Silverjet, an all-Business-Class airline serving the
It's also known for superior food. This month's
I had to look up colcannon and found that it's an Irish dish consisting of mashed potatoes with kale or cabbage. The British have a similar dish called bubble and squeak. Gods knows why the Irish insist on calling theirs colcannon - wouldn't you rather eat something called bubble and squeak? Along with a side order of spotted dick. I'm still not sure what the latter dish is and I really have done my best to avoid finding out. I can spend hours pondering what's in spotted dick and those lazy afternoons would be lost forever if I ever discover the truth.
Anyway, you have until April 18 to take advantage of Silverjet's special early summer $919 (one way, excluding taxes) flights to
Minutes after I finished posting the last note on airline bankruptcies, along comes Frontier Air with their bankruptcy. I really hate it when everyone jumps on the bandwagon.
One difference and this is probably major for those holding Frontier Air reservations, is that they did not discontinue operations. They just filed for Chapter 11 protection while they inevitably reorganize and secure new lines of credit and the executives hoover up their bonuses before the coffers run dry.
And in undoubtedly related news Northwest and Delta have agreed to a merger. I'm not sure where on the list of largest American airlines this will place them but it probably will be slightly ahead of Frontier.
So in the past week or so a number of airlines have given up the ghost as it were. Let's see what the rollcall is at this time:
Skybus - a super cheap carrier based in
ATA Airlines - we really knew nothing about this airline as they seem to have specialized in the northern tier of routes which we hardly ever fly. And now we'll never know them unless someone buys the name at the bankruptcy auction. Hopefully not - ATA seems more like the acronym for an association than an airline.
Aloha Airlines - we were familiar with this airline though we never actually flew them since our first trip to
The loss of the two latter airlines will supposedly impact Hawaiian air travel as both were carriers for that market. I somehow doubt that all of the remaining airlines servicing
So far it seems to be the smaller regional low cost airlines that are experiencing problems. Of course these are the companies that normally have less resources to weather major increases in fuel costs and other economy driven issues. Me, I'd probably think strongly about trip insurance if I were to book on smaller regional airlines for the foreseeable future.
As part of the Round the World trip I felt it was important that I try as many regional beers as possible. It's always been a theory of mine that one can learn a lot about a culture by imbibing their indigenous brews. It's a lousy theory but the alternative explanation (and the one that Mary is most in agreement with) is that I have an abiding affection for the brew and will do most anything to acquire some. Still, I did have a great time, and I think it's safe to say that one can travel pretty much anywhere nowadays and find a great regional brew.
Tiger
Kingfisher (which is really Indian but we ate a lot of Indian food so it just seemed right) Carlsberg (which is European but it was a hot day and the beer was cold and inviting)
Singha
Asahi Super Dry
Assorted Kyoto Micro Brews (that I neglected to get the names of - my bad)
Kona Longboard Lager
Kona Fire Rock Pale Ale
Keoki Gold
Anchor Steam
San Miguel (a
Chang
Victoria Bitter
Tooheys New
Tooheys Extra Dry
Boags Premium
Crown Lager
Fuller's ESB (In my defense we weren't in
Of all the beers consumed I can safely say there is only one that I would not willingly and enthusiastically drink again and that was the Phuket Island Beer. It wasn't that this beer was bad - it was just a little strange as it was noticeably sweet. Also, the Bikini Blonde Lager in Hawaii although drinkable (and that's a pretty broad category for me) was pretty blah, fine if you like the mass market American brews like Budweiser but otherwise not able to compete at all with its tastier brethren from Kona or Keoki.
Of all the places we have visited on our Round the World trip, I think
But starting with the airport and the drive through town to our hotel, we found out very quickly that not only were our preconceptions wrong, they were really, really wrong.
We had hoped that our stay in
But I dash ahead heedlessly.
We used a car supplied by the hotel for the ride into town. Our driver gave us a lot of advice as to where and what to eat. He reminded us of the taxi drivers we've had in
Food is probably going to be the most salient feature of
One result of the mixture of cuisines that occurs in
Still, the ones we did try were pretty great. We got the requisite chilli crab which is interesting but expensive and probably not really worth the money or the mess. We also had the Hainanese chicken rice dish which is famous and it was both pretty tasty and remarkably cheap. This is a dish that I'd be happy to subsist on for a few years if I had to live on a budget. Along with a bunch of other things, we also tried a fried noodle dish that I never did catch the name of, but it was simply awesome.
