the next 50 years. I’m glad to be at the peak.

On a personal sidenote, it seems everyone has to travel with music – checking out a city is not done unless done to your own playlist. I don’t like this.

How, then, has the combination of these two fields fared? Do you find these technological differences are changing the face of travel journalism in a positive or negative way? What modifications, technologically speaking, would you make to improve the field of travel journalism?

Travel shows are so unrealistic: check-in camera, queue cam, argument with police cam, trying to buy food cam, rude foreign service cam: the moment any hotel or restaurant sees a camera crew show up, of course they will bend over backwards to accommodate. Hidden cameras which would gauge the real reception in a place are a must.

***
All in all, big thanks to James Bennett who has indulged my curiousities on many occasions, ranging from do-the-toilets-really-flush-the-other-way-in-Australia to this much-more-intelligent exchange.

India, Part Two

"The immigrant's journey, no matter how ultimately rewarding, is founded on departure and deprivation, but it secures for the subsequent generation a sense of arrival and advantage," writes Jhumpa Lahiri in her essay My Two Lives in the latest Newsweek (March 6, 2006).

Lahiri's article is a refreshing look at modern immigration; specifically, how her life growing up was obviously very different than many others as a child to Indian immigrants to the United States in the 1970s. Lahiri's tone and style are subdued, and she never overwhelms the reader with intellectual jargon understood only by the academia-jetset. She discusses her struggle to hide her Indian homelife (speaking Bengali regularly with her parents, for instance) but never being able to be fully American (never knowing how to ice skate, unlike her East Coast born-and-bred friends).

In short, Lahiri's piece about her struggle to be accepted on "either side of the hyphen."

It reminds me of the Margaret Mead quote we've discussed in class:

"All of us ... are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before. The young are at home here."

I hope you will find some resonance in it as I did.

Indian Mashup (NYTimes)

I'm linking to a recent NYTimes Travel article by Seth Sherwood, titled In India's Silicon Valley, Partying Like It's 1999.

This article really stands out to me for four reasons:

1. It is a hybrid article, at once covering travel, nightlife, technology, fashion and the business industry. I think the term "mashup" applies perfectly here. Also, I wanted an excuse to use the word "mashup" in an academic setting.

2. It shows that the world is really getting smaller. For example, read this sentence: "...the crowds mingle with their raspberry martinis in one hand and Blackberry wireless devices in the other." Have you ever been to Spice Bar in downtown Columbus on a Saturday night? It seems the yupster lifestyle in Bangalore, India isn't too much removed from the yupster lifestyle in Columbus, Ohio.

3. The article also points out some major differences in Indian culture. It is illegal for nightclubs in Bangalore to stay open past 11:30 p.m., though many people choose to find modern-day speakeasies, so to speak, to fuel their nighttime fun.

4. The article has some great snippets of imagery like this one: "Sip a Sunday latte along the silvery counter at Barista, India's answer to Starbucks, and you'll see them [multicultural entrepeneurs living in Bangalore] noodling on laptops." Noodling! What a great word! Almost as good as mashup!

In short, the NYTimes has done it again with a great travel article that incorporates many aspects throughout it. India, anyone?

Torino 2006!

Every time the Olympics roll around, I promise myself that I won't get addicted. I won't stay up until midnight watching curling. I won't get obsessed with ice dancing. I won't wake up from dreams about winning gold medals in figure skating. I won't devour every tidbit of knowledge I can glean online about obscure athletes in obscure sports, and I most certainly will not harbor crushes on speedskaters, let alone hockey goalies.

And without fail, every time the Olympics roll around I become completely obsessed. All it takes is about seventeen minutes of watching the TV coverage before I have picked out my favorite competitors, favorite uniforms, favorite sports ... I don't know what it is in particular about the Olympics that gets me, but every two years I lose two weeks to the television.

I love the Olympics for what they represent: sportsmanship, unity, dedication, endurance, and overcoming obstacles. It's for reasons like this that I get teary-eyed watching Cool Runnings. (Don't even get me started on Rudy. It isn't even about the Olympics - for chrisssakes it's about Notre Dame, and I'm a Buckeye, no less! Yet I own the movie and it's a safe bet to make that by the time the whole stadium is chanting "Rudy," I am bawling like a toddler who has just lost her pacifer. Pathetic! Absolutely pathetic!)

Right now, this website (NBC Olympics Dot Com) is on my favorites because this year, like every year, I've become downright stricken with Olympic fever. In fact the minute I finish this post, I'm turning on the television to catch some hot curling action.

My favorite part of the website is the athlete profiles. Do yourself a favor and check out Shaun White (the gold medal snowboarder, also known as the Flying Tomato) and this section titled Q&A, which is a very refreshing read. It's not often athletes at the top of their fields are so self-deprecatingly funny. I'd love to hang out with him just to hear these quotes for my own ears (especially the one about the panda suit).

The travel-related part of the website is the Country Profiles section. It's like a mini-Lonely Planet-esque guide to each country participating in the Games, and it is always good to know the background of your favorite skeleton competitor. Which reminds me, I gotta turn on the TV. That is, right after I finish wiping away the Rudy tears.

Dan Steinberg's Olympics Blog

Little by little, I've been writing about my own idiosyncracies on this blog. It seems that most of my posts fall under the "personal" umbrella as I am virtually incapable of writing anything without tangentially mentioning something that happened to me when I was seven years old or my penchant for getting deals at the supermarket. Anyone reading this probably learns much more about me than is ever really necessary, so for that, I apologize.

Blogs seem to be the perfect forum for the TMI Era: the Too Much Information Era. Mopey teenagers have blogs devoted soley to what shade of black their nailpolish is today. Bored professionals get fired due to their not-so-professional blogging habits. Cair Pierce tells you about her obsession with the Olympics.

Dan Steinberg of the Washington Post has a rather hilarious blog on the Olympics. Whether or not this hilarity is intentional is besides the point. His ramblings make me look like a regular literary genius. I love how he is obsessed with cheese and Norwegian TV announcers hairdos, and feels no need to keep this information from the public. In short, Dan Steinberg is my hero.

Read on: Dan Steinberg on the Olympics

www.GoAbroad.com

I make a lot of decisions. Most of my better ideas always seem so much saner in my head. For example, dying my hair "Starry Night Black" wasn't exactly something I could stop halfway through. Coming home with seven and a half pounds of ground beef made so much sense in the grocery store, especially when you break it down to price per ounce! That was in August. I think it's still buried somewhere in the freezer, but I'm too nervous to actually look for it as I'm sure it's turned a glorious shade of green by now.

However, not all of my decisions have been so life-changing as those mentioned above. One of the best I've made in my life was to study abroad for a year. I was born at Ohio State Hospital and I grew up in Clintonville. In fact, I think you can see my parents' house if you stand at Lane and High and squint really hard. Attending THE Ohio State University has been wonderful but I always knew that I needed to get out of my hometown. So, in short, I hopped on a plane to Sweden for the better part of a year.

I am a firm believer in the statement that you need to get away from where you're from in order to appreciate it. And not everybody needs to live two hours from the Artic Circle in order to realize they're from a great place. Sometimes all it takes is a little trip to someplace new, whether it's just across the state line or in another hemisphere. That's why I'm linking to this great website as it is an amazing resource for anyone who wants to get outta town for a little while.

GoAbroad.com

It's very easy to lose a few hours perusing all the offerings of GoAbroad.com, and I highly recommend it. However, I would advise you to steer clear of dying your hair any "Starry Night" variety. And if you are in need of any beef just let me know, I've got a whole cow in the freezer.

Robert D. Kaplan

"Neither journalism nor travel writing are real subjects. Rather, they are only a means for communicating subjects that are real," writes Robert D. Kaplan in Cultivating Loneliness, an article for the Columbia Journalism Review.

This article is a great read for anyone interested in any field of journalism, let alone travel journalism. It is chock-full of reasons why the industry is changing so much due to technology infiltrating the once-lonely environment of travel journalism. Kaplan, the author of eleven books on various subjects, writes that the barrage of information has created the illusion of knowledge:

The Internet now makes facts so effortless to obtain that there is the illusion of knowledge where none actually exists. With so many low-budget Web logs that do little more than emotionally react to the headlines, rare is the commentator who does the field work necessary to earn his opinions — or even his prejudices. And as punditry has crowded out the space once owned by print correspondents, the public is increasingly removed from the intangible essences and minutiae of distant places that explain the present, and thus forewarn of the future.

I won't quote the entire article here (though I wish I could), Kaplan goes on the make some other great points, one of which deals with the difference between "reporting" and "journalism." To Kaplan, good reporting is listening, not asking interrogative questions, as he relates two examples (one from a conversation with a Turk, another, his experiences with Marines in Afghanistan) to prove this.

