Pros and cons of traveling

I'm on my way home, waiting for my first flight at the airport of Columbus, Ohio. That is one of my favorite airports, because it offers free wireless internet access on all terminals. I hope that is a trend that catches on.

I'm not a big fan of traveling, especially business trips to the USA. You basically spend one day going from Europe to the USA, and two days going from the USA to Europe, due to the time zone difference. So I ended up with a 6-day trip for 3 days of meetings. That is just enough to get used to the jet lag when in the USA, and then you get the reverse jet lag back home.

On the positive side I quite like *being* in the USA for a while. While you might doubt their sincerity, people are outwardly a lot more friendly than in Europe, especially in shops and restaurants. Talking of restaurants, once you have identified the places to avoid, you can eat quite well in the USA. Especially steaks are very good, and restaurants are generally a lot cheaper than in Europe for the same quality of food. I also like eating bagels, which although supposedly of European origin are very hard to get in continental Europe. Mmmmh, freshly toasted cinnamon-raisin bagel with strawberry cream cheese! :)

With shopping in the USA I had mixed experiences. On a business trip I have neither the time nor the luggage space to shop much, but I do like visiting American malls. In Europe it is surprisingly France where you are most likely to find a mall which just looks like an American one. Other countries usually have much smaller shopping centers. Over the years the exchange rate between European currencies (now the Euro) and the US dollar fluctuated a lot, and so shopping is sometimes very interesting, and sometimes not so. Some goods like jeans are always a lot cheaper in the USA, but when buying other sorts of clothing you risk getting "made in China" stuff which is cheap, but falls apart the first time in the washing machine.

I used to buy PC games in the USA, but with WoW taking up all of my play time, I didn't buy any games this time. Console games I couldn't buy anyway, because just like DVDs they have regional coding, and you need a console modified with a custom chip to play them, which is less easy than modding a DVD player, it seems. You also need a TV able to display NTSC, but many modern European TV sets can do that.

I did end up buying a TV series on DVD, Will & Grace, just because I heard it was funny, I've never seen it in Europe, and the complete first season was just $25. With the help of some freeware program named DVD Region Killer I was able to get this to run on my laptop. I also found a site offering instructions on how to remove the region code check on my DVD player at home, have to test whether that is working.

Anyway, I'm happy to be heading home again. Live on the road has its advantages, but after a week I've had enough.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:25 PM Permanent Link