Another standout in the cuisine marathon was the North Indian buffet in Raffles, which was spectacular -- if you like Indian food, that is. And we do. Mary suggested having the buffet for dinner every night of our stay, but even I had to draw the line there. No more than three nights running. I mean, it's Indian food and that's great, but there comes a time when one more spoonful of lime pickle relish will eat a hole in my stomach lining. I'd willingly suffer that, but I couldn't find out if
In fact, pretty much everything in
Besides eating, the other national sport seems to be shopping. We thought
I'm sure there are some other touristy things that people do in
So, that was
Here's a post from Mary relating to our recent gallivantations (I'm looking to get my own word into Webster) around the world. We are home now and everything's fine. We had to cut the trip short and due to the changes and stuff along the way I fell behind on entries. I do have a bunch of articles left to post and will get them up over the next couple of weeks. So here's Mary.
As Mike mentioned in an earlier post, we had to come home from our round-the-world (RTW) trip early. 25 days early, to be exact, meaning our trip ended up being only 47 days long instead of 72. I had some recurring health issues starting in
This meant canceling quite a few planned legs of the trip, including visits to Adelaide, Australia; Christchurch, New Zealand; Dubai; Madrid, Seville and Barcelona, Spain; and Paris and Disneyland Paris. When I figured out we were going to have to reroute, cancel and rebook dozens of reservations, it was absolutely overwhelming. Here's where it would have been so much easier if I'd used a travel agent to book everything - I could have made one call and let the agent do it.
Our recent experience was an interesting lesson in what happens when your well-thought-out travel plans go awry in a big way. Prior to our recent RTW trip, Mike and I have had some pretty amazing luck during our travels, considering we've traveled internationally about ten times in the past five years, usually for at least two weeks at a time. Until this trip we'd experienced absolutely no major glitches.
Before our RTW trip, we'd never had a big screw-up with a hotel or airline. Oh, I had made a few minor mistakes in the past (like booking a hotel stay on the wrong dates) but luckily those errors were all easily corrected and didn't cost us a thing. Well, that luck ran out on the RTW trip. If you've been reading this blog, you know I managed to make a mistake that caused us to miss our very first flight of the trip. That cost us quite a bit, because we had to buy a walk-up airfare at the airport. And unfortunately, stupidity is not covered by travel insurance.
Speaking of travel insurance, here's how our situation played out. Last fall, I considered buying full travel insurance coverage, meaning trip cancellation/interruption insurance and medical coverage. I quickly discovered that it was difficult to get a policy to cover a 72-day trip. The few policies I found (through insuremytrip.com) were also wildly expensive. So I sat down and thought about what I really needed.
First I thought about what would happen if we suddenly had to cancel our trip or cut it short, which is what trip cancellation/interruption insurance covers. Most of our hotel reservations would be refundable up until just a few days prior to check-in, because I had deliberately booked rates that allowed changes and cancellations. In fact, only the two stays we had booked for vineyard cottages in the
Also, unlike the typical discounted round-trip airfare, which is quite inflexible, RTW air tickets are designed for relative flexibility. (That's why they are very popular with college kids backpacking around the world -- in the much cheaper Coach version, of course.) I realized that if we needed to change our flights, we'd only have to pay a relatively small change penalty, there would be no last-minute fare penalty, and getting seats should be no problem. Thus, trip cancellation/interruption insurance didn't seem really critical.
That left me with the issue of medical coverage. We are members of MedjetAssist, which is a program that provides medical evacuation by private jet from anywhere in the world if you require hospitalization. That is much better than standard travel medical insurance, which will only pay for evacuation if the insurance company deems it necessary. With Medjet, if you're in the hospital and you want to go home, they will transport you, as long as you're stable enough to fly. Medjet is not, strictly speaking, insurance - it's a private program for which you pay an annual fee of a few hundred dollars.
