Travel Archives - Page 3 of 25

Getting a haircut and shave while traveling

August 27, 2016 by Jon Brown 1 Comment

I’ve pretty much always gone way too long between haircuts. My neglect is really just about thinking it’s a time consuming hassle. Back in The States I begrudgingly pay Supercuts US$15-20 to cut my hair, although increasingly I just have Elena drag electric clippers over it for me because I loathe driving to the haircut place, waiting for an indeterminate amount of time, having someone drag electric clippers over my head with varying levels of skill.

Being a digital nomad and going from country to country means eventually you need to get a haircut from people that are unlikely to speak your language. That can be a bit intimidating at first, but now I actually prefer it all the other options.

The first haircut and shave in Thailand

A couple years ago in Thailand I drove by one of the many little barber shops you see lining the roads. Local Thai men getting a cut and shave from barbers. From the looks of it these people were paying pennies for that classic barber shop experience that I last witnessed when I was about 5 years old and my dad took me to one. Yeah, in the US hipster barber shops the recreate that have been popping up for a decade, but I’ve never actually visited one.

Anyway, one day I finally decided I’d surmount the language difficulties and go to one of these local little barbershop. It was _so_ much fun. I’m sure I wasn’t the first foreigner to sit down in there, but I’m sure I was the first to do so with a beard like mine. We laughed, and as is de rigueur they joked about shaving my whole beard off. While I’m not quite ready for that, truth is if it happened I’d roll with it. You’ve got to be prepared for things to go wrong, even though at least in my dozen or so experiences now it never has.

In desperate need of a haircut and a shave in Indonesia

Note: I took this photo 5 times... how this is the one I saved I'm not sure... but it pretty much sums it up. — Note: I took this photo 5 times… how this is the one I saved I’m not sure… but it pretty much sums it up.

I could have pretty easily gone into a barber shop back on Bali where they all spoke excellent english, but I kept having other things to do. Then this morning I thought I’d try on the say to the airport, but they didn’t open until noon. My flight was so delayed that I probably could have done that, but alas I didn’t. I flew to Malang, Indonesia still needing a haircut and beard trimming. Malang is not a tourist destination and while in the first few hours I’ve found a lot of people do speak some english, it sure isn’t Bali.

Finding barbershop in Indonesia

Foursquare helped me find 2 near by barber shops. GoJek got me a motorbike ride the 1km to the nearest one, Pullman Barbershop, which turned out to be exactly what I was looking for.

There is a growing hipster kind of barber shop thing going on over here in asia as well. Only this haircut, shave and shampoo only cost me 70k IDR (US$5.38).

A couple of the guys in the shop spoke very good english, well enough to help the guy actually cutting my hair (who spoke very limited english) to make sure he was getting it right. A few “Satu centi” while pointing at my beard to say, “1 centimeter” and “tiga tiga tiga” while pointing all over me head to say #3 clippers and a very barber who really wanted to make sure it all came out alright made for a lot of fun and a nice clean up for dinner tonight with Tri and Tunggul. It’s good if they don’t think there boss is a homeless dude.

Digital Redundancy for Digital Nomads

November 29, 2015 by Jon Brown 1 Comment

I’d planned on publishing photos and a little story today about our second week in Cuba.

Sadly one of a digital nomads worst fears struck me yesterday. No, not digestive malaise. Although I am just getting over a minor bout of that, this is far far worse.

Laptop death sucks when you’re 100% dependent on it for your livelihood. When you’re a digital nomad it’s even worse because getting it fixed rarely means popping into your neighbor Apple store and getting 24 hour or faster turn around on a repair.

Multiple Levels of Redundancy

Being a fairly experienced nomad, almost 10 years now, I do have multiple levels of digital redundancy. Elena has encouraged me to blog about for quiet some time, so now seems like an awfully good time to at least touch on that!

Data Loss Protection

First, I have a Time Machine backup on an external hard drive. That hard drive also gets packed separately from my laptop when in transit, so that just in case one bag goes missing everything doesn’t disappear at once. AKA don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Second, I clone my hard drive in it’s entirety to that same external hard drive about once a month. There are a few folders (music/podcasts/TV/Movies) that I don’t bother backing up with Time Machine and frankly nothing beats having a bootable copy of your own hard drive for troubleshooting or in an emergency.

Not terribly relevant but that hard drive also has a third partition that just stores junk I carry around but have no need to backup (virtual machines for testing, old photos backed up elsewhere, movies I carry around on the off chance someday I’ll watch them, etc).

Third, I have a TimeMachine backup at home on my file server. Although that is now months out of date it’s better than nothing. I also have a backup of my “irreplaceables” on that file server like photos. Finally, yes, that file server itself gets backed up to an external drive at home too (keep meaning to move that to the cloud).

So with ALL that I don’t really worry about losing “data” and you wouldn’t either if you setup some basic mostly automated practices like these. Maybe you don’t need to go so far, but if you’re traveling for more than a couple weeks at the very minimum you should be traveling with a time machine backup on an external hard drive just in case and a backup elsewhere just in case in case.

Productivity Loss Protection

What I do worry about is losing productivity. No computer means no work. No work means no income. No income means no fun…

I have some redundancy there are well.

First, I travel with an newish iPhone 6 and an old iPad (mostly for ebooks/RSS reader). Either means I wouldn’t loose 24/7 access to email and Slack without a computer and I could function a little to at least temporarily get info out as needed.

Second, I travel with Elena… while that sometimes when it comes to technology she’s far more of a liability than a resource, here she’s definitely a resource. I could plug that hard drive clone I have directly into her laptop, boot it up and go. Albeit a bit slowly slower than off my internal SSD, but I could get some work done without really breaking much of a sweat. However “hijacking/sharing” her laptop for any lengthy period of time however would probably be the one thing that could break our relationship.