Currently, I am reading a book by Kaplan called Balkan Ghosts. It is both history and travel journalism, written throughout the late 1980s and published in 1993 about the so-called conflict in the Balkan states. The Balkans (Romania, the former geographic area known as Yugoslavia, Croatia, Albania and Slovenia) not to be confused with theBalticss, have had such an enormous impact on Western politics since the turn of the last century it is hard to fit it all in one book.

The article and the book both epitomize excellent "travel writing," something which I'm not sure I'd ever be very successful. But as we've said in class, in order to be a good writer, one must read good books. Here's to a start.


Resources: Kaplan, Robert D. Balkan Ghosts.
Cultivating Loneliness: Robert D. Kaplan for Columbia Journalism Review, America's Premier Media Monitor

Travel Industry News

Up until this point, I've posted about things I really enjoy, be they photographs, books or other websites. In class while searching for related links to our blogs, I came across a travel industry blog by using technorati's search engine. At first, I was excited to find a relevant blog to travel journalism. However, my enthusiasm waned as I continued to use the site.

Let me preface my criticisms by reminding you, dear reader, of my poor knowledge of all things technology-related. It's sometimes like going to a museum with my sister, an art history aficionado. I only know whether I like or dislike a painting. My sister, on the other hand, can tell me all the reasons why I should like or dislike a work of art. In the same vein, there are students in our class who know why I should feel a way about a blog; sadly I only know that I don't like it.

This website is one of these instances. I feel it is poorly designed and hard to navigate, with a confusing setup. The blog itself is very boring in terms of aesthetics, which isn't necessarily a bad thing as most bad websites out there have tried to do too much. This one is just plain boring. However, my main beef with the site is how it proclaims itself to be about "Travel Industry News," yet contains very few articles regarding the industry. What does a top story about surgery scams have to do with the travel industry?

Overall, the website isn't terrible. I would just like it to be a bit more focused when it comes to the travel industry.

Travel Industry News

My Life as an Athlete

In a past life, I am pretty sure I was a sportswriter. My athletic career reached a high point at the age of eight as a coach-pitch softball slugger. I spent the summer spent making daisy chains in the outfield with my best friend. We aptly nicknamed ourselves The Strikeout Sisters based on our sky-high batting averages. I had stunning success on a girls soccer team, most likely because our uniforms were purple and emblazoned with our team name across the chest: the Unicorns. This is a fact: any eleven year old girl will play for a team named the Unicorns. It could be rugby or curling, I'd still suit up in two seconds.

At age thirteen, I joined the track team after a bet with my mother: if I didn't quit, she'd buy me the dress I'd had my eye on for months. After I inexplicably made it through the season, I wore the dress once and promptly realized I'd accidentally purchased it two sizes too big and naturally lost the receipt to return it. In high school, another bet landed me in a cheerleader's uniform for a year. The details of that are fuzzy at best and all I can say is that I really didn't mind the skirt.

Fed up with difficult contact sports like cheerleading, I returned to my childhood love of swimming. I was captain of the girls swim team throughout my senior year, voted in probably due to my ability to make everybody feel really fast while swimming next to me. Also, Fierce Pierce looks phenomenal on the back of a team sweatshirt.

Despite my obvious lack of talent in any particular field, I have always loved sports. I’ve subscribed to only two magazines in my life: The New Yorker and Sports Illustrated. I have a few favorite sports writers, people like Bill Simmons of ESPN, of whom I am incredibly envious. People who can’t play sports write about sports. People who can’t write about sports read about sports. Guess which category I fall into.

Today is arguably the biggest sports day of the year. I'm not sure if you knew this or not, but it's Super Bowl 40. If you are learning this for the first time today, you are either a) living under a rock or b) an English major.

Michael Rosenberg of the Detroit Free Press wrote a hilarious article for his fellow sportswriters on how to properly bash Detroit.

Enjoy this article, enjoy the Super Bowl, I've got my money on the Unicorns.

Detroit: Burning questions, easy answers



***
Rosenberg, Michael. Detroit: Burning questions, easy answers. Detroit Free Press 28 Jan 2006.

El Cheapo

I have but one motto in my life. I splurge on three things and three things alone. Number one, toilet paper. Number two, food. Number three, shoes. Anything else and I am cutting coupons, hunting bargains, haggling and hassling until I get my deal. Some may call it frugality (and aren't they sweet!). I prefer "El Cheapo." There is something very satisfying, very I-sleep-better-at-night, and very glorious about getting a good deal. Now usually I don't like to share, but seeing as how this is related to getting a good grade, I suppose, just this once, I can let a few of you in on my secrets.