So we didn't need medical evacuation insurance. That left travel medical insurance - in other words, coverage for medical care if one of us should have an illness or accident during the trip. I double-checked our regular medical insurance and determined that it would only cover limited emergency care outside the
As it turned out, I wasn't hospitalized and I could just barely manage the long-haul flights necessary to get home. (Here's where being in First Class was a complete godsend, because I could lie down during the flights.) Changing our flights was fairly painless, though because it was a RTW ticket, we had to come home from
While I'm sad about missing the other planned stops on our trip, at least I'm not upset about the cost of our plane tickets. The very first leg of our trip, if purchased separately, would have cost more than the entire price of our RTW tickets, so we were already ahead of the game at the beginning. Yes, it would have been nice to get even more value from the tickets, but that's life. We had to pay a reissue fee of about $300 to change our ticket, but that wasn't too bad, all things considered.
Our travel medical policy should pay for the over $1400 in medical expenses I incurred during our trip, less the $250 deductible. So assuming that happens, it was worth buying.
We lost half the cost of one of the vineyard cottages and the full cost of the other - a total of about $1000. We were able to cancel all of our other hotel reservations in time to avoid penalties. We also lost some prepaid European train fares amounting to about $700. In hindsight, I made two mistakes with the train tickets. First, on such a long trip I should not have bought nonrefundable tickets. (They were nearly half the price of the flexible tickets, and I succumbed to temptation.) Second, it really wasn't necessary to buy those tickets so far in advance. Since we were traveling in the off-season, I could have waited to buy the tickets in
If I had purchased trip interruption insurance, it's possible that, with a doctor's note, I could have been reimbursed the approximately $2000 we were out for air ticket change fees, lost accommodation deposits and nonrefundable train tickets, but after paying the high cost of the insurance (which as I recall was about $900 for such a long trip) and the deductible (which I think would have been about $250), I wouldn't have been all that much ahead.
In any case, I'm glad to be home and glad to be feeling much better!
There is yet another reason to yearn for the privilege of flying Virgin America (besides seat back video systems). Now, first class passengers have access to the Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse at
This is quite a step up from the current situation where we access American Airlines lounges when we have a first class ticket and show our Platinum Amex card. There's actually one or two airports where even this free access isn't worth it in our opinion. American Airlines lounges are pretty marginal in a lot of places. And sometimes they're too far from our gate so we just don't bother going to them.
Oh, well. Still waiting on Virgin to get their act together and drop some flights into Denver International. If they ever do, I very probably will be a devoted and slavish adherent to their corporate cult. I for one, welcome the opportunity to worship our frequent flyer overlord, Sir Richard Branson.
I had to rewrite this article after I lost the original in an unfortunate demonstration of both my inability to remember to back up files and Vista's inability to function adequately as a desktop operating system. I've had to reconstruct the article from memory. And my memory is faulty and failing. So here goes.
We flew from Bangkok to Tokyo, Japan on Japan Air Lines (JAL). Our first mistake was opting for a night flight. Our second mistake was opting for a night flight even though the flight itself was only five hours long. We thought we'd settle into quiet slumber in the first class seats on JAL and arrive in Tokyo refreshed and ready to face a new day. However, we didn't sleep, for reasons we can't quite fathom, and arrived in Tokyo not ready to face the day, but instead yearning desperately for a nice soft bed. But that was not to be. It's Japan - they have rules. First rule, do not check into your hotel till 3:00pm, do not collect room key and go to room and fall into bed till 3:00pm. Do not pass Go. You can play Go though.
So we exchanged some cash, hit an ATM, and Mary picked up the phone rental she had ordered from a booth at Tokyo Narita airport. (Mary's Blackberry wouldn't work at all in Japan, even with roaming so we rented a phone that we could switch her SIMM chip into and thus get calls in Japan. Technology! As it turned out, practically all we did get while we were in Japan was lots and lots of text messages that were all gibberish. We never did figure what that was all about.)
