A whole year?

The next crop

Last Saturday were the district interviews for next year's Rotary exchange candidates. Among the interviewers were Chloe and Anna Rae and they also talked about their experiences and answered questions from the group. This is an exciting time for the soon-to-be exchange students because they're waiting through the holiday season to find out where they'll be living next year.

Part of what Chloe does is dispel the myth that the kids shouldn't call home for months so they'll integrate into their new cultures without holding on to home. She told the group that, although they (Rotary) didn't want to hear it, she called home every day for the first few months and it was the best thing, for her, because it kept her grounded and was a small reassurance that this part of her world still existed. Knowing that freed her to immerse herself in her new life. I rarely called her, but let her call if she needed to. She never complained and never said she wanted to come home (but she did want all of her friends and family to move to Pamplona for the year). Mostly we just chatted about nothing in particular. It was understood that if she were ever to stay home just to call us that the phone calls would stop. She was mildly insulted at that: Yeah, like I wouldn't go out with friends or tour a cathedral just so I could stay home and call you. Blanket rules don't apply to everyone and for some kids calling home often would keep them from exploring their new surroundings. A student here last year talked to her parents almost every day and she was very happy to do so. It didn't hinder her integration into the American way of life, but she wouldn't make even the tiniest decisions without consulting them first. It made shopping a frustrating exercise: No, I'd better wait to talk to my parents tomorrow before I spend $8.00 on this pair of jeans that I absolutely love that originally sold for $75, even though my mother told me to buy new pants. Tomorrow, sweetheart, these jeans ain't gonna be here and you can afford them even at $75! On the other end of the spectrum, I talked to an adult who was an exchange student more than twenty years ago. She said she talked to her parents maybe a total of 40 minutes in seven months. And she liked it that way.

There's a new group of Rotary members on the exchange committee and some of the old suggestions seem to be disappearing. For example, Chloe's group was told to call home when they arrive and then not call home or e-mail for three months. They're also beginning to understand, based on last year especially, that cell phones are extremely important (if they're widely used where the student will be living). I didn't think the phone was that important when Chloe left, and not even so much when she'd tell me often that she really needed a cell phone. Not until I spent a week in Pamplona with her did I realize that a cell phone is all but necessary and is an efficient tool that will help the kids integrate into their new culture quickly. Kids with cell phones are often looked on disparagingly by older adults ("spoiled brats"), but they are a huge part of the culture that is such an important component of exchanges. For some reason new things, like cell phones, are often dismissed during all the highbrow talk of multicultural experiences. If I were to do this again I would make arrangements for a cell phone for my student as soon as possible. Almost all of them in Europe (not sure about other parts of the world) are prepaid so there is not a danger of your child ringing up hundreds of dollars in unexpected phone bills. Besides, they use them for text messaging much more than for talking because that's cheaper.

Chloe had fun interviewing and was happy to be able to answer questions. Partway through the day she had an overwhelming compulsion to get on a plane and go somewhere. That made me happy.

What to do with those digital images

When you're away on your exchange and you fill up the media card in your digital camera, be careful how you get rid of the photographs and videos you have stored there. If you upload them directly to a computer they'll probably be fine. But some programs default to converting the photos to a much smaller file size so they'll upload quicker and won't take up as much room. Be especially careful if you upload them directly as an e-mail attachment because they'll almost always be made smaller. Photo files (usually jpeg) are compressed by discarding information in the photo file, which means some of the detail is lost. That's fine for e-mailing a photo home to mom of you standing under the Eiffel Tower, but not so good if you want to blow up the photo so you can crop away the guy on the side trying to sell you a glow-in-the-dark Eiffel Tower so you can have an 8 x 10 printed and framed for next Mother's Day.

Chloe learned the hard way. For the first half of the year she used Abby's computer to burn CDs of all of her photos before she deleted them from the memory card. After Abby went home I'm not sure what Chloe did, just that she has photos saved to a CD that are all but useless because they were saved at such a low resolution. She can't have a print made of her and Nana in the cathedral with Olite in the background because the photo is a bunch of relatively large squares instead of detail-filled tiny pixels. She also has a CD filled with nothing but the shortcuts to photos that she'd uploaded to her family's computer, where we hope the photos still are.

