Technology (Or Lack There Of)

Written by: Grace Muth

As a person living in the 21^st first century I know as well as anyone that technology is important.  Having the newest iPhone, having a computer, iPads, the Internet, YouTube, video games, you get my point. When you’re traveling, technology becomes even more important.  It’s your way to connect back home, it’s entertainment for long flights, it’s a way to do math for homeschooling.  However all of this technology relies on battery power. When you run out of battery the device no longer works, simple logic. Fortunately we can easily recharge our gadgets by plugging a power cord into an outlet.  Except that US plugs don’t fit into the outlets outside of the US.

Before we left we made sure that we had adapters.  Adapters are great, you just plug the US plug into the adapter and now it works in whatever country you bought the adapter for.  We had two global adapters; those adapters were supposed to work in almost every country of the world.  In Greece we used the Europe adapter part.  The Europe plug is almost exactly like a US plug except instead of having two thin lines, the indents are circular.  Fortunately we were able to use the Europe adapters in Egypt as well. We also had two USB inputs in a wall in our apartment, which reminds me of another struggle.  This struggle is not just one found in traveling but in everyday life in the US as well.  Almost every power cord ends in a USB, not a plug, so you need a brick.  Brick are little plastic blocks that transfer the USB end of the power cord to the plug of the country you need. Back to the original point, it was super convenient to have two adapters and two USB plugs in the wall and each adapter had two USB ports so we had a total of six USB ports and two US plugs, that is until one of the adapters got fried after we overloaded it.  As we headed to India we had one adapter

            India was a whole different story.  We were able to use the Europe plugs but the thing is there were a lot of power outages. By a lot I mean at least one a day, for at least 15 minutes.  One time the power was out for a good 12 hours.  So while we didn’t have to go find new adapters was still really difficult to charge our devices.  Thailand was by far the easiest plug situation, the outlets were designed to fit Europe, Asia, and US plugs so no adapters were needed.

 In Hong Kong technology stores and market stalls that sold bricks were everywhere, so all we had to do was get some cheap bricks and then we could recharge our devices. Key word there is cheap, and cheap they were. One of the three bricks we got died in a week, and two of the four power cords broke after three uses.  China was the same as Thailand, and now in South Korea we are back to the Europe plugs, but our adapters are slowly dying.

            There’s one other struggle when it comes to technology and travel. This is Internet and Wi-Fi. Yes those are two different things. Wi-Fi is a way to connect to the Internet; I won’t get into the details. Greece and India were the hardest to connect to the Internet and Wi-Fi. In Greece you had to be in the lobby of our hotel and India, the router was slow and every single time the power went out, you had to reboot the system. The only country worse than India was China, there was nothing.  I mean nothing.  There was about one bar of Wi-Fi if you were lucky, but Internet, none.  On the flip-side Hong Kong, Egypt, and Thailand were great.  The connection was a little slow in Thailand, but otherwise it was great.  South Korea is the oddball.  There were plenty of available connections but all of them were locked, all we had was an Ethernet cable.  Once we figured out how to connect to Ethernet and turn on Internet and Wi-Fi sharing on the iMac, which took two days and an Arduino, the Wi-Fi started working great and we were able to connect to the Internet.

             As I stated before and described out this whole post, technology is a struggle, especially when traveling.  Sometimes it’s easy to forget that when we have such good signal and easy access to power sources in the states.  I’d like to be able to say that I have learned to unplug and be screen free, but the sad truth is, it’s nearly impossible to do that when you have to work so hard to plug-in.  In all honesty it’s been really frustrating trying to connect to back home and have access to the materials that we need for homeschooling.   It’s a little bit ironic that we rely so much on something that twenty-five years ago didn’t really exist.  It just goes to show that you can’t take something for granted especially when it’s as convenient as Wi-Fi.