[travel] The other convergence ... cameras, photographic memory, and more

At home I enjoy having a phone that puts the world's knowledge in my pocket via the internet. My needs while traveling are slightly different, though. I still want to have as much information in my pocket as I can. However, much of that information isn't online. It's in tour books, maps, and other places. So I've developed the habit of using my nice camera to take high-resolution pictures of anything that I might need. I can take a photo of a wall-size city map, and then later read every fine street detail of it by zooming in on the glorious 9-megapixel photo on the camera. I have pictures of road maps, subway maps, monument maps, directions, the sign for my hotel (for showing to cab drivers), flight information (for getting into airports without a printed pass), mysterious foods that I'm hoping the hotel staff can identify for me, restaurant listings, webpages with informaiton on visiting some attraction, emails from friends with information on what to see in a city etc. I'm lazy now... I will take pictures of six-digit flight confirmation codes. It's easier than haviing lots of pieces of paper floating around. The photo trick saved my ass in the nightmare package scenario I described earlier.

I quickly discovered that it's much better to be standing on a third world street corner looking into your camera than it is to be on the same street corner with a giant unfolded mess of a street map or an opened tour book. Basically, the latter two scenarios are basically like a big sign saying “I'M A CONFUSED TOURIST! CONVICE ME TO ENTER YOUR HIGH-PRESSURE RETAIL ESTABLISHMENT AND HAVE SOME TEA!” As a result, I sometimes photograph entire sections of the tour book so that I can look quietly at them in public. In addition, some of those tour books run over 1000 pages and will weigh you down. It's silly to carry a 1000 page book for one two-page spread of a city map and some listings.

I usually still carry a street map as backup in case my battery runs out. It also lets me spread the meme whenever I can.

For example:

( spreading the Word )

What I'd really like is for camera vendors to make this note-taking more organized so that I can make the notes searchable. I want the ability to tag, or better yet, use optical character recognition, so I can quickly search for text strings in my database of notes.

That's just the beginning. I want the camera to translate signs in pictures I take from foreign alphabets into English. Then I can photograph menus, signs, notices etc and then read them in my native language. I want a GPS on there along with street maps of the world so I can always know where I am and mark locations of places of interest. I want to download tour books directly to the camera. Furthermore, I want to be able to effortlessly put little notes and reviews for things as small as a street food vendor or a nice place to get a good view, and be able to see sites others have reviewed. There are both hidden treats and scams in all these exotic cities, and I want to know about where they are. I want to have a smart mob of tourists labeling the highs and lows of an unknown country. Many of these ideas run into the territory of the sort of thing that's being developed for the iphone, but the iphone has a crappy camera and international internet access is limited.  So why not put all that stuff on my good camera so that I can have it work on the data I'm gathering as a tourist?

[travel] Jerusalem pt 1

There's so much to say about this place. It's beautiful, unique, and completely fucked up.

Jerusalem is an especially ancient city that happens to also contain the holiest sites of three of the world's religions. It's been fought over, captured, and recaptured by many different groups for millenia. It's currently filled with Israeli-Palestinean tension, and the police are constantly on high alert.

So what's it actually like in person? Here are some tales:

First, Jerusalem reminds me a lot of my visit to Houston. Why? Because it's full of Texans. There are more bible-belters here than just about anywhere else in the world, and that includes any blue state in the US. Jerusalem is basically a giant biblical pub crawl. Here's the place where Jesus had his last supper, there's where he dropped under the weight of the cross and Mary helped him up again, there's the tree that some prophet climbed up to hear Jesus give a famous sermon etc. It's fairly common knowledge that most of these sites were “discovered” in the 12th century when the crusaders showed up, but that doesn't stop the people from coming.

I soon realized something: In terms of both tourists and, especially, residents, Jerusalem attracts fundamentalists of many faiths, and the trouble with many fundamentalists is that they're fervent, stubborn, unswayed by logic, and sometimes a bit crazy. So essentially, the city is a magnet for crazies. This partially explains why things are such a mess. I've met fairly secular Jews in Tel Aviv who basically see Jerusalem as nothing more than a big security risk.

An anecdote about the crazies: As many of you may know, orthodox Jews see the Shabbat as a day of rest and contemplation of the Torah. Many things are forbidden on Shabbat, including the use of any fire or its modern equivalent, electricity (except for the use of candles for reading light). I watched as a group of rabble-rousing Muslims gathered in an open field at the corner of the city to shoot off fireworks right after the start of Shabbat just to piss off the Jews inside their homes studying the Torah.

[travel] Jerusalem, pt 2

More stories from Jerusalem:

This place is the closest you will come to experiencing day-to-day life in a city of 2000 years ago. Cars are kept out of the old city, so you pass through everything on foot. Streets are a cavernous human-scale tan stone habitrail of arched passageways, stairways, and narrow alleys. Religious buildings dominate the skyline, and people are squeezed into stone buildings in between. Every shop is a little hole-in-the-wall. It's glorious.

Ah, back to religion, the city's focus.

The holiest Christian site, the location where Jesus was supposedly laid to rest, was honored with an enormous church, but the six responsible Christian sects were fighting so bitterly about how exactly to decorate the church that they had to hand over the keys to the church to a Muslim because they couldn't trust one another. The responsibility of mediating for the squabbling Christians has been passed down through the same family for generations. Even now, Christ's tomb is decorated in a mishmash of six different styles of candelabra. The line for Christ's tomb was very long, but I found a porthole where I could look in. While the sight of a rock that may or may not have been the location of Jesus's final resting place didn't have much effect on me, I was very interested to see how it affected true believers. Their emotional reactions were stunning and beautiful. This was their culmination of a lifetime of faith – a trip to the holy lands, and a chance to ground their faith in something physical.