And be especially careful about emptying videos from your card. The first time we transferred photos to a CD at a commercial place was in Pamplona, where we transferred everything on the card to a CD. The employee asked if we wanted to check the photos and we did, when I noticed that none of the videos had transferred. She explained that the software isn't capable of that (that proved to be the case in Rome and Paris as well). If Chloe hadn't spoken Spanish we wouldn't have asked questions and probably would have believed the message on the machine (all of the machines we saw had an English-language option) telling us that the transfer had been successful, after which I would have deleted everything on the card, including the videos of San Fermín that were still there but not on the CD. It can take a lot of time to review a CD full of photos, time that can seem like an eternity when four people are waiting behind you at the Vatican Museums for their turn to empty their cameras. But if you don't take that time you may inadvertently erase some of your memories.

There are many options for emptying your camera's media card including the simple but expensive option of buying lots of them. A Google search will turn up more information than you'll ever be able to read. If you read the directions for whatever method you choose you can avoid being disappointed with the photographic memories of your year abroad.

Skype

Very cool. I've been meaning to try Skype, a free Internet phone service, but hadn't gotten around to it until Chloe said her host father was excited to try it out. We just got done talking and it works great. She sounded better than she usually does on the telephone. It's not perfect and is subject to the usual Internet hiccups (I'm guessing that a dial-up connection would be less than ideal, if possible at all). Chloe heard an echo of herself so hung up and called right back and the echo was gone. I'd rather pay for a phone call than have to bother with bad connections, but that wasn't a problem

All you need is an Internet connection and a microphone. The assorted microphones I have from different software that I've bought over the years are in a box somewhere, but the microphone on the Web cam worked just fine. I've read none of the directions, but they weren't necessary to talk. If you're online, a box pops up and you'll hear a telephone-ringing sound and all you do is click on the answer button. If there's a crowd, everyone can hear because the sound comes from your computer speakers.

They have another service, SkypeOut, that lets you call regular telephones from your computer for about .02 per minute to about twenty countries, including most of Europe (calls to cell phones cost more). I wouldn't give up my landline (Internet calling is just not quite there yet), but it's a great alternative, especially for international calling. I haven't researched their business model so I have no idea how they plan to make money from a free service, but I don't care. They don't have any of my personal information (except that I'm an 89-year-old man living in the Scottish Highlands) and have only the Gmail address I use for online registrations, so I won't be bombarded with Spam if they sell registration information. Worth a try, especially for exchange students to talk to their friends from home instead of paying for phone calls

More on phone cards

The cost of phone calls is very boring business until the exchange student wants to call friends at home. For Christmas we gave Chloe a phone card that she could use just to call her friends, with the understanding that when it was used up, that was it because I wouldn't recharge it (calling on special occasions is in another category). The better a shopper I am, the longer she has to talk to her friends.

Don't take anything for granted. For example, it would be reasonable to assume that if one company offered both an international calling card and a domestic calling card, the international card would be the best thing to use when calling internationally. Reasonable, yes, but that assumption will cost you money. Today was Chloe's friend's birthday so she called her at home. She wasn't home, so Chloe called her cell phone. Bad move, I thought, because calling a cell phone costs lots and lots more than calling a land line.

Or so the phone-card people have told me. After spending way too much time in endless-loop customer-service hell I managed to get to a person and get another opinion ("Press the star key and then press 1." Okay. "I'm sorry, that is an invalid selection." The bargain that is cheap phone calls is somewhat negated if you bash the phone to bits after trying in vain for fifteen minutes to get through to customer service).

With the MCI cards from Costco there is no per-call connection fee or monthly maintenance fee, which for us makes these calls cheaper than going with a service that charges those fees but has a slightly lower per-minute rate. Here's the latest Costco/MCI phone card score (Spain is one of the more expensive European countries to call from the US: France is .03/minute rather than .06):

• International cards
  from the US to Spain:
  calls to landlines = good (.06/minute)
  calls to cell phones = bad (.35/minute)
  from Spain to the US:
  calls to land lines = bad (.69/minute)
  calls to cell phones = bad (.69/minute)
• Domestic cards
  from the US to Spain:
  calls to landlines = bad (.13/minute)
  calls to cell phones = good (.13/minute)
  from Spain to the US:
  calls to land lines = good (.54/minute)
  calls to cell phones = good (.54/minute)

If you think that was confusing, in some countries your cost per minute varies depending on the phone number you are calling, and some area codes are blocked entirely.

