On a recent trip to Boston, I decided to add a GPS to my rental car. Although I'm great with direction and finding my way via a paper map, I had to drive about an hour outside of town -- at night -- and I figured having a satellite-based mapping system on my side would be a good thing. How wrong I was. I've never been so lost in my life.
I should have know it was going to be a disaster from the moment I tried to leave the airport. The correct highway onramp was right there in front of me, but so was a copy car and a slew of flashing lights barring access. Did the GPS know about this? Of course not. Not only did it want me to drive over a cop car to get on the highway, every time I followed the detour signs and was getting somewhere, the GPS would redirect me back to the same, closed-off entrance. I went in a big fat circle at least three times before I purposely got so lost that the GPS was forced to look for another entrance.
Sure, it found a new entrance -- actually about four of them -- but that still didn't help. The GPS became very fond of sending me through the Big Dig tunnels all over Boston. What happens when you go in a tunnel? The satellite connection fails of course! I would be driving along, needing to choose which direction to take out of the tunnel, and my GPS would disconnect. Of course, I almost always took the wrong direction because the GPS doesn't tell you where you will eventually be going, it just tells you where to turn and when.
Another problem in Boston is that each tunnel road also has a corresponding side road not in the tunnel. Can the GPS tell these apart? Of course not. It would tell me to take the road on the right when it actually meant the tunnel road on the left. So the next time I would reach one of these tunnel and side road choices I'd say "o.k., I really need to take the tunnel instead." ...and then it would turn out I was supposed to take the side road after all, so I could make a left turn over the tunnel. Argh!
It took more than an hour just to get on the freeway that night. I drove through some pretty cool looking parts of Boston, I just have no idea where they were! I do know I was in the vacinity of Fenway park at one point, so at least I got to salute the World Series-winning Sox the day after their big win.
You think the return trip would have been better...by then I'd figured out some of the foibles of the GPS and was learning to compensate. But oh no, I still got lost trying to get back into the airport. This time, the problem was street names. The GPS would tell me to "stay right and enter the McKinley (or whatever) highway" but there wouldn't be any such highway. There might be the 93 or the 1 or the Americas Avenue, but heaven help me, there was no McKinley highway to be found.
At least by now I was quicker on the uptake. After only one missed highway, I gave up on the GPS and resorted to that good ol' standby, the directional sign...you know, the signs with that nifty airplane symbol? Yeah, the ones that take you to the airport if you just follow the little picture. Much better than a GPS.
And for other locations? I'm sticking with the archaic paper map.
Happy driving!
Monday, November 12, 2007
Monday, October 15, 2007
What makes a myth?
Last week people all over the world commemorated Che Guevara's life and death on the 40th anniversary of his execution in Bolivia.
I often wonder about the myth that has become 'Che.' I've been drawn into this myth at times, yet I have to ask, "Who was he, really?"
Other than religious personages, I doubt any visage is as globally recognizable as that of Che with his beret and scraggly beard. I've seen his image on fridge magnets, buttons and t-shirts while traveling in countries on every continent: Turkey, South Africa, Australia, Croatia, Peru, England, the U.S. The list could go on.
These images take the 'Motorcycle Diaries' version of Ernesto Guevara as a young man developing a desire to help the poor and oppressed and create an idealized revolutionary.
On the anniversary of his execution, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote one of the few articles I've ever seen that focused on often-omitted facts about Che. For example, Che oversaw the executions of hundreds of dissenters and 'traitors' in Cuba at the end of the revolution. Today, we would question such actions from a leader. Just look at the fallen leaders in Serbia and the Middle East. How does Che's memory avoid the question altogether? Why are his actions often considered noble when similar actions from others are talked about as evil?
One of the men who caught and oversaw Che's execution was interviewed in the Chronicle article. To this day, he can't understand why people revere Che. He expressed distress that Che had become such a mythological figure...an icon who's human failings and evils had been long forgotten in favor of recalling only his purest principles.
I personally have encountered some of Che's detractors. I was talking to a woman from Peru about a year ago and I made some comment about how popular Che seemed to be in South Amercia -- Peru included. She got very frustrated and made it clear that she was not someone who idealized him "Not all Peruvians consider Che a hero," she told me. "I most certainly do not. He was a murderer."
So, what makes a myth? How do some people win the myth game, and others lose? Do we create these myths around people because we don't want to remember the truth? Or is it because we have lost faith in our leaders and need to believe in someone who fought for his ideals, regardless of what they really were and regardless of the consequences?
I wish I knew...maybe then I'd be able to understand my own conflicting emotions about Che Geuvara.
