Travel and Technology
I am just back from a speaking trip covering eight countries in just over two weeks. It started, as my speaking trips usually do, with an invitation — this time to Tiblisi, Georgia, for Libertycon, the European Students for Liberty annual convention. Having accepted the invitation I announce online that I am available to give a talk to any group willing to pay my expenses, the major one, flying to Europe and back, being already covered.
I used to do it on my blog. Now that my blog has been effectively replaced by my Substack I do it there and on Facebook. I have been doing it for a long time, speaking trips at least since 1999, traveling around Europe much longer. What has changed?
The most obvious change is in me. I am more than fifty years older than when I traveled around Europe by myself as a graduate student. Thanks to an easy life and good luck in the genetic lottery I am more functional than most men my age, but spending the night on the stone floor of the Salzburg rail station talking to fellow students from England no longer looks like an attractive option. Even since 1999 I have gotten less able to put up with jet lag and insufficient sleep; my back complains now about carrying a backpack much lighter than the one I once carried without problems.
There have been other changes that make traveling easier. In the old days, navigating to a hotel or a museum required a map and enough attention to street names, written in a foreign language and displayed in an unfamiliar way, to figure out where I was. Now I have a smart phone and GPS. Finding a hotel involved searching a travel guidebook for something suitable, going there, hoping it had a room free. Now I have the web and email.
Traveling across Europe used to mean converting dollars or traveler’s checks — does anyone still use traveler’s checks? — into multiple currencies, exchanging one currency for another as I went. The shift to the Euro eliminated some of that, but not all; my current trip involved eight different currencies,1 not counting dollars. But that didn’t matter because I did not need any of them; every country I was in let me pay for things with a debit card on my dollar account. Calling America to speak with my parents used to require access to a public phone, was expensive enough that I didn’t do it often. Now I have a phone in my pocket, can chat with my wife back home in California as often as I want, subject only to the constraint of different time zones.
Transportation is also faster and easier, in part because I am richer, in part because Europe now has Uber and Bolt. Communicating is easier too. Even fifty years ago English was the international language of travel but it has now become, in much of Europe, the second language of most young adults. Dealing with languages will be easier still once I get in the habit of using my cell phone’s latest trick, the ability to photograph text and translate it.
In addition to giving talks, another thing I do in my European trips is go to museums, mostly to photograph medieval jewelry. The camera built into my cell phone is considerably better — higher resolution, longer telephoto, better able to deal with low light — than the dedicated cameras I used to use. Instead of waiting until I get back to America to have the film developed I can look at the picture on my phone as soon as I have taken it to see if I need to take it again, download it to my laptop in my hotel room. After I take a picture I can add a note on the size of the piece or the width of the case it is in. The size of the case plus a picture showing case and contents lets me deduce the size of the piece, useful information if I want to make it.
Hotels
Warning: All information is based on a limited and non-random sample of both American and European hotels.
Having just returned from my trip, it occurred to me that information on differences between American and European hotels might be interesting, even useful, for Americans planning to travel in Europe or Europeans planning to travel in America. Several struck me.
Almost all American hotels, including pretty low end motels, have a small refrigerator and a microwave in the room. A standard hotel room in Europe, judging by my experience, might have a microwave, is unlikely to have a refrigerator.
On the other hand, two of the places I stayed were not what I think of as standard hotels, were something between a hotel and an apartment, probably intended for a longer stay. Neither of them had an unlocked door or someone to let me in, a lobby or an attendant. Instead there was a keypad outside the front door; to get in you entered a four digit code, hopefully obtained in advance when booking the room. It contained not only a microwave but a kitchen sink, a stove, a refrigerator — in one case it may have been intended as a freezer, judging by what happened to the bottle of diet coke I left in it, although that might just have meant it was set too cold. Cabinets held cooking and serving equipment.
Another difference is room size; hotel rooms are a good deal bigger in the U.S. The smallest I have encountered were in London; more than half the area of the room I occupied with my wife and daughter a year ago was beds. My view of London hotels may be biased by the fact that on both this trip and that one I stayed in one of the small hotels near Paddington station, convenient for getting to and from Heathrow airport and, by London standards, inexpensive.
A difference that favors the European hotels is breakfast. A good mid-range American hotel such as a Hampton Inn provides a pretty good breakfast, typically a waffle machine, scrambled eggs, dry cereal, toast, and the like, but it pales next to several of the breakfasts I got abroad, judged by variety and quality. If you are staying in a decent European hotel with breakfast buffet included you might give serious thought to making that your big meal of the day. A standard American motel at the level below Hampton Inn provides watery orange juice, possibly a pastry sealed in cellophane, and with luck dry cereal and milk.
One feature of foreign hotels that an American may find puzzling is the need to insert your room card in a holder just inside the front door of your room in order to activate the room lights. The card sometimes controls electric outlets as well as room lights, meaning that the laptop you think is recharging may not be if the card isn’t in. It probably won’t be in if you are out, since you need to have the card with you to get back into the room.
The solution, as I determined by experiment, is to put a different card of the same size in the holder — unlike the door lock it is not actually reading the card’s magnetic programming.
Danish and Swedish Krone, Icelandic Kruna, Czech Koruna, Georgian Lari, Polish Zloty, Euro (in Portugal) and British Pounds.
In the early 1960's studying to be a Civil Engineer, after we had specialized in 3rd year, we had to do a year of Physics which included Quantum Mechanics and also Geology (both structured for Engineers although we attended many classes with 1st Year Students of those disciplines).
We never quite got our heads around why we as future Civil Engineers had to do a subject that included Quantum Mechanics (which resulted in the Faculty of Engineering ordering the Faculty of Physics to re-mark our final exam papers as they refused to allow that Faculty to fail us). We had less problems with accepting Geology as at least there was a future connection but also a lot of attractive 1st Year Female Geology students.
I found that reading the textbook (particularly for Physics) before lectures just left me more confused. I might as well have been reading in German.
It was only after the Physics lecture that anything remotely made sense. Clearly not much, as 90% failed, including me. Even after re-marking, I still had to re-sit the exam over Summer, which to my amazement I passed.
Subjects in which you have little or no previous exposure that are very technical, are very difficult to 'get your head around' without some guidance. A very good lecturer can achieve that.
Misc comments
One thing I recall from travels in Italy is that you can usually request that the waitstaff bring you a coffee. If you do, it will be significantly better than the pot of coffee on the buffet counter. Same often applies in France
In most respects everything you describe about European hotels also applies to Japanese ones (and in my more limited experience Korean and Taiwanese ones). In Tokyo one of the big differentiators between budget hotels (e.g. APA hotels) and more luxury ones like Prince Hotels is room size. The former are tiny, the latter can be as spacious as American hotels. Japanese hotels tend to not have a breakfast buffet by default, you have to get a reservation that includes it (or pay for it when you eat it) but it is, like the European ones, normally a very good deal and well worth it though if you want the regular American / European food options you may be disappointed as to choice and availability. Japanese hotels often have a dedicated public bathing area (segregated male/female) which frequently includes a sauna and sometimes odd bubble massage sections. After a long day on your feet these are very very welcome.