travel

The Kindle abroad

On a recent long jaunt around the Aegean, I realized something important about the Kindle: it’s the ultimate travel gadget.

I honestly didn’t expect this. I just brought mine so I’d have something to read! But here’s the deal:

  • The Kindle has a web browser. It’s simple and slow, but solid enough to check Gmail and mobile.twitter.com. In fact, it works beautifully with the mobile versions of most sites.
  • It’s almost miraculously connected. The browser wouldn’t mean much if Whispernet—Amazon’s set of carriage agreements with cell networks around the world—didn’t work everywhere. It does, and it’s also free. I was using Edge and 3G Whispernet reliably in remote-ish provinces and on sleepy islands. In fact, my Kindle generally got a stronger signal than my iPhone.
  • It’s light and durable. There’s a big difference between older Kindles (which I’m toting) and newer ones in this regard; I’m considering snagging one of the latest simply because they’re so much smaller, slimmer and lighter. But any Kindle is more portable than any iPad, and I also felt a lot more comfortable tossing the Kindle into a bag or dragging it across the beach. (I had my iPad on this trip, too, but barely used it.)
  • The Kindle works in direct sunlight. Especially when you’re traveling, this is a big deal. Standing on a busy corner or sitting on the beach, the Kindle is always totally usable. And this provides another contrast to the iPad, which always sends me scurrying to the shadows. (It really is a resolutely indoors device, isn’t it?)
  • The battery lasts forever. You know this already. My Kindle was on a once-a-week charging schedule, and that’s with lots of reading and regular internet checks.
  • Your Kindle is your itinerary. Using the Kindle as a virtual folder for travel documents was perhaps the biggest aha; it was my traveling companion who figured this out first. We got into the habit of forwarding tickets and reservations straight to our kindle.com addresses, which all Kindle owners have. (Oddly, this is the one part of international service that’s not free, but the price is negligible: $0.99 per megabyte for documents delivered this way.) It feels so good to have all of your information right there, in a format that’s so legible—not just to you, but to others. Once, in Turkey, I simply passed my Kindle to a ticket agent to help her understand where we were trying to go.
  • Travel guides on the Kindle work great. I was a little skeptical about this—I think of the Kindle as being bad at random-access material, and a travel guide is definitely one of those books you want to be able to flip through freely. But as it turns out, we got a ton of use out of a Lonely Planet Kindle edition—purchased mid-trip, natch—and by the end of the trip, I felt like a dope for having bothered with a physical guide (which weighed in at about five Kindles).

Honestly, even if you are not ever going to read an e-book, but want a device to help you stay connected and organized while traveling—especially if you’re going a bit off the beaten track—the investment in a Kindle (barely more than a hundred bucks at this point) can’t be beat.

 

Notes from the field

Having just returned from a five-day jaunt up the West Coast of North America, I present three findings:

  • Every city needs an Ace Hotel. As some of my colleagues know, I hate snazzy hotels; they always seem so wasteful, so frothy, so (for lack of a word) huh-I-don’t-get-it-who-actually-likes-this. By contrast, the Ace Hotels (I’ve stayed in the New York and Portland editions) seem just perfectly calibrated to me: not too much space, not too much fuss, but plenty of attention paid to the details—and to the food.
  • If you have the right temperament for it, Amtrak’s Coast Starlight route is a blast. You’ve definitely got to start down in LA, though. Get a private cabin. Read Steinbeck on the way up through Santa Barbara and Salinas. Go to sleep somewhere around Sacramento. Wake up at the California/Oregon interface, which, at least this time of year, looks basically like Narnia. Get off at Portland. And then…
  • If you find yourself in Portland this winter, go to Cascade Brewing and get their glueh kriek, a piping-hot beer served from a steaming cauldron that feels exactly like the kind of thing a half-elf ranger would drink in a dark tavern somewhere just east of the Shire.
 

Feet on the ground from far away

This little postlet on a tumblr that hails from Minnesota—

20100106_googstreet

—made me stop and go: A-ha! We all do this now, don’t we?

When I was looking for a new apartment a year and a half ago, there were a couple of days where I spent more time in Google Street View than in, uh, the real street. When I was scouting hotels in Paris last spring, I’d position my little yellow avatar at the front door of, say, the Hotel la Demeure and then take a test stroll. Did the Paris that stretched out there seem fun—or foreboding?

And of course it goes beyond Street View. We’re all satellite analysts now; looking for an apartment, I quickly learned the overhead signature of my favorite kind of street. It’s a certain width, with a certain density of dark-green tree splotches and a certain number of missile silos.

But this is all very pedestratian; very practical. You can also think about Google Street View as a new kind of street photography. Jon Rafman scouts Street View for compelling images—and, wow, he finds them. He writes:

Initially, I was attracted to the noisy amateur aesthetic of the raw images. Street Views evoked an urgency I felt was present in earlier street photography. With its supposedly neutral gaze, the Street View photography had a spontaneous quality unspoiled by the sensitivities or agendas of a human photographer. It was tempting to see the images as a neutral and privileged representation of reality—as though the Street Views, wrenched from any social context other than geospatial contiguity, were able to perform true docu-photography, capturing fragments of reality stripped of all cultural intentions.

!!!

Do check out his images if you haven’t seen them already; they’re really stunning. And equally stunning, for me, is the image of Rafman at a computer, clicking through Google Street View—scouting, searching—a step at a time.

 

I hope the air traffic control monitors didn’t look like this, too

There was a huge monitor at JFK that was glitching out in the most wonderful ways on Tuesday night. Through the looking glass: