Tripped

The Career Break

When the immigration officer at Heathrow started grilling us about our lack of home or income on our entry into the UK ten days ago, he reminded us of many of the people we've tried to explain our scheme to ever since we dreamed it up. Our attempts at coming up with a shorthand version of the story had led us to jokingly describe this is our long-delayed gap year, but as we learned several months ago there actually is a name for what we've been doing since January - the Career Break. Lonely Planet (where my friend Todd runs their North American operation) even has a book that gives you advice on how to do it. ( As they put it: "Stop daydreaming at your desk, ditch the nine to five, say ciao to the rat race - take life by the scruff of the neck and give it a shake!")

As I implied in the very first post on this blog, you could argue that every freelancer like me, who works from project to project, experiences a career break each time one of them ends. But that definitely wasn't the case with Eileen, who even as she has switched disciplines and changes coasts while advancing to a senior executive level in her career has only had two employers in her adult life, one for ten years and the other for twelve. So for her this break has been a significant one.

We still have a couple months left and a few more countries to visit - we'll be in Prague beginning on Saturday, with Budapest and Vienna to follow before we spend some time with Eileen's sister Beth and her husband Jim at their home in Switzerland -  but we can already say that it's maybe the second best decision we've ever made (the first one being to get married, of course!).

Now we just have to start figuring out what we want to do when it all ends. And where.

The Gatwick Grilling

Almost didn't make it into the U.K. tonight! The immigration officer at Gatwick Airport was extremely concerned that we were unemployed, homeless, and hadn't been in the U.S. for 7 months (has he been talking to our mothers?). We spent 15 minutes trying to explain ourselves. Our round-the-world itinerary from American Airlines didn't help, since with some of our flight changes it was seriously out-of-date, and we had never bothered to print out an updated copy. This is what we get for thinking we live in a digital world. He finally went to talk to a supervisor; few minutes later he returned and waved us through. Fun stuff.

The Camera Crisis

The generosity of our fellow guests on safari was only temporary, so after we left Ngala Tented Camp I knew I would need to do something about my camera, or lack thereof. As I mentioned in my post about the day the camera died, one of the owners at Arethusa Lodge had identified my problem. He had also made clear to me how limited the Canon support was in South Africa, and how costly new equipment would be if I tried to replace it there. Indeed, both he and Trevor both told me separately that they bought all their gear overseas, mostly from B&H Photo Warehouse in the U.S., which I had also used in the past.

Worse yet, Brendan at Arethusa noted, if I did find myself shopping for a replacement, the warranty would only be good within the borders of S.A., and nowhere else. The same would be true for any covered repairs I might need on my failed U.S.-bought camera, assuming it was still under warranty (it wasn't).

That left me with only a couple of options: a) find a way to get the camera repaired in Cape Town before we left the country; b) find a used camera quickly in Cape Town that I could live with; c) wait until we got to London to buy a new one there; or d) buy a new one in the States and figure out a way to get it to me in Europe so I could continue documenting the trip over our last three months as I had over the first six.

Option e) - live with the dinky Olympus point-and-shoot - was right out. Photos had become too important a part of the experience for me to consider going without.

An email to support@canon.co.za and a phone call to their recommended service center in Cape Town quickly confirmed that option a) wasn't going to happen, that it might take all of the remaining time we had in country just to diagnose the problem. That left replacement. Option b), going for used, was also dispensed with when I started to compare prices online for used equipment from South African vendors - it was as expensive as new in the States. Shopping around until I found someone with good deals might have taken all the remaining time we had, and eaten into delivery time if I was going to buy one and have it sent to me in Europe. And option c) would have left me with the same issue I had with buying new in S.A., the lack of warranty coverage when we returned to the U.S. 

So I went new, and U.S. bought. I decided to stick with the same level of equipment I had, since I already had lenses suited for it. I would just get the latest model of it from Canon - in this case, the Rebel T1i/500D. Amazon didn't have it in stock, B&H did, and at a comparable price for the body, so B&H got my business.

Then there was the sticky issue of shipping. B&H wouldn't mail it to a non-billing address overseas, so I couldn't just buy it and send it to myself care of whatever hotel or apartment we were going to be staying at. Instead I had to send it to my brother in Connecticut and then have him re-ship it to me in Copenhagen. Which all worked perfectly: no hassles in shipping, no hassles in customs, and the camera was waiting her for me when we checked into our hotel on Monday morning. And still cheaper than buying it in South Africa!

Those Global Distribution Gaps

It's the soap that's the odd one: we found Neutrogena, unscented formula, available in Chile, in Peru, in Ecuador. In Argentina, it's nowhere to be seen - even while the original formula bars and a range of other Neutrogena products fill the shelves in the Farmacity. Now that we're on our fourth country and our third extended stay, what we've learned about global distribution of consumer goods is that plenty of the major brands we're all familiar with back in the States have penetrated these markets. But as expats everywhere seeking the comforts of home have long documented, it's impossible to predict which ones make it across which border. I

Take that Neutrogena soap in Latin America: it appears to have an oddly antagonistic relationship with Neutrogena shampoo. The latter was impossible to find anywhere for ten weeks, from the moment our initial flight landed in Lima, through Peru and Ecuador and Chile, until we arrived here. Now it's in every Farmacity in Buenos Aires even while the unscented bars have disappeared. Multiple other American shampoo brands, however, have been ubiquitous across the continent, especially Head & Shoulders in its many different formulations.

