This time, though, I made a change. A big one.
I didn't pack a map.
On previous trips I've packed around a camera and even a laptop, plus a paperback book or two, and a travel guide or two. I did have a camera in my bag but this time everything, from journal to light reading to, yes, the map was in my hip pocket.
Yeah. iPhone. I got permission from IT for roaming and up to a gig of data. I loaded up with a tourist guide and a couple of books (including a copy of that great new translation of The Odyssey). I made sure I had plenty of space for pictures.
Also picked up a folding keyboard which made it so vastly much easier to take lengthly notes on the road.
In the column of "That worked fairly well" the GPS was a boon from the gods. The streets in the Greek cities I was exploring never ran in the same direction for more than a handful of meters, were narrow enough to block all possible landmarks from their confines, and street signs were often hard to come by. Not that they helped. Maybe if I had been forced to read street signs I would have eventually gotten the hang of written Greek, but most of it remained "egg nog, egg nog" to me.
Not helped by the inconsistent romanization. On a bus schedule I had, the "Heraklion" route went from "Iraklion." On a pair of street signs I found, you were either entering "Tylissos" or "Tylisos." Even "Chania" was sometimes "Hania." Yeah...I recommend learning your Greek alphabet because that's a wee bit more consistent (there, the problem is that the characters are simplified and substituted in very odd ways on the electronic signs inside and around public transit, meaning it's not enough just to know it; you need to be comfortable with it.)
Also, between Apple's "Map" ap and Google Maps, fire roads and trails were all wrong and coverage of even major museums was spotty. Nor could either ap really handle public transit or even figure out a driving route that didn't put you going down a public dock. Or a walking route that didn't put you on the highway.
The digital bubble worries me here. I don't mean the way you might be wandering around with your eyes on the GPS direction widget instead of, you know, traffic. I mean that even in my home town, close to the heart of Silicon Valley, restaurants and shops I know damn well exist aren't listed on the Maps ap. It was worse in Heraklion, where I could find the local Gap store but not a knitting supply store that way.
So. For pictures, the phone was good enough. Most of what I was taking was museum exhibits anyhow. I wasn't trying to make pretty pictures, I was documenting what I found so I would be able to look it up later.
Okay, mostly.
In the column of "needs work," I had aps for the companies where I had reserved hotels and purchased flights, but those aps rarely told me what I needed to know. The only time one was of any use at all was to display the address of a hotel in proper Greek for my cab driver, but the ap insisted on truncating the address and could not be convinced to scroll or re-scale.
There was an odd experience at the Agora (around the foot of the Acropolis); a bunch of people had some kind of pre-printed ticket that was scanned through easily, but the rest of us were blocked from entry because the credit card reader was down (for some reason that meant cash was off limits as well. Or the staff was so focused on one problem they didn't want to take time to do the other). That actually worked out well for me in the end because I barely had time to get to the Acropolis then out to meet my ferry after all.
Every experience at a clerk or boarding agent, though, no ap or printout was needed or wanted. Just my name and my passport. Just as well. My experience with e-tickets is every single one has a different ap, and all those aps are bloatware, a drag on your data, and possible spyware to boot.
The nadir had to be the Pireaus-to-Iraklion ferry; there you take a printout of your receipt (you must have this) to the ferry company's office in town where they print you an official boarding pass (sometimes for a small charge). Not terribly efficient. Or obvious.
I brought a power adaptor and a battery pack good for up to two full charges.
That's the first thing you notice about doing everything with a smart phone. I don't know if it is the GPS (and running two different map aps at the same time) or all the photographs but battery charge goes like that. I ended up spending significant time with the phone in one pocket and the battery pack in another, trickling in more juice as I walked.
This is something the primary manufacturers haven't quite gotten yet. Apple continues to make their gear smaller and thinner, but as the customers are using their devices more continually and at higher consumption rates (brighter screens, streaming videos, flashlight aps) those internal batteries are no longer sufficient to get through a day. Charging stations are springing up. There's a new version of Wardriving out there as people search out unguarded outlets in coffee shops and other places. I changed seats on the ferry to hog an outlet I found on the floor there (eventually I gave it up to someone else after I had enough charge to hold me).
And of course battery packs, battery packs everywhere.
Other odd follow-on effects. Payphones are long gone, of course. But clocks in public spaces are also on the way out. It is odd to be in an airport and not be able to find a single clock anywhere. Not even on the departures board is there a time display. Which is pretty stupid if you think about it. Sure, everyone has a smart phone (supposedly) and those automatically synch to local time...but only if they get a signal! When you are changing time zones, you are also roaming, and possibly out of coverage for the frequency range of your phone, which means no automatic updates.
So all in all, it worked, but I'm not giving up on the old ways completely. A little notebook with everything important copied to it is still the most important thing you can pack.
No comments:
Post a Comment