Third, I travel with a lot of credit cards. I know that sounds like I’m joking, but I’m serious and in a pinch I wouldn’t hesitate to by a replacement computer. If you’re making your living through a tool, you’d better be prepared at any moment to replace that broken tool. On that front it’s also worth noting that both my renters insurance policy (which covers my possessions globally) includes loss/theft/peril of all my gear.

Getting Things Fixed in Faraway Lands Part 1

I should probably start by explaining that little ribbing I gave elena above about being a liability as it’s rather germaine to this post. Exactly one year ago Elena’s MacBook Pro suffered a nearly identical failure to mine yesterday while we were in Cortona, Italy. She however didn’t have a clone of her hard drive and her TimeMachine backups was weeks out of date (I literally have to remind her weekly to plug it in and keep up it up to date… which she used to ignore, but I put a clause in our pre-nup that she has to run a backup once a week — j/king).

To fix her laptop we had to travel from Cortona to Florence (2 hours each way by bus/train) to the nearest Apple Store. Where upon our first visit I had to buy an external hard drive enclosure, pull her hard drive out myself in the food court of the mall put it in the enclourse and use my working laptop to clone her hard drive to yet another external drive. After which I put the original hard drive back in the computer and turned it over to Apple support for the board replacement before traveling back to Cortona to wait. While we waited she was able to plug that cloned HD into my MBP and get some work done, not full speed, but at least something with her apps, docs and universe available to her. A few days later we got the call that her laptop was fixed, again 2 hours each way, really more like 6 hours round trip to Florence to pick it up and US$600 out of pocket (ouch Italian VAT) before we resumed life as normal. Well as normal for us.

Getting Things Fixed in Faraway Lands Part 2

The good news this time, is my Late 2013 15″ Retina MacBook Pro still has AppleCare. The bad news is that there are no Apple Stores in the Dominican Republic. I did try stopping by iZone the nearby authorized Apple authorized retailer and was told 2-3 weeks for a repair 🙁

The delightful surprise however is that my Asus MB168b+* USB travel monitor is unaffected by the video failure. So, for now I’m working ghetto like this.

Two things on that photo: Yes, that’s the Asus MB168b+ I’ve raved about endlessly propped up in front of my useless rMBP screen, and yes, I often write my blog posts in Sublime Text.

So, wait if it’s working why no post on Cuba? Well, because while most things work, Lightroom can only browse photos it can not edit photos. I presume it needs to use the fried dedicated graphics card/memory.

Thankfully, we are flying to Philadelphia Wednesday to attend WordCamp US December 5-6 and I’ve already made an appointment at the Apple Store in Philly for an hour after we land. I’ve got my fingers crossed that they can fix it overnight, but we’ll be in Philly for 2 weeks and worst case I’m sure they have shiny new MacBooks for sale, just not the 15″ MacBook Air I keep dreaming about and waiting for.

Stories, advice and more welcome in the comments!

* Note: I’ve linked to the MB168b+, but Asus just released a new (although nearly identical as far as I can tell) Asus 169b+. I’ll be getting a MB169b+ in the next couple months and doing a side by side comparison.

Beginning our Honeymoon in Cuba

November 23, 2015 by Jon Brown 5 Comments

Our first week in Cuba was amazing. More on getting there, being there and visiting Elena’s uncle in Havana is all coming soon.

I just wanted to share a couple scenes from week one.

First, the iconic classic cars that greeted us walking out of the airport.

They reminded me of visiting Yellowstone National Park and gawking at the first bison I saw entering the park. I was simply in awe, until a week later the novelty started to fade and they became just another part of the scenery. Similarly tourists reactions to them are also a metric by which you could tell how long someone had been in Cuba. Day 1, exuberant photo snapping. Day 7, only taking note of the most exceptionally preserved. Day 14, only taking note of the most exceptionally decrepit and being aware that the brakes could fail or a tire come loose at any moment… More of the beautiful ones coming soon.

Then there are “animal trucks” as one of our drivers later referred to them.

After which a conversation ensued where I tried to explain the difference, at least in American usage, between a truck that carries animals like pigs and cows, and a truck drawn by an animal. I say “at least to Americans” because I long ago learned that “our” use of terms is far from the only one. Maybe Brits, Austrians, Hong Kongers or South Africans do call these “animals trucks”. Regardless, they’re common outside Havana and fun to see.

This is not to say there aren’t any new cars in Cuba. I was actually surprised by how many newer and more expensive cars there were, including some rather expensive Mercedes and Audis, but most new small sub-compacts.

Oh and yes… there are pro-Cuba/Fidel/Che billboards and graffiti all over the place, again more of that later.

Out of the airport we spent our first week in proper honeymoon style completely unplugged at an all inclusive resort in Veradero. Which I still can not for the life of me pronounce properly.

It was the first time in a long long time that we were sincerely “on vacation” rather than working and traveling. We were just relaxing, every day, all day and it was glorious. I never really understood the purpose of taking a “honeymoon” after getting married. It always seemed to me just a convenient excuse to take a vacation, when one should just do that from time to time anyway. Being completely unplugged for a week however really allowed Elena and I some time to connect and to express our love for one another without any of the usual disruptions and distractions of day to day life. Perfect. More on traveling as a digital nomad couple coming soon to JonAndElena.com.

…and Caribbean beaches aren’t bad either:

The best part of the resort though was this pool directly outside the front door of our suite with a swim up bar. We pretty much spent 75% of our time in that pool reading, lounging, sipping on Cubatas. It was in and around that pool that I read both of the Cuba themed books that author Eduardo Santiago gifted us, Midnight Rhumba and Tomorrow They Will Kiss. The first two books printed on actual paper I’ve read in years, and both a delightful reads.