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Two reasons not to be afraid of traveling outside the English speaking world.

August 29, 2016 by Jon Brown 9 Comments

I’ve heard from a lot of people that are afraid, or let’s so shy, of trying to travel outside the English speaking world. Here are two reasons not to be.

First English is the world’s second language

I remember the first time I traveled to a country where English wasn’t the official language. It was 20 years ago and after visiting London where they speak something occasionally close to English (j/k) I took the Eurostar to Paris.  I remember studying intensely how to say “I’m sorry, I don’t speak French”, along with a few other phrases I thought I needed.  I also remember the first time I walked into a shop and tried using said phrase being laughed at and told “no you certainly don’t” in near perfect English.

At the time I took that encounter as something unexpected, not the rudeness of it that was expected in Paris, but the English fluency of the person I needed to speak to. I thought, “how fortunate this person speaks English!”  20 years later I can say that’s it’s actually pretty hard to get more than 10 meters from a non-English speaker while traveling.

Let me be extremely clear, I’m not saying you can’t find non-English speakers, nor that you can’t actually get away from them, just that it takes some serious effort and is unlikely to happen accidently. An example…

Taking a pedicab to a coffee shop in Malang, Indonesia

This morning I decided it was about time I find a coffee shop in Malang. I found a well regarded one a 15 minute walk away. I actually didn’t plan on walking though because it’s hot, and as I needed to check out of my hotel first I’d be carrying all my stuff. Instead I planned on making use of the pedicab that I had seen parked along the road right where the hotel driveway meets the road every time I’ve left the hotel.

Now I’ve seen a lot of traditional human powered pedicabs and rickshaws around the world and I can assure you, not one of the drivers speaks any English. If they did they wouldn’t be pushing a pedicab around for 5,000 IDR ($0.40) a trip. Surprisingly however the pedicab I expected to find however was not there at the hotel exit. Thankfully, I recalled that two nights prior when I walked to the nearby Indra Mart (like 7-11) I noticed a pedicab rank next to the street food vendors right around the corner.

I marched that direction and as turned the corner sure enough a pedicab driver noticed me “coming right at him“. He stood excitedly and I nodded to him that yes indeed this white skinned foreigner was about to ask to hop on his pedicab.

I knew there was no chance the driver would speak english so I prepared a little. When I looked up the coffee shop on Google Maps I also took note of the nearest local landmark. In this case a traffic circle with a small monument in the middle of it. I knew that if that didn’t work I could still point where I needed to go easily enough, but I didn’t need to do either. No sooner had I said “Alun-alun Tugu” to the pedicab driver as did a younger man standing nearby jumped up to help translate and confirm for the pedicab driver that yes indeed Alun-alun tugu was where I was asking to go.

It was a lovely ride.

https://wanderingjon.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_3050.mp4

As you can see I the locals make heavy use of pedicabs for short distances too:

https://wanderingjon.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_3049.mp4

And there were are circling the traffic circle, with Alun-alun Tugu monument in the middle.

https://wanderingjon.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_3051.mp4

Operation pedicab to coffee shop complete.

Getting a taxi to make multiple stops in Malang, Indonesia

My friend in Malang is having a baby in a few weeks so I decided it’d be a nice gesture to buy them a small baby gift. I thought baby clothes of some kind would be an easy to buy gift for a soon to be new born boy. I located a nearby store which seemed to sell “things for babies”m but it was rather unclear from their Facebook page (of course they don’t have an actual website) if they only sold things like strollers and bottle sanitizers or if they actually sold other things like baby clothes. I’d find out soon enough.

I asked the front desk of the hotel to call a taxi for me. Once upon a time it was necessary to learn left, right, go straight in the local language so you could give a Taxi driver directions when needed. These days Taxi’s the world over are accustomed to having smart phones with Google Maps brought up shoved in their faces. I remember not long ago when handed a smart phone taxi drivers stumbled and have no idea how swiping and zooming worked, but now, they’re all pros. However, I didn’t even need to do that here.

The taxi arrived and I asked the doorman, who spoke perfect English, to explain to the taxi driver that I needed to first go to this baby store and then needed to be driven to the fancy restaurant at the far end of town where I was treating my friend and his wife for dinner.