There's a huge jam-packed Jewish cemetery by the Mount of Olives. Apparently the Bible can be interpreted to state that at the end of the world, God will raise the dead starting at the Mount of Olives and then gradually working his way out. Basically, these people are all jostling (and I mean jostling.... these graves are cheek-to-cheek) to be the first in line to Heaven. They want to get all the good seats before they're all taken.

My friend Daniel was hustled by a rabbi at the holiest of Jewish holy sites, the Western Wall. While we were looking at an old copy of the Torah on display at the Wall, the rabbi pulled him aside, gave him some blessing, and then hit him up for cash. Daniel provided some, and then the rabbi tried to hit him up for more cash. So much for the holiest of holy sites.

I spent some time walking through the Muslim quarter. Parts of it have the edgy rough-and-ready feel you get in some lower-class neighborhoods in the US. However, other parts were filled with schoolchildren happily playing, oblivious to the tension. I noticed a lot of Palestinian kids with toy guns. These toy guns were all black, unlike the orange-lined ones you see in toy stores in the US. These also weren't little shiny funny-shaped ray guns. They looked sufficiently like real guns that I felt a bit uneasy. There were 14-year old kids waving around convincing-looking toy machine guns just a couple of blocks from where 19-year-old Israeli Defense Forces soldiers were standing around with real, loaded machine guns looking for signs of trouble. This can't end well.

I have very limited data to go on, but it seems like the Israeli government is already making a lot of compromises to the Palestinians to keep the peace in Jerusalem. Non-Muslims are not allowed into many sections of the city, and Muslims are given full control of the top of the Temple Mount even though it's also one of the holiest sites in the world for Jews, and there's plenty of empty space up on the Temple Mount to put up a Jewish temple in between the mosques.

My friends and I discussed various potential solutions to creating peace in the Middle East, but almost all of them came down to the same problem... there are enough fanatics on both sides who will screw up any compromise even if it's not in their best interest to do so.

I think the only real solution will have to involve forced cultural intermixing, and for that to be successful it has to be started when people are very young. It's hard to demonize a group when you've had playmates from that group as far back as you can remember. Currently parents can choose public integrated schooling or various faiths of religious schooling for their kids. Thus fundamentalists can raise their children in a very indoctrinating environment where they are not exposed to peers of other faiths. For intermixing to occur, public school needs to be mandatory and fully integrated, starting from preschool. This needs to happen for the good of society. It will require very effective teachers, as fundamentalist parents will probably be arming their children with various prejudices. It will also require Israel to give up some aspects of being a Jewish state, as ultra-orthodox Jews would no longer be able to raise their children in a biblically strict manner. However, the benefits of educating an entire generation of tolerant youth are well worth paying for, especially given the astronomically high cost Israel currently pays for security, both in terms of military budget and in terms of lost productivity.

I'm relatively new to this whole situation, so those of you who are experts on the Middle East should share your thoughts.

Photoblog?

I have around 4500 pictures at this point. I've had trouble getting a connection fast enough to upload to flickr, but I was thinking of instead uploading 5-10 pictures at a time every few days, and putting each in large format in a separate post, kind of like riotclitshave  does. Would anyone who reads me be bothered by this periodic influx of photos? If I hear a lot of grumbling I'll create a separate lj account for people to friend.

[travel Israeli security fail

Israel spends a huge amount of money on security. They treat train stations, bus stations, malls, and even some restaurants the way we treat airports. However, there are high value targets and not-so-high-value targets, and resources are limited. Apparently the Lev Hamifratz train station is in the latter category.

Security officer: (at entrance to train station) Passport please.

He looks at the passport... he starts looking really concerned when he sees the United Arab Emirates stamp, complete with scary-looking (pretty) Arabic script.

Me: I went to Dubai.
SO: That's what this is? U.A.E. ?
Me: Yes.

He keeps looking.

SO: WHAT'S THIS?? YOU WENT TO SYRIA??
Me: No, I didn't go to Syria. That's Turkey.
SO: That's not Syria?
Me: No, that's a Turkey visa. That's the Turkish flag. It says “Turkey” right there.
SO: Where's your Israel immigration stamp?
Me: Over here. Ben-Gurion airport.
SO: Oh, ok. Go ahead.

[travel] Anatomy of a logistical nightmare

Logistically speaking, more or less everything had been running smoothly on my trip. Not that I believe in the conservation of luck, but it appears that I was overdue for some trouble.

It all started when I had the bright idea to ship my Eurail pass to my friend's cousin's house in Tel Aviv, Israel instead of sending it to the bay area and having one of the people in the bay area who is coming to visit me bring it. It seemed like a good idea at the time to get this expensive package somewhere close to me instead of relying on someone else to tote it overseas. (Eurail passes, which give you unlimited travel on all of Europe's trains, run around $800 for 3 weeks)

The first bad sign occurred when I got a very anachronistic phone call from a Eurail representative while wandering through ancient roman ruins at Ephesus. They couldn't find anyone to sign for the package, so it was being placed on hold. My friend told me that I'd have to retrieve it from the Tel Aviv DHL office in Airport City. She also gave me a note allowing me to pick up the package even though it was mailed to someone else. “Hey, that's easy”... I thought. “I should totally ship more stuff to myself that way. I can get Lonely Planet guides for $10 off Amazon instead of paying the $50 local booksellers want.”


( everything breaks along the way but it turns out ok in the end )

So, what have I learned?
I love the DHL employees of Tel Aviv.
Google Maps is not the pope. Google Maps is not infallible. Then again the pope isn't infallible either. But they're still different in other ways.
Always have a phone number for the place you're trying to get to as backup.