I often wonder about the myth that has become 'Che.' I've been drawn into this myth at times, yet I have to ask, "Who was he, really?"
Other than religious personages, I doubt any visage is as globally recognizable as that of Che with his beret and scraggly beard. I've seen his image on fridge magnets, buttons and t-shirts while traveling in countries on every continent: Turkey, South Africa, Australia, Croatia, Peru, England, the U.S. The list could go on.
These images take the 'Motorcycle Diaries' version of Ernesto Guevara as a young man developing a desire to help the poor and oppressed and create an idealized revolutionary.
On the anniversary of his execution, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote one of the few articles I've ever seen that focused on often-omitted facts about Che. For example, Che oversaw the executions of hundreds of dissenters and 'traitors' in Cuba at the end of the revolution. Today, we would question such actions from a leader. Just look at the fallen leaders in Serbia and the Middle East. How does Che's memory avoid the question altogether? Why are his actions often considered noble when similar actions from others are talked about as evil?
One of the men who caught and oversaw Che's execution was interviewed in the Chronicle article. To this day, he can't understand why people revere Che. He expressed distress that Che had become such a mythological figure...an icon who's human failings and evils had been long forgotten in favor of recalling only his purest principles.
I personally have encountered some of Che's detractors. I was talking to a woman from Peru about a year ago and I made some comment about how popular Che seemed to be in South Amercia -- Peru included. She got very frustrated and made it clear that she was not someone who idealized him "Not all Peruvians consider Che a hero," she told me. "I most certainly do not. He was a murderer."
So, what makes a myth? How do some people win the myth game, and others lose? Do we create these myths around people because we don't want to remember the truth? Or is it because we have lost faith in our leaders and need to believe in someone who fought for his ideals, regardless of what they really were and regardless of the consequences?
I wish I knew...maybe then I'd be able to understand my own conflicting emotions about Che Geuvara.
Monday, October 8, 2007
What's in a Name?
'What's in a name?' Everything.
I've just learned that the hardest thing about having a blog may be choosing the name... Choose right, and everyone will marvel at your wit and inventiveness at creating just the right title for conveying your passions, thoughts and expertise. Choose wrong , and you're stuck with a moniker that people will misunderstand the rest of your blogging life -- or at least until you dump the blog for another title.
I should know about misunderstood naming choices. Years ago, when free email was just getting started, I combined a college nickname with my passion for travel to open a Hotmail account. To this day, I still get people asking me if I'm a car fanatic because of my email address (...if you can figure out what nickname a girl named Yvette would have that rhymes with a car, you pass the test!). And I'm not...a car fanatic...just to be clear. Though I do love those MINI Coopers...
So this time around I spent a whole 20 minutes making my choice, 15 minutes of which involved asking at least five people nearby what they thought before taking the plunge. Now that's what I call market research.
What's in this blog's name? Hopefully, my passion for travel, my passion for all things global, and -- somewhere in the sub-head -- my interest in photographing and writing about the places and people I see and meet.
I hope that by sharing these passions with anyone who cares to pay attention I can inspire one more person to step beyond his or her doorstep to experience a new place. Maybe it's someone who's never left home, or maybe it's someone who's traveled far and wide already. One thing I've learned...the more places I visit, the more places I want to visit.
There's a whole world out there, so let's get going!
I've just learned that the hardest thing about having a blog may be choosing the name... Choose right, and everyone will marvel at your wit and inventiveness at creating just the right title for conveying your passions, thoughts and expertise. Choose wrong , and you're stuck with a moniker that people will misunderstand the rest of your blogging life -- or at least until you dump the blog for another title.
I should know about misunderstood naming choices. Years ago, when free email was just getting started, I combined a college nickname with my passion for travel to open a Hotmail account. To this day, I still get people asking me if I'm a car fanatic because of my email address (...if you can figure out what nickname a girl named Yvette would have that rhymes with a car, you pass the test!). And I'm not...a car fanatic...just to be clear. Though I do love those MINI Coopers...
So this time around I spent a whole 20 minutes making my choice, 15 minutes of which involved asking at least five people nearby what they thought before taking the plunge. Now that's what I call market research.
What's in this blog's name? Hopefully, my passion for travel, my passion for all things global, and -- somewhere in the sub-head -- my interest in photographing and writing about the places and people I see and meet.
I hope that by sharing these passions with anyone who cares to pay attention I can inspire one more person to step beyond his or her doorstep to experience a new place. Maybe it's someone who's never left home, or maybe it's someone who's traveled far and wide already. One thing I've learned...the more places I visit, the more places I want to visit.
There's a whole world out there, so let's get going!
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