Our chores completed, we then caught the Limo Bus to the Ambassador Hotel at Tokyo Disney Resort. Strangely enough, since our last visit the seats have been enlarged. This is the only logical explanation as we have most definitely not gotten smaller, but we fit into the seats with only a bare minimum of Vaseline applied. Mary got to nap on the way out to the hotel but I, paranoid as usual, was sure that if I fell asleep we'd end up somewhere in the far north of Japan or possibly sold to North Korean cigarette smugglers or something. So I stayed awake for the hour long trip to the parks. By the way, for those new to Tokyo, the Limo Bus is a service that uses tour buses to take passengers to various hotels in the Tokyo metropolitan area. It's very convenient, especially when you have a fair amount of luggage. It's much easier than using the trains and quite a bit cheaper than a taxi.
We finally arrived at Tokyo Disney, where we were dropped off right at our hotel. We put our bags into storage and while Mary got the passes to the parks, I got the monorail passes. And it turns out we never used the monorail because it doesn't actually stop at our hotel - or any other for that matter. It just goes in a big circle around both of the parks, with a couple of random other stops that aren't actually AT any of the hotels. You have to take a shuttle bus to the monorail stops. We'd have to walk further to the nearest station to catch the monorail then we would have to just catch a shuttle to the park and walk to the entrance. So we did that.
I'll have an article on Tokyo Disney to post on MouseSavers.com soon, but in the meantime you can check out our observations from several years ago which are largely still relevant, as not much has changed in the intervening period. Which is going to make my follow up article nice and short and simple. Good for me!
So we wandered around Tokyo Disney all day, though towards the end our pace was not unlike that of marathon runners that gave the sport up several decades and a couple of thousand packs of cigarettes ago and then decided to run the Boston marathon because there weren't any good movies playing that weekend. The preceding passage can be construed as a fairly accurate depiction of our mental processes at that point - mostly free association with random whining. I think we both fell asleep during the five minute shuttle ride from the park to the hotel but we awoke just long enough to get checked in and collapse into our room. We slept, or more accurately entered a state of general unconsciousness, for five or six hours, awaking just long enough to pick at some food and then go back to bed. Some more sleep. When we awoke the next morning around 10 o'clock we were ready to face a new day. Right after a nap. Face it, we're not young anymore. Thirty-six hours without sleep tears us up. Completely.
Anyway, after a couple of days sampling the extreme funness that is Tokyo Disney, we departed to check out parts of Japan that don't have Disney characters and merchandising opportunities. Finding this impossible, we decided to just go and visit Kyoto because we heard a rumor that they had temples and castles and stuff.
Mary got us tickets on the Shinkansen, which is the Japanese bullet train. It was massively cool. The ride is so smooth it's hard to believe that you're speeding along at 300km/hour (185 mph). Mary's research established that since the trip took three hours or so from Tokyo to Kyoto, many people pick up a bento box to eat on the train. Think picnic lunch, sans potato chips but cunningly packaged in wood boxes with many small compartments containing many squiggly bits that defy identification and some outright odd things that Americans might consider going beyond the pale, at least for lunch stuff. But then what do I know, some people in the States eat head cheese or much worse, peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches. So if the Japanese want to eat cold chewy octopus tentacles for lunch - I say go for it. And they weren't bad. I wouldn't want to choke down the tentacles on a hangover, but otherwise it was no stranger than the aforementioned fluffer nutter sandwich.
Mary got a vegetarian bento and I went with the extra large bento box o' bounty. I'd say that fully 30% of my lunch was a mystery (or as Mary put it, a culinary adventure) while Mary felt that hers only had a 20% mystery ratio. We pretty much just poked at the cold gelatinous items to see if they wiggled like Jello and then left them alone. It was an interesting lunch and I liked most of what I ate. I did end up disposing of a few items in the Kyoto train station but then I usually end up tossing something from Western box lunches, too, so it's pretty much a wash. Even with octopus tentacles.
After debarking at the Kyoto train station we took a taxi to our hotel, the Hyatt Regency Kyoto. For informational purposes we can confirm that taxis outside Tokyo also have lace doilies on the seat backs. Our hotel was surprisingly nice. As we drove up, the façade looked pretty much like every Midwestern Ramada Inn I've ever seen, but the interior was beautiful. Very spare and clean and Japanese. We relaxed and had dinner in the hotel, which we found was quite well endowed with French tourists. As an aside, we encountered a lot of French tourists all through our travels through Asia. I don't know why; from prior experience I always assumed that most of them went primarily to former or current French possessions like Martinique or Tahiti. Perhaps I just haven't been that observant. Or possibly the recent strength of the Euro has resulted in more French citizens wandering the globe.
