What more junk can I put on my iphone?

It's a gorgeous sunny and surprisingly non-humid Saturday in NYC - perfect weather to be out enjoying the outdoors..

....but I'm stuck indoors, still staring at my empty suitcase and consulting my packing list. I just don't seem to want to pack!  So instead I will share some of the links various friends have been sending me and also sharing some of the travel apps that I've downloaded.

This is a blog that LP sent me about Rolf Potts, an ambitious globetrekker and seasoned vagabonder who started the "No Baggage Challenge", i.e traveling around the world sans suitcase.

In the famous cult words of Alicia Silverstone  --- AS IF!

Tut, tut. I'd like to see him try this as a woman.  This is clearly one of those times that illustrate that Men truly are from Mars and Women are from Venus. I can't imagine going 2 blocks from my apartment without at least 5 basic articles on me... (in order of importance : iphone, keys, CC, inhaler, lip balm)

Here's one of his articles that advises how you would go about such a thing, if you're interested. "How to Pack for  Journey with No Luggage"

In any case, it's inspired, or rather -- admonished me -- to cross a few bulky things off my travel list (do I need flats in both brown and black? hmm..tough call)

Another enlightening read comes by way of Gary Ardnt. These are his top 20 travel observations after seeing the far reaches of the world, and it's all very touching.

20 Things I've Learned From Traveling Around the World for Three Years

My favorites include:

• "People are generally good"


• "Everyone is Proud of where they're from"


• "Modernization is not Westernization" and felt a giant rush of relief at hearing..


• "You can find the Internet almost Everywhere" (phew!)

Apps

Another thing on my to-do list is to find utilities or productivity apps for travel. There are a whole bunch of junk ones out there but so far I've downloaded Kayak Mobile, Tripadvisor Mobile, some phrasebooks off Lonely Planet and CoolGorilla.com

Kayak Mobile allows you to quickly get ahold your trip itinerary. Kayak Trips organizes all the various legs of your flights. What's neat about it is that you can forward trips@kayak.com all your email confirmations (from flights, hotels, trains, tours, activities) and it will extract the relevant pieces of information and upload it to your trip planner. So - say you just booked a flight on AA.com. You forward that email to kayak, and Kayak magically knows how to read through the text and extract the dates of travel, the confirmation numbers, the airlines, airports, gates, prices paid etc into its planner. It's not 100% seamless but it works pretty well from my experience. You can then download all of the information and sync it into your calendar.

Parlez vous Anglais? Par-lay who wha?


One of my biggest concerns is the language barrier when I travel.  I can only imagine the French sneering at the only french phrase I've mastered yet.  I'm lucky I was born bilingual but as you can guess if you don't speak the languages on a frequent basis, the age addled brain just can't hold onto any of it. I took Spanish from Junior High through High School and remember being decent at it, but when I subsequently took Mandarin in college, half of the Spanish was obliterated. Now, not having used either language much in the last 10 years, I'm just another stupid American :) Well, that's where phrasebooks come in.  I bought a few language phrasebooks to help out in a pinch..if stranded somewhere without knowing how to speak a lick of the local dialect... I'll just whip my iphone out and let the iphone do the talking. You can select the phrase you want to say in English, and it comes out of the speaker in the language desired. Pretty nifty. I got some of these for 99 cents off Coolgorilla.com. I've now got one in French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese.

Imagine having a whole conversation by shoving your iphone in someone's face. Awesome.