The phone is here! The phone is here!

I love gadgets, so I was happy when my Mobal phone came today (I wrote about the deal here) but I can't try it out because it doesn't work in the US. So I'll look through the book, change the banner, put a few numbers in the phone book, and try out the games. I've looked and looked for negative reviews about the company or the phone but can't find any amid all the positive reviews and user reports.

For forty-nine US bucks I got a new Nokia phone and charger, a cool fitted plastic case filled with cool teal translucent plug adapters (I didn't know those were included but, because it's a UK plug, I wouldn't have been able to easily buy plug adapters here in the US), a SIM card, and free delivery. No activation fee, no per-day fee, no-monthly access fee, no deposit. Before I placed the order the company responded to a couple of my questions via e-mail in a matter of minutes, and included my new UK-based phone number. I ordered it Tuesday afternoon and it was here, all the way across the country, on Friday with their standard free FedEx shipping. Although it has a UK plug because it's a UK company (there's an office in New York), the transformer on the charger cord is for 110 or 220 current so you don't need a voltage converter. For $99 you can get a phone that will work in the US, but you'll have to go to their Web site to get the details on that. I don't need another phone that works here so for once I didn't buy more than I'll use.

According to a gazillion Web sites, Nokia GSM phones are easy to unlock so they'll work with any SIM card instead of with only one carrier's SIM (in this case, the one that Mobal contracts with in the UK). Service providers use software to lock the phones so you have to use their service, a practice (locking) that is illegal in Italy, so if you buy a phone there, you can use any SIM you can find. If I'd known about Mobal before Chloe left, I would have gotten her one, hacked into it to unlock it, and had her get prepaid SIMs in Spain. In Europe, especially, you can buy a SIM along with your cup of coffee and pack of smokes. Or, in my case, can of Diet Coke and a candy bar.

Lots of people think that kids with cell phones are just one more indication that our society is in a hand basket on a slippery slope to hell, but I'm not one of them. Read Ben-in-Japan's blog and you'll see how much they rely on their phones to make basic logistical arrangements. Read between the lines and it appears that many of the things he's done have been possible because he and his friends text messaged each other from distant parts of extremely crowded big cities in time to make crucial arrangements. Of course, his initiative is a big part of it, but I'm convinced, from what I've gleaned only by reading his blog, that one of the reasons he's able to meet up with different people and get so much out of his time there is the expert use of his cell phone.

One thing I've discovered while researching worldwide use of cell phones: if your idea of fun is to spend hours and weeks in the bowels of geeky tech forums, you'll be able to spend the rest of your days happily perusing posts about how to use a callback service to get a Lichtenstein phone number on the GSM phone you bought in America but that came from England so you can make and receive cheap calls from Kuala Lumpur to Kazakhstan. Hours and hours of great good fun.

Cell phones for travelers

Been doing a little research on cell phones in Europe for when I go meet Chloe. I'd like to have one to make, confirm, or cancel reservations, check in at home once in a while, and generally for emergencies, like please don't give my room to someone because I'll be three hours late because our train was canceled because there was a suspicious Fiat parked at the station. I refuse to pay exorbitant hotel surcharges for phone calls and it's not always convenient to find a pay phone (I used the pay phone at a bed-and-breakfast in Cambridge to let Steve know we'd arrived more or less intact after a tortuous days-long journey - it cost me five one-pound coins per minute, about $8.25 at the time).

No, you can't take your American cell phone to Europe. Well, you could, but it would be good only as a wedge under your hotel-room door to discourage intruders. Essentially, Europe and most of the rest of the world operate on GSM. There are a few GSM phones in the US, but most of them are locked to a specific carrier, so they are of no use outside of the US, either. Your US carrier may offer global options, but they are all expensive.

Renting a cell phone is very expensive: monthly rental fee, the calls are expensive per minute, there's a monthly access fee, and the companies require a hefty deposit (usually $300-$500, on your credit card). Then you have to send the phone back when you're done.

I found Mobal, a company that will sell you a Nokia for $49 with free delivery to your home before you leave. No deposits, no monthly access fee, no contract, the calls are billed to your credit card (about $1.25-$2.00 per minute in most of Europe), and you own the phone forever, so it will be just waiting for your next trip abroad. Links to favorable reviews by Arthur Frommer, Time magazine, Rick Steves, and MSNBC are here. This site and this one might be of some use to you, too. If you're willing to do a little mucking about with the phone, you can unlock the phone so you can use local SIM cards to get incoming calls free and local rates for in-country calls.