Lo and behold, here is one of my favorite travel websites, mainly because it has a name that's very difficult to forget:

Cheap Tickets Dot Com

My favorite thing about this website is two things. Number one, it lets you plan multi-destination trips. Say you'd like to fly in to Rome but fly home from Paris. No need to purchase bunches of one-way tickets, instead, you can add up to three destination cities if you so desire. Number two favorite thing, the website lets you make trip itineraries, set prices, and then everytime you log in, it tells you the current prices for that particular trip, alerting you when it drops to your price. Now that is a deal! To think, if only they sold stilettos ... oh the world would be a better place, indeed. Until then, El Cheapo for CheapTickets.

A Picture's Worth?

While hunting for travel-related photographs online in class, I came across a stunning website. According to their website, Diane Cook and Len Jenshel met in 1979, married in 1983 and started an amazing career of photographic collaboration in 1991. They turn anything they get their eyes on into a breathtaking photographic piece. I started looking on their website for their travel photos but was hooked in no time to looking at their pictures of anything and everything: even photos of golf courses are beautiful (and usually the only thing I find beautiful about a golf course is the nineteenth hole, if you're picking up what I'm putting down, my friend).

If I couldn't write, I think I'd like to be somewhat talented in another art form. Stick figures are my limit when it comes to drawing, elephants with paint brushes in their trunks do a better job than me, and my guitar career ended abruptly when I broke a string six days into owning one. I never had it replaced and it was a gift on my sixteenth birthday so I think you can see where I'm going with this one. These two photographers are blessed in making what seems mundane and ordinary into a work of art, and their photographs from around the world are absolutely surreal.

I may be using a plethora of positive adjectives here, but once you get a look at them you will agree. People say a picture is worth a thousand words. With this post, I should be exempt from all the rest this quarter because these images will astound you.

Diane Cook & Len Jenshel Photographs

(I've linked to the "Travel" section but I'm sure you will browse just as I did.)

GPS Debate

Today in class, we discussed the merits of Global Positioning Systems, or GPS as they are known. I referenced an article published in the Columbus Dispatch recently. Here is the link to the story by Bill Eichenberger:

So long, maps


Unwittingly I sparked a debate on the GPS technology, as well as how technology is received as a whole. It seems that throughout centuries, humanity is always more than a bit hesistant to embrace something different. As Professor Selfe mentioned, we weren't too excited about putting erasers on pencils, and it seems we've done alright so far.

Another article (by Eichenberger as well) appeared alongside the other. It's an interesting look at the GPS phenomena and how one person handles it.

Pocket-size computer helps New York visitor



***
Eichenberger, Bill. "So long, maps." Columbus Dispatch 29 Jan 2006.
Eichenberger, Bill. "Pocket-size computer helps New York visitor." Columbus Dispatch 29 Jan 2006.

Ticket To Ride

A very good friend of mine from Australia sent me his personal copy of a great book called Ticket to Ride, written by a hilarious young Australian, Sarah Darmody, who wins a United States greencard. She decides to travel the continental US by Greyhound to discover her new country, along the way finding a lot to love, as well as a few things not to love.

Having spent about a year living with other international students in Uppsala, Sweden, I was one of only a handful of Americans studying there. I know (and usually heard) firsthand a lot of assumptions about our country: fat, stupid, arrogant, too friendly, noisy ... I'm sure you can think of some on your own. Sometimes I felt very frustrated trying to portray the "good" America to all of my friends; other times, I embodied their own frustrations about me (it must be in my genes to eat peanut butter straight out of the jar and call it a "healthy snack" because it has nuts in it). That's the thing about traveling. You find out that stereotypes exist for a reason: mainly for you to dispel them.

That's what Ms. Darmody's book does. It's a breath of fresh air in an otherwise rather smelly atmosphere of all of the negative attitudes towards America that's been going around lately. She describes the people she meets, the places she goes and everything (and I really mean everything) that happens to her. She has quite a soft spot for Krispy Kreme donuts, and who can blame her, really. I imagine if she ever came to Columbus she would park herself outside the Wonderbread factory downtown and just wait to soak up the delicious aroma it emits.