Our old standby Tom's of Maine toothpaste has been a no-show on shelves throughout, so if they're getting a marketing boost or improved retail channel access via their acquisition by Colgate-Palmolive, it's not internationally. And there's been plenty of Colgate around everywhere we've gone - that and Aquafresh seem to be the most popular American toothpaste brands, in their full range of flavors and types.

Atra razor blades, still widely available as replacement cartridges to the installed base of handle owners in the States? Forget it - in Argentina, they've already been phased out. If you're a Gillette customer you're either a Sensor Excel, Mach 3, or Fusion user.

Peanut butter had been everywhere, until Argentina.

The pervasiveness of Coke and McDonald's are well documented and railed against, although no one in any of the countries we've visited appears to be railing - they're enormously popular. But Oreos have been just as pervasive.

Those are off the top of my head, I'm sure Eileen will now remind me of some more and I'll append them here.

Standard Deviation

You may think that the measure of a country's economic efficiency and prospects for future growth has to do with all those macroeconomic indicators that have been bandied about during the G20 summit the last couple of days: savings rate, current account balance, tax rate, etc. Not true! In Argentina, the measure of future prospects may come down to whether they can actually adopt an electrical standard. I mentioned the World Travel Kits we're carrying in my posts about our bag o'connectedness, but I failed to note that this country can't make up its mind which of those plugs we should be using. In Mendoza, the electrical outlets were almost entirely the same as those we saw in Santiago, and took plugs that looked like this:

But here in Buenos Aires, those plugs are useless, and the only ones we can use in this apartment look like this:

Imagine moving from one town to the other - you have to make sure you have enough adapters to cover every single one of your appliances and electronics. Worse yet, imagine being the distributor who has to sell computers or TVs or toaster ovens in this country: do you have to ship each one with an adapter? Do you have to separate your inventory by province as if you were separating it by country? I'm sure there's an answer out there on the web but I haven't come across it yet.

Rain!

First we've seen since leaving Ecuador six weeks ago.

The List of Connectedness

In comments, S. Marc asks where the list is of what's in our bag o' connectedness. So here goes (not all items included in photo below):

• Mighty Bright book lights (2)
• iPod USB cable
• iPod power adapter
• Airport Express
• Apple World Travel Adapter Kit (2 - 6 pieces each)
• pair of Apple earbuds
• flash memory stick
• Apple mini-DVI to DVI adapter for MacBook Air
• optical digital audio cable
• S/P-DIF adapter for connecting optical digital cable to the Mac
• 45w power adapter for MacBook Air
• 65w power adapter for MacBook Pro
• Audio-Technica noise-canceling headphones (2)
• airline seat adapter for headphones (2)
• mini to full-size adapter for headphones (2)
• headphone splitter
• Apple DVI to HDMI cable
• analog audio cable
• analog audio cable with L-R stereo splitter
• USB to min-USB cable for digital camera
• Canon camera battery charger
• spare Canon camera battery
• Samsonite world travel kit (6 pieces, including 1600 watt voltage converter)
• 80 GB iPod Classic
• 80 GB iPod 5th generation
• Apple DVI to Video Adapter with S-video and composite outputs
• spare Apple U.S. two-prong power adapter plugs, in addition to what's in World kits (3)
• power adapter for Eileen's dead Blackberry
• dead Blackberry
• 3G iPhone
• Apple USB to Ethernet adapter
• lightweight exercise headphones
• Canon Digital Rebel XTi camera
• MacBook Pro (2.2 GHz Intel Core Duo, 2 GB RAM, 250 GB hard disk)
• MacBook Air (1.6 GHz Intel Core Duo, 2 GB RAM, 80 GB hard disk)
• USB headphones w/attached microphone, for foreign language learning software
• Kensington DC-AC Ultra Portable Power Inverter 150, with airline seat & car cigarette lighter adapters

Only Connected

Way back at the beginning of this extravaganza, I described in brief our two-carry on bags apiece decision and the gobs of electronics we've managed to squeeze into those four small bags, alongside our limited wardrobes and our even more limited library of paperbacks. I've thought more than once since we got off the plane in Lima, a little more than two months ago, about how much of what we're carrying wouldn't have even been available to us ten years ago, or in some cases even five years ago. Take our iPods, for example: not even ten years old. If we were making this trip in 1999 we'd have been limited to a handful of CDs, not the nearly 500 I've got crammed into ours. And that's just one example.