Taxi drivers here don’t speak a lot of English because frankly there are not a lot of tourists. However when pressed all 5 taxis I took this weekend including this one, spoke at least a little they were just very shy about making use of it. Which is to say all the drivers new more than enough that I could have communicated these “two stop” instructions to them myself without a word of Indonesian if I needed to, but sometimes it’s just a lot more expedient to let the locals translate.

A few minutes later we successfully arrived at the Hompila Baby Store in Malang about 1.5km from my hotel. I told him in awful Indonesian “Saya segera” (“I’ll be quick”) and he said something that sounded like gibberish but I clearly understood to me “I understand, I’ll wait right here”.

Baby shopping in Malang, Indonesia

I walked into the baby store, exactly like I have at hundereds of other times around the world. I looked around briefly hoping to spot exactl what I wanted, but in hurry I didn’t waste much time before I found a sales clerk (which is easy since stores have about 10x the staff that American stores do and they’re all eager to help).

In extremely clumsy fashion the first thing out said to the clerk “Anda bisa bicara bahasa inggris”. As you can guess, that’s “Do you speak English” in Bahasa Indonesian. I try to _assume_ the people I’m speak with don’t speak English. I don’t know why, but I feel a bit weird just assuming they do. Now, I tried but it probably sounded totally wrong because she cocked her head, winced a but and looked at me. Never a good sign, but she was trying to understand me. I simplified things by simple saying “English?”, with a raised eyebrow and a smile. At which point she clearly understood as she giggled, then guided me hastily over to a young male clerk at the cash register who asked “Yes sir, please how can I help you?”.

The clerk helped me quickly find the baby socks I wanted. They were upstairs among sea of pink things. I didn’t even realize it had an upstairs when I first started looking. I found some cute brown ones with monkeys and some yellow ones with little giraffes on them. The same clerk guided me back down stairs and helped me checkout and then helped me get it wrapped up in a gift bag. Outside the taxi was waiting outside ready to get me to dinner on-time. Mission accomplished.

Is Malang off the tourist trail?

Malang is a big-ish city with a University, so it’s far from rural, but it’s not really a foreign tourist destination. As I sit right now in the Abdul Rachman (MLG) airport looking around at the 300 people in the gate area and I’m pretty sure I’m the only caucasian person here. I’m sure there are a few other foreigners but I can’t spot them.

Malang is not a metropolis, however it is a proper city with a university and a large regional hospital. It’s unsurprising that there are people here that speak English. However it’s my belief that it’s really not that, because I see this everywhere. It’s my belief that the main reason that it is nearly impossible to find anyone under 30 that doesn’t speak passable English anymore is simply this: internet.  

English is the predominant language on the Internet

Even if the internet uses all languages, and legions of people work tirelessly to translate it into the many languages of the world, much of the internet starts in and remains only in English.

Yes, many people around the world actively learn English because it’s the lingua franca of tourists everywhere (someday I’ll write about the fact all tourists everywhere from France to China speak to staff in hotels and restaurants in English, as well as to each other in English). Hospitality staff learning English though isn’t why it’s so hard to find yourself somewhere without an english speaker at hand. That’s one thing, but what doesn’t get talked about is that kids today learning English to play video games and to chat with other friends that don’t speaker their language.

Ok, sum up the two reasons:

  1. It is really hard when traveling anymore to come across someone that doesn’t speak English and at the same time to have no one near-by ready and willing to help translate that does.
  2. If you do manage to find that mythical place without English speakers, a few hand gestures and maybe a smart phone are likely all you need to get anywhere or anything you desire.

If you’re really adventurous…  go ahead and wait at the curb for a local bus to come by, carefully make sure there are no school aged kids on the bus…  then hop and and ride it a long long way…  When it stops, maybe, on only maybe, you’ll be in that magical place without an english speaker within earshot. However, don’t be surprised if you’re still not there.

Filed Under: Journal, Travel, Uncategorized

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

IMG_2994Foursquare 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.

https://wanderingjon.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_2998.mp4

Filed Under: Travel, Uncategorized

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.

https://wanderingjon.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/IMG_1703.mp4

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.

Asus-168b+-on-MacBookPro

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.

Attending WordCamp US 2015Thankfully, 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.

Filed Under: Technology, Travel

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