General Travel Tips Vol. 1

Here are some general travel tips I've picked up over the years. I've tried to avoid things that are well-known or just common sense.

Get the special meal--Have you ever been on a flight and wished you could get your food before everyone else? Well, you can either fly first class or request one of the special meal options when buying your ticket. If you select kosher, halal, low-sodium, etc., you get your food before they start passing out regular meals. I can't understand why more people are not aware of this. My favorite is low-sodium because it comes with a packet of salt. I generally avoid kosher because I figure I'd have a hard time explaining that I'm not Jewish if the plane gets hijacked.

Get the more expensive bus--If there are two buses you can take from point A to point B, go with the more expensive option. The air-con, comfortable seats, on board bathroom, and lack of livestock are more than worth the extra $5.

Backpackers, leave the gadgets at home-- I've mentioned this before, but it's a mistake many people seem to make. If you're staying in a hostel (or anywhere else where security is a concern), don't travel with a laptop, ipod, $700 camera, etc. You either have to haul all this shit wherever you go or worry about the very real prospect of it getting stolen. A good compromise would be bringing an iphone or ipod touch--it can play video and music as well as connect to the internet for email and other applications. The device is small enough to keep on you without any inconvenience. Internet cafes are everywhere in case you need to do any significant typing or upload pictures.

Digital cameras should be small and cheap--If photography is your hobby, by all means get a nice digital SLR. Otherwise, you want a camera that is compact so you can shove it in your pocket and relatively inexpensive so you won't be heartbroken if you lose or break it. A small drop in image quality is a small price to pay for the pictures you'll be getting from bars/clubs/boats/whatever. Besides, you can easily find pictures of landmarks that are 100x better than anything you could do.

I'm sure there will be additional travel tips as I think of them.

August

I have a fairly significant project to finish by the end of August (nothing Laos-related) so I’m not sure how much writing I’ll get done this month. Hopefully I’ll have a burst of creativity and be able to put up one or two things.

I was listening to the Rolling Stones song “Sympathy for the Devil” and something I had never thought of started to bother me. Near the end of the song Mic Jagger sings “just call me LUCIFER” like it’s supposed to be some major revelation. The only thing is that the previous lyrics make it painfully obvious who the speaker is and the song is titled “Sympathy for the Devil.” The “ha, gotcha” ending really only works if you’re so stoned you forgot the first three minutes.

It must be terrible being a Hollywood makeup artist. I’m sure the job itself pays well and is interesting, but you must be constantly harassed by people wanting you to transform them for parties and other events. I’m sure the following happens all the time:
“So, what do you do?”
“I’m a special effects makeup artist.”
“That’s awesome! Hey, I’m going to a costume party in two weeks, can you make me look really fat?”
“Um, that would take over 20 hours to make molds of your face and color the prosthetic pieces.”
“I could pay you like $100.”
“That’s less than $5 an hour and my work schedule is really busy…”
“So, can you do it?”