If I ever had the opportunity to travel in a foreign country by bus, I doubt I would take it as well as this author. If you ever come across it, snatch it up and give yourself a few hours over a rainy weekend. As my friend James wrote to me when he sent it, "If this doesn't make you proud of your country than I don't know what will."

As we discussed in class recently, good writers read good books so here's to hoping it rubs off on me.


***
Darmody, Sarah. Ticket to Ride: Lost and Found in America. Sydney: Bantam, 2005.

Money Talks

Lots of college students take a "Euro trip" at some point in their academic career. Falling asleep on a train in one country and waking up in a completely new one can be very disorienting, not to mention a problem for your wallet. In recent years, the introduction of the Euro in most major European countries has definitely allieviated that problem to a certain extent. However, many European countries (not to mention, um, the rest of the world) have yet to join the economic union and you can find yourself with lots of different currencies floating around your wallet. It's a good idea to know how much you have, as numbers start to lose meaning when you're changing currencies a lot.

Even if you aren't doing any traveling, comparing currencies can be really fun. For instance, one US dollar goes pretty far in Albania: 102 lekes, which even sound like they'd be fun to spend. When I lived in Sweden, I got really used to the krona (Swedish for "crown;" they may have a democratic government but boy do they love their monarchy). When my parents came to visit me, a grocery trip with my father, who had obviously done his dollar-krona conversion homework, turned into one long exclamatory adventure: "A gallon of milk is FOUR DOLLARS?! Honey, did you realize you are spending FOUR DOLLARS on milk?! That's like - " he pauses for the mental calculation - "SEVENTY SIX CENTS A GLASS!"

Here's the website my father probably used to discover the price-per-sip of wholesome Swedish milk:

The World's Favorite Currency Converter

It contains a universal currency converter as well as self-updating Quick Cross Rates, comparing the world's top currencies. Simply put, the website can be quite addictive. Of course it's no Facebook but finding out I'm a millionaire in Albania is hard to beat ... that's a lot of milk, people, a lot of milk.

Wallbounce

Do you have a extra $100,000 just burning a hole in your pocket? Chances of that are on par with the chance of me actually getting any homework done less than three hours before it's due (this blog included). Yet I digress. A recent Columbus Dispatch article alerted my attention to a rather bewildering, yet highly engrossing, company's website:

Wallbounce LLC

Created by Robin Wilson, Wallbounce seeks to fill a rather slim niche: if you have some extra money, any adventure can be yours, no planning on your part whatsoever (aside from signing the check, of course). Feel like flying on a private plane to a luxury yacht for shark diving off the coast of Mexico? Check. That is, a check for one hundred grand will get that done. Other "experiences" range from the rather pricey (a professionally-produced custom TV-style biography is but a mere $11,500) to the relatively affordable (ten NASCAR laps with Dale Jarrett for the bargain deal of $625).

Though the company's offerings are by no means strictly travel-related, it does strike a chord: the ease of the internet and letting someone else do all the dirty work with the result of fulfilling a lifetime dream (if driving around in circles at extremely high rates of speed is a lifetime dream of yours). And that's something everyone loves.

Cambodia

One of my favorite things to do on Sunday mornings is hunker down with the newspaper, especially the comics and the crossword (my roommates and I have perfected a system for finishing it in less than an hour ... which sounds like a long time, unless you are like me and actually attempt to finish it by yourself, something I have accomplished about twice in my life). I highly enjoy methodically going through the coupons and supermarket circulars. I also love to read the travel section, a fact imminently more important to this blog than the thrill I derive from snipping coupons. I wonder how the journalists can actually make places like Detroit sound interesting instead of extremely dangerous (um, 8 Mile, anyone?), and if I could ever do the same.

The New York Times has an amazing travel section, going places all over the globe, and today's edition was no different. I'm linking to an absolutely fantastic article on Cambodia 's exploding tourism industry. A good friend of mine is Cambodian; her parents escaped to the United States during the late 70s. She was recently able to return and visit relatives she had never met and is constantly talking up the beauty of Cambodia.

Why Is Everybody Going to Cambodia?

Currently, I am in the planning stages of a trip to Asia and Australia, which will hopefully begin in December (and end whenever my money runs out). This article by Matt Gross not only reinforces the country's alluring appeal, but is extremely well-written. It links the history of the country and the author's modern-day impression of Cambodia, a feat not easily replicated. Reading articles like this is right up there with cutting coupons, in my ever-so-humble opinion.