We had a full day to wander around Kyoto and we got a smidgen of a taste of the city by visiting one of the more prominent temples, as well as the cultural history museum and generally just wandering around. For a while. A pretty short while. It was cold. Not sub-zero Colorado cold, which is dry and pleasant (or as pleasant as something that is described as sub-zero can be). No,
Anyway, we did the wandering and sightseeing thing and enjoyed it a lot. We wish we had more time, since there are a lot of other sights to see. Maybe someday when it's a little warmer.
Our trip back to Tokyo on the Shinkansen was as smooth and trouble free as the trip out to Kyoto. This time, though, we decided to skip the bento boxes and the squiggly bits. We had a big breakfast in the hotel instead. In lieu of lunch we tried some Japanese snack foods to see if they had improved since our last foray several years ago. I can safely say that Japanese snacks have not gotten any better in the interim. As a matter of fact, they may have gone downhill, hard as this may be to believe. Mary got me one thing that might be the vilest thing I have ever tried, some sort of marinated chicken in a pouch that was uncommonly disgusting. So disgusting that I have a hard time envisioning anyone, no matter how bad a case of the munchies they might have, ever managing to choke this stuff down. Did I mention it was horrible?
We had decided to stay again at the Park Hyatt Tokyo for our last three nights. We had stayed at the Hyatt during our first visit to Japan several years ago. For fans of the movie Lost in Translation, this is the hotel depicted in the film. Although it's a beautiful hotel, it does suffer from being a little out of the way, located in a complex of office high rises. On the other hand, since the rooms start at the 41st floor and go up from there, the views are pretty awesome, especially at night.
After arrival we took it easy, as Mary was feeling a little under the weather, and had a quiet dinner down in the basement of the building, where there are a plethora of restaurants serving pretty much everything one could desire as far as Japanese cooking is concerned. I was intrigued by the Snacks And A Shot restaurant, but Mary nixed my plans to check it out. Sometimes she can be a bit of a stick in the mud. We settled on some Indian food in a place where we'd eaten before, which was pretty good and decently priced. And it was a break from Japanese food, which we like a lot, but every once in a while you just want something where you can identify everything you're eating. Just as a change of pace.
Of course the following night we decided to try a katsu restaurant, and this turned out to have several farcical elements. Ever since our first visit to Japan I had vowed to try a katsu restaurant, though until recently I was unaware what the Japanese appellation was, instead referring to them as the pork cutlets restaurants. Every where we went in Japan - there they were, with their enticing plastic displays offering several variations on pork cutlets that were deep fried and then sliced. Mary, although she's generally opposed to fried foods, finally agreed to try one. The particular restaurant we picked represented a bit of a problem, as there no waiters who spoke English. We figured this wasn't a huge hurdle as they had nicely laminated menus with pictures of the various dishes. However, since everything in the pictures was fried, it was a little difficult to tell what the items were. As Mary discovered, a fried chicken strip (which is what she thought she was ordering) looks very similar in a photo to a fried oyster (which is what she got).
The meals came in "sets" with several courses like a salad and stuff. One of the courses, or so I thought, was a nearly raw (possibly slightly poached) egg in a small cup with seaweed shreds and a couple of other ingredients that I wasn't quite sure of. I promptly stirred the egg together with the other ingredients and started trying to eat it, though it was a challenge with chopsticks as it had the consistency of a thick soup. When our cutlets arrived, the waiter indicated that the bowl with the egg and other items was actually used for dipping the cutlet slices in, along with a scoop or two of what could only have been Worcestershire sauce that was in a large crock on the table. I imagine the staff had a pretty good laugh over the Westerner eating the Japanese equivalent of a bowl of ketchup. Ah, well. The pork cutlets, on the other hand, were juicy and tasty and pretty much everything one could hope for in a pork cutlet. It's not a high bar.