I see you, too

Chloe's new house has a Web cam and she told me I should buy one. I don't often chat online and I've never been interested in being visible when I'm using the computer. But I chatted with her and it was great to be able to see her, her new watch, her new purse, the room where she's sitting, and then her host parents.

I had a gift certificate to Office Depot so what the hell. It couldn't be easier to set up and yeah, it's fun. I held the cats up to the camera one by one, brought Scout in (she weighed about 13 pounds when Chloe left, and she's about 70 pounds now), showed her outside the window here, held up a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese (which will still be here when she gets home), then called Steve and told him to run home and they got to see each other. The only thing he does on the computer is check various ski reports, and only because I made it easy by creating shortcuts on the desktop for him, but he thought this was pretty cool and remarked throughout the evening about how amazing it is that a cheap piece of hardware makes it possible for him to see his daughter, in real time, thousands of miles away.

Today I was chatting with her at about midnight their time. She's home alone and I see her on the phone. She said she just called Maren to tell her to get online (of course, she could have asked me to call Maren, a mile away, to get online, but this is all still new). So I called Maren and told her to come over here so they could see each other while they chatted. The smiles and squeals of delight from both of them when they saw each other for the first time in almost five months made buying the camera worthwhile.

Taking it for granted

I've been an early adopter of technology and fully embrace most technological advances. I think gadgets are cool and use most every one I have to very nearly its potential. Like everyone else, though, I yell at my cell phone: "I said to call 'Ann cell,' dammit, not 'Karen' you stupid p.o.s. phone!" and, so, my phone proceeds to do neither but continues to taunt me with "Did you say . . .". I also get frustrated if a Web page takes more than a few seconds to load. How many Web pages was I able to view at all just a few short years ago?

Today I was walking downhill in Seattle toward the waterfront and talking to Chloe. She asked why it was so noisy and I said because it was extremely windy and I was walking over the top of I-5 in downtown Seattle. Then she asked what that other noise was, and I told her it was a woman standing on a street corner condemning me and my fellow passersby, in a Jamaican accent, to Hell if we didn't get down on our knees and praise Jesus right that very minute: "You a dead man!" she'd say to no one in particular.

Chloe's in Pamplona, Navarra, Spain. I'm in Seattle, Washington, USA. Thousands of miles away from each other with a nine-hour time difference. We are carrying on a normal telephone conversation, for six cents a minute, as if I were sitting at a desk and she were at another desk across town. We tend to forget how truly amazing that is.

The only safe computing is no computing

Can't remember if I mentioned before to be careful with someone else using your computer. Until I set her up with a Gmail account (1000 megs of storage), Alicia would save pictures she received in e-mail to a file she created on our computer, which wasn't going to do her much good when she moved on and no longer had access to this computer. I later discovered that she must have been saving the whole Hotmail page because there are all sorts of Hotmail graphics files littering my computer.

A while ago she was showing me something and every time the ZoneAlarm window would pop up with a warning that something suspicious was trying to access the Internet, she'd blithely click on Allow instead of Deny, which somewhat defeats the purpose of having a firewall. The other day she showed me a message in Hotmail that she thought was from an exchange student but there was nothing in the body of the message. She then noticed the attachment, which had a .zip extension, which is almost certainly a virus or worm. Christopher said he's never seen me run so fast as I ripped the mouse out of her hand and closed Hotmail just as she was clicking on the attachment. I think I may have scared her in my panicked haste, but she'll probably remember to ask me before she opens any more attachments.

Electronics

Chloe said Abby’s computer would not fully charge and was frequently at about 13% power after being plugged in all night. After making sure that she had it plugged into a voltage converter and not simply a plug adaptor, I told her to check the transformer that is part of the computer cord to see what the input voltage was: if it said something like “Input 100-240V” then it didn’t need to be plugged into an additional converter because it’s rated for our 110 volts and Europe’s 220 volts. I’m guessing that all laptops are this way, but it’s not my computer and I didn’t want it to fry under my direction.

She checked, it did, they plugged it into the wall, and it charged to 100%.

Magellan’s has a pretty good primer on electrical issues here. It’s basic information, but if you haven’t traveled outside the US, you have little reason to know it.