ITASoftware.com, which provides the technological backbone for many airfare shopping sites, allows users to scan an entire month’s fares for the least expensive rate. (Log in as a “guest” and click on “month-long search.” ) In January, the 28th and 30th were the cheapest dates to fly nonstop to London from New York ($536) for a week’s vacation, according to a recent search. The next best was Saturday, Jan. 23, at $640. To book the ticket, users must go to another site. Kayak.com has a flexible-dates option (registration is required) and a calendar that shows the best fares found by other Kayak users in the last 48 hours. Bing Travel, the Microsoft search engine, offers a similar option, found under “plan trips,” about halfway down the page.
iLingual from Lean Mean Fighting Machine is a new translation app for iPhone. Pick your phrase, hold it up to your mouth, and let ‘er rip. Check out this brief – and hilarious – video:
The dogs are barking and the birds are singing. First light hasn’t yet hit Porto, Portugal today, but I’m awake, a victim of jet lag and an inability to sleep in spite of being dead tired.
Ah well … gives me a chance to catch up on my blogging!
I flew into Lisbon, Portugal yesterday, planning to take the train up the coast to Porto, where I’m attending an Intel eLearning conference. Unfortunately, the flight was delayed, causing me to miss the last train … so I had to rent a car, with interesting challenges:
At about 3AM local time I was finally 300 km farther north and in my Porto hotel room – ready to sleep about 4 hours and then get down to the conference, which is being held in the Alfandega, a converted riverside warehouse. Getting there in my rented car was a little enjoyable, too:
In any case, I’m here, the conference is great, and Porto is an amazing city. Here are just a few photos of things that caught my eye – hopefully there will be many more over the next few days:
I’m sitting in my hotel room on the 30th floor of the Ritz-Carlton in Osaka at 5:35 AM, Sunday morning, reflecting on my Japan experience so far.
First impressions are only first, and I have 5 days in Tokyo to add to them, but they tend to last. My first impression is that Japan is by far the most foreign place I have ever visited – foreign in the sense of profoundly different, unknown, out of my experience, and even potentially unknowable.
I’m no Marco Polo, but I’ve been to Romania, many countries in Western Europe, Northern Africa (Egypt), mainland China, Taiwan, and all over the US and Canada. So I’m not unfamiliar with being in places where few if any speak my native language. And it’s not unusual for me to be an ethnic minority when I travel. But there’s something about the incredibly different language, the different characters/letters, and the different social customs that just make Japan qualitatively different.
More than that, there’s something about the monoculture of Japan – those are the words of a native Japanese from a talk at the ACE 2009 conference yesterday – that make Japan the most foreign place I have traveled. I’m used to being the only white guy in a room or a train station. But it’s outside of my experience to hardly see a black person, an Indian, or even different Asian ethnicities.
Add it all up, and you have countless experiences that your brain just can’t interpret … can’t file away in the right slot … can’t process and understand.
For example, I walked into a shop a couple of days ago, my first day in Osaka, and I could not determine what the store sold. Imagine that – being in a store and not being able to understand what was actually for sale! There were obviously products available for purchase, with price tags, and product information, and people paying, and a cashier – all the familiar archetypes of “store” from my Western, Canadian experience. But the products appeared to be small pieces of paper, or cards – about business card sized. They weren’t phone cards, weren’t sports trading cards … and I could not determine what precisely, they might be. Nor could I and the salesperson communicate.
The experience – just one of many similar – stretches your brain’s expectation engine and challenges your ability to understand, predict, and therefore feel a (false) sense of control that tends to put you at ease. So in Japan I am always wandering and wondering: what is this? is it what it seems? is that person speaking heatedly to another angry, or just speaking normally for Japanese? what is this building for? is “arigato” (Harry without the H, French for cake – gateau – with a long O at the end) OK for thanks, or is it too familiar?
Being a complete naif and newbie in Japan means that I can somewhat safely wander around like a medieval village idiot: investigating the obvious, pursuing the mundane, and capturing a gestalt of “japan-ness,” or, to be more honest, “my Japan,” the Japan that I hazily grasp.
The beautiful and glorious thing about travel like this, of course, is the ability to step out of MY mundane, and MY obvious, and pass through the wormhole to an alien culture and learn and re-learn the world anew. Here I am alien – even gaijin – and therefore I have the freedom of the outsider to observe and see, and the curse of the outsider to always be on the fringe. It is strange and exhilarating and enjoyable and challenging. And it’s also exhausting.