On our last day in Japan, Mary was feeling much better, so we decided we'd go and spend the entire day jetting around the city and hitting a couple of places we'd never been to before, as well as some favorites like Harajuku and the Ginza. Alas, it was not to be. Tokyo was hit with a very unusual snow storm that lasted all day. It was pretty impressive and snarled up all the traffic in the city, though fortunately it was a Sunday. From our hotel there was a four block walk over to the entrance of a pedestrian subway that would allow us to walk under cover for the rest of the trip to Shinjuku station, the closest subway station to our hotel. Just those four blocks or so in the open got us fairly wet, as the snow was turning to a lot of slush. It soon became obvious that a lot of places weren't open, it being a Sunday and all, and those that were didn't have things like snow shovels or sand or salt, at least from what we saw.
So we decided to spend the rest of the day in the comfort of the subterranean tunnels that led through the Shinjuku area and connected to all the major department stores. As you can tell from our previous visit, we love Japanese department stores. They are wonderful emporiums full of pretty much every thing one could desire and lots of stuff you never knew you needed. Or wanted, either. Mary did a little shopping for baby things for a friend who is preggers and apparently doesn't have enough Hello Kitty stuff. Or giant fighting robot models (my contribution). We also love to buy things in Japan because they wrap them so nicely.
On our last morning we were scheduled to depart from the hotel pretty early in the morning. The plan was to take the Limo Bus back to the airport. As it turned out, the hotel concierge gave us a call around dawn to warn us that due to the snow, which continued late into the night before, the highways were pretty much shut down. No Limo Bus. This left us with really only one option - we had to take a train out to Narita airport. We had never done this, for the simple reason that most Japanese train and subway stations (and for the most part these are the same thing) do not have many escalators or elevators, but do have many stairs. Dragging our luggage (one large bag, one carry-on and a day bag each) up and down interminable flights of stairs is not my idea of fun. The drinking of beers and the eating of indigenous snack foods while watching and attempting to understand local television programming is my idea of fun.
In any case, staying at a five star hotel really paid off in this situation. The concierge, through whom we had originally arranged the Limo Bus pick-up, contacted us when the service was cancelled and recommended the Narita Express train, which fortunately for us departed from nearby Shinjuku station, so we wouldn't have to make a transfer. And they arranged a taxi to take us to the station (the city streets were marginally clear) and then one of the hotel staff helped us get tickets and assisted us with the bags, taking us all the way onto the platform and staying with us until the train actually departed.
As it turned out, we made the train with literally no more than a couple of minutes to spare. Without the Hyatt staff's help, we would definitely have missed the train and we'd have had to wait an hour till the next. Based on the delays we experienced on our train, the later one probably wouldn't have gotten us to the airport on time to make our flight.
If you have minimal luggage I would recommend the Narita Express. However, unlike its namesakes in London, the Heathrow Express and Gatwick Express, the trains don't run nearly as often. Narita Express runs around once an hour, so it's not great unless your timing is superb or unless you like hanging out in train platforms. We know we do. Still it is convenient and cheap, even cheaper than the Limo Bus, but then again it doesn't drop you right off at your hotel either.
Our flight to Singapore was on Cathay Airlines and we were happy to be back. Unfortunately the plane in use on this leg was older equipment without the newer suites. In fact the older Cathay equipment was pretty much equivalent to the JAL seats. The food was good, as was the service, and we did actually get a bit more sleep than on the leg to Japan, as we had been awakened early and the whole rushing to the train station and stress inherent in all the dashing about made us pretty fatigued by the time we settled in to our seats. The leg to Singapore was longer, too, so there was a bit more time for us to relax and get a bit of a snooze.
So it's time for a little check on how technology is impacting our trip, for good or ill, at the halfway point. So far, since the meltdown early in the trip, we've had relatively few problems. Well, relatively few problems with products that are not produced by Microsoft.
The HP Pavilion laptop I got to replace the Dell did have a burp a couple of days ago but the issue was Vista again and not the laptop itself. During download of some Microsoft updates, the computer decided to go into a loop that I couldn't get out of, even with multiple reboots. We finally had to do a system restore. A couple of weeks of articles were lost but that's partially my fault for not backing up: something I've gotten out of the habit of doing but Vista is encouraging me to relearn. If I buy any computers over the next couple of years I'm going to be sure and get them installed with XP as Vista is frankly a steaming pile of offal. Or maybe I'll even buy a Mac.