When I first went to work at HotWired way back at the dawn of the Web in the summer of 1994, Eileen and I spent a Memorial Day weekend apartment hunting in San Francisco with the aid of an Apple Newton I had received as a going away gift from Wolff New Media and some third party guidebook software that was available for that big gray brick. It was crude, and the screen was grayscale, and the functionality fully reflected the John Sculley era at the company. And yet for all its drawbacks, when I was standing at an intersection high on Telegraph Hill, using my plastic pen to poke at it and try to suss out what was nearby, I could feel just how close we were to all those futurist predictions about the integration of technology into our everyday lives.

Flash forward to today in Buenos Aires: we went to dinner tonight looking for a restaurant in our neighborhood that turned out to be closed. Eileen had a few backup choices in her head, but none written down, and we passed by one or two of them that didn't look so promising, before we noticed a restaurant on the corner named Meridiano 58º. So I whipped out my iPhone and launched the Kindle for IPhone app so I could see if the Frommer's B.A. (the only B.A. travel guide currently available for Kindle) had any mention of it. Bingo! Of course, Frommer's turned out to be unreliable - the food was mediocre at best - but that's not the point! The point is I used Kindle on the iPhone to choose this mediocrity. And it was way easier than using that Newton back in '94!

This all happened after I spent the extended weekend watching college basketball on TV. Well, not exactly on TV, since Argentine cable doesn't care a whit about the NCAA tournament. But thanks to our laptops and the Slingbox we have installed at my in-laws house in Florida, plus the wonders of CBS Sportsline's live feed, plus the DVI-HDMI cable we have in our bloated bag of electronics, plus the Philips flatscreen HDTV here in our apartment, which also has a Linksys router attached to a broadband cable Internet service, I was able to at least approximate the experience of sitting at home in America gorging on March Madness™ (I use the trademark symbol because I bet you didn't know that the NCAA actually owns that phrase. Did you?)

What it all means is that even while we are traveling we are very much at home, living everyday all those old cliches about the global village. Ten years ago we would have felt in touch with home (for better or worse) because we saw the ubiquitous U.S. brands like Coke or McDonald's nearby, or because we heard yet another American accent as we walked past the sidewalk tables of a restaurant. Now we don't need to feel it vicariously through external stimuli - we ARE in touch, nearly every moment, thanks to the relatively speedy Net connections we've had everywhere we've been so far, with the exception of the Galaxy in the Galapagos - and even there the high-end boats now have satellite Net service on board. Those Net connections have made it so much easier than we could have hoped to get our email, back up our photos, and produce this blog, that we've actually started to get annoyed when it's not perfect and fast. Beyond that we've also got our iPods, and our noise-cancelling headphones, and our iTunes Season Passes for Lost and 30 Rock, plus iTunes access to a plethora of other TV shows and movies.

All this connectedness raises another cliche: that somehow we've lost something because of our connectedness - that the only way to fully appreciate a visit to another culture is to cut off all contact with the one you come from. Wrong! Well, wrong for us. If anything, all these connections have actually enriched our experience, since we don't have to be solely dependent on the often flawed guidebooks for our introduction to the places we're visiting. I think they've also helped eliminate any possible homesickness we might have felt in our two+ months on the road to date across four countries.

In the next day or two I think I'm going to have to take a photo and list the contents of our electronics collection so you can get the full effect.

A Reminder to Family & Friends

That 3 minute cell-to-cell call to my phone you made a couple weeks ago?

$17 on our bill.

So let's stick to IP-only methods of communication, except in emergencies. Message us and we'll call you via Tru-Phone, if it's necessary to talk.

It's Really Happening

I must not have quite believed it, and maybe I still won't until we're actually settled in our hotel in Lima, but it certainly appears at this point that we really are about to embark on this crazy trip. The last 72 hours have been a bit hectic, as we searched Manhattan for the last few things we needed, realized what we'd left behind at my parents, and then today made the not-even-slightly panicked drive back up to Danbury to meet them at my brother's house where they were having dinner, so we could pick up a couple of items that we had failed to pack in the proper bag when we separated "clothes that are going" from "clothes that are staying behind."

There was a rationale behind all of this, of course: when we factored in what it was going to cost to replace those clothes we had just bought, what it would cost to take a cab to the airport, and how much we would have spent on a leisurely lunch this afternoon while we were killing time, it only made sense to rent a car and zoom up to CT before returning it at JFK.

Of course you're invited to laugh at us for already replacing the Apple Airport Express which we also left behind, which we could have retrieved if we had thought about it with half a brain. Are you getting the impression yet that our command of the last-minute details has not quite been up to our usual standards? Did I mention that Eileen also dropped her Blackberry in a Union Square mud puddle yesterday, too late to get a repair or a replacement and by all appearances trashing the phone we were planning to use to swap SIM cards into as we went along?

But that's all behind us now, now that we're sitting in The Oasis business class lounge at JFK's Terminal 4, watching the snow fall and the de-icing brigades hose down the jets as they leave their gates.

We're ready. 

We think.