I’m looking for hotels in Tokyo for an upcoming speaking trip to Japan, and ran across the Sumisho.
It looks like it could be OK, but it’s hard to tell given the Japanese/English fusion (Engrish) it’s written in.
The Nihombashi which stops the vestiges of Edo. As a hotel of peacefulness, Sumisho is nochalant, and it is warm in it, and it has treated the visitor to this ground that is full of rich humaneness.
Please take in everywhere the merit of the sum to which the heart is softened, and though you are hotel form, use as the base of the Tokyo walk by Sumisho which valued the atmosphere of a tasteful hotel, and a place which relieves the tiredness of business.
Well, you can’t beat that!
I’m fairly used to Chinglish after trips to Taiwan and mainland China … but Engrish is a little new to me. I think I like it!
Some pictures from my recent trip to Portland, OR …
We were meeting a group of people at Intel, which has a fairly major presence in Portland. It was my third visit to an Intel office – head office in Santa Clara (Silicon Valley), Intel Shanghai offices, and now one of their Portland offices. I had a 4-hour presentation (!!!) which went extremely well, thankfully.
And, as you can see above, I was fortunate enough to have an afternoon in Portland to do a brief photowalk. The side-benefit? It was the first Thursday in the month … and every first Thursday Portland art galleries stay open late. So it was very enjoyable to stroll downtown and stop by at least 15 different galleries.
My favorite painting of the night was this one by Claudio Tschopp:
Should I try to visit Mount Fuji? How far is it from Tokyo … and how much time would it take to climb? Should I spent all my time in Tokyo – in a city of 12 million or more there’s got to be plenty to do. Questions, questions, questions!
I’ll be researching this in the next week or so – any suggestions would be much appreciated!
I recently traveled to Shanghai, China for meetings with Intel. What an amazing place: 30 million people in one city … always growing, always changing, always building.
Lashing rain from the regretful remnants of Typhoon Morakot has now left the region, cleaning the air and drenching the streets. A thin mist is still falling, invigorating evening walkers. And a low fog is blanketing the city, obscuring the tops of skyscrapers and deepening the mystery of this city of almost 20 million.
As if Shanghai needed help in mystifying visitors. Some cities easily foster the illusion that they are known … San Francisco with the TransAmerica and Coit towers serving as beacons and reference points, Chicago defined by the lake and the blank black Mies van der Rohe towers, other cities with definable and visible landmarks.
But Shanghai, like London and other megacities, seems too big and too complex to grasp for the casual visitor. Shanghai, with a million towers under construction … Shanghai, with elevated freeways and expressways and bridgeways like spaghetti in a Salvador Dali painting with even less connection to reality than most.
I’m now back in the mundane if luxurious world of the Shanghai HIlton, just returned from my nightime stroll through Shanghai – or, the tiny fraction of Shanghai within walking distance. Tomorrow I have meetings, and probably the day after, but then I’ll have at least some time to explore this single city that has almost two thirds the population of my entire country, Canada.
But I’m glad I stole a few precious moments from tonight’s pillow time to allow the experience of being in China and being in Shanghai be more than an airport and a hotel.
I’m in Taipei with a colleague for meetings with Asus.
Fortunately, through a combination of good timing and good luck we’ve been able to see and do a few things while here, including visiting the Taipei 101 (currently the tallest building in the world) and parts of the city.
Here are a couple of the highlights:
Note, if you check the photoset on Flickr, you’ll get the full titles and descriptions …
I recently visited Intel’s Santa Clara headquarters for meetings with their emerging markets platform group. It’s the first corporate HQ I’ve seen with an integrated museum and gift shop.
Here’s a small selection of photos of their facility:
I recently traveled to Cairo to speak at the Intel Learning Alliance summit.
The conference was great, and I met many, many wonderful people. So was the city, and I made sure to take an extra day or so to ensure I could see at least a few of the sights.
Early this week I had the chance to spend a day in Amsterdam on my way to Cairo for the Intel Learning Alliance Summit.
Amsterdam is (of course) very beautiful, and it’s an amazing walking city. I took the train from Schipol airport to Amsterdam Centraal station, and then booked onto a canal tour. After that I walked around the city for 3-4 hours.
As per usual, I serendipitously happened across the Anne Frank museum and immensely appreciated the opportunity to slowly and contemplatively go through the house where most of the Franks lived their last few years.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
I'm a software exec who cares about UX and UI, scours web & social media, lives in Canada, plays hockey, uses a Mac (mostly). Oh, and I blog and speak at conferences.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