In any case, I like the laptop when I'm not having problems with the operating system and am pleased with it. Mary is also pleased with her old Blackberry replacing the newer phone. It works consistently and what more can you ask for?
One item that I got kind of on the spur of the moment was a Cruzer thumb drive from Scandisk. This was a replacement for a thumb drive that took a little submersible trip through the washing machine, from which it emerged a little the worse for wear. The drive has been a real lifesaver for transferring files from the Dell to the HP laptop and transferring photo files to Mary's notebook.
And to top if off, the thumb drive came with a copy of Skype preinstalled, which we've put to quite a bit of use. We've spent a total of about 6 hours on the phone to people back in the States and this has cost us a grand total of $8 US. Skype isn't a replacement for a cell phone, since you can't receive incoming calls easily, but in times and places where we're settled in and have access to the Internet, we can use the program and our laptops to call pretty much anyone for around 2 cents a minute, versus an average of $2 per minute for international cell phone calls. Mary estimates that this has saved us over $700 in cell phone bills.
Our biggest happy has been with our Sony Reader digital books. These have worked out better than we hoped. Basically, the Reader is a display device that can store around 160 or so books in a digital format on the Reader itself and then as many more as one would care for on a computer. The software operates much like iTunes, in that you access the Sony site or others and download digital books onto the computer and then sync with the Reader. Overall the Reader has been pretty easy to use; there are two different sets of buttons for turning the pages, depending on how you like to hold the Reader. There's also a menu button, buttons 0-9 for entering page numbers and moving through chapters, and a button to zoom the text size up or down. The display is very similar to that of an actual book; since there is no backlighting, one needs good light to read. The Reader is around the size of a trade paperback, though considerably thinner.
The really nice thing is that on a long trip like the one on which we are currently involved, we'd usually read something like 20-30 books each. Yes, we read a lot. We'd have needed another suitcase just to carry the books. And frankly, my back would never manage the abuse (I am getting on in years, as I like to tell Mary now and then, or three to four times a day). Now, it all fits in the palm of our hands. We can recharge the Readers in an amazingly short time by just connecting them up to a laptop using a USB cable. On a full charge it seems like the Reader will go maybe 10-12 hours of solid use.
Not long after we got the Reader, the Kindle from Amazon came out. We took a bit of a look at it but decided against it. The one big advantage the Kindle has over the Reader is a keyboard, which can be used to take notes or for a rudimentary web surfing capability. But when it comes right down to it I can't remember the last time I took notes in the margin of a book - not since college at least. The web surfing is something I have my laptop for and it shows color and graphics, so the Kindle isn't really something I'm going to need for that. And the ability to download books on the fly using cell phone networks was a non-starter with us since we were going mostly places where American cell phone networks don't exist - like the rest of the world in fact. All in all, the Kindle seems like a pretty decent product but we like the fact that the Reader really only does one thing. I'd even be happy if they took out the ability to play music, since I don't intend on using that, though Mary says she might use hers for audio books.
So as you can see, we like our Readers. I think Mary sleeps with hers under the pillow. She's certainly given hers a more endearing nickname than she gave me. Mary has filled hers up with the collected works of Jane Austen and such while I've gone with the collected space operas of various authors of the 30's and 40's. To each their own.
On one last issue - cost. I have to say that the Reader is not going to save anyone a bunch of cash. First of all, the Reader costs around $300 a pop. The digital format of the books costs less than the paper version, but not a whole lot less. If you buy a steady diet of mysteries, say, then it is possible to save money over the long run, but it will take two to three hundred books. On the other hand, the Reader can be used with files in several formats - not just the proprietary one from Sony - and so one can download books from sites like Project Gutenberg for free.
One advantage the Kindle does have out of the blocks is that Amazon offers around 80,000 or so books for download, while Sony is much lower at 25,000. It would be nice if Amazon started stocking digital books in a variety of formats, but I'm not sure what their business model is - do they intend on making money on the Kindle itself or primarily on the books they sell?
Ahh, for the three or four people, who are all probably my relatives, that are reading this blog, you may have noticed that it hasn't been updated lately. This is because there have been some developments that entailed a slightly faster route home from our current trip then we planned. I still have a large number of articles to post and will so over the next couple of weeks. Updates start again........now!
