If there’s one thing that travel has done for me lately, it’s made me recognize and accept how addicted and reliant I am upon my smart phone (in my case, an iPhone).
When you travel (internationally), you have to make a hard choice — do I shell out big $$$ to AT&T to get an international data plan, do I shell out even bigger $$$ to use roaming data, or do I sever the umbilical and disable roaming data. Roll the dice on being able to get wifi. Or worse yet — don’t use the internet at all. Gasp.
Traveling with others, I get this feeling that some people who don’t get an international plan are hopping from connectivity bubble to connectivity bubble, holding their breath in between and hoping they make it to the next one alive. There’s a sense of relief when they can get back online. Check Twitter. Check email. Check in. Check a map. OK, now hold your breath and hope we can find somewhere else with wifi before it’s too late!
I’ve found myself more and more often opting to not get any data access at all, and to actually relish the experience of not having connectivity for the most part. When I was in Chile, it was rough at first, not having access to maps, Google, etc. But I got used to it. It was like taking a step back in time. I talked to people. I used a paper map. It wasn’t so bad. It turns out that not having connectivity to the world wide web forces you to live in… the world right in front of you.
That’s not a bad thing. Try it.
When we originally planned our trip down here, there were 2 places at the top of our list. Santiago and Buenos Aires. Santiago won out by a hair, but BsAs was right up there. After copious amounts of harassment from Robin, I finally gave in, and we picked up some cheap tickets to duck over there for the weekend. For Christmas. I’ll comment on the sanity of that in a minute, but here are some general notes from our Christmas weekend in Buenos Aires!
The Andes, flying from Santiago to Buenos Aires
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We’ve been here for over a week now, and it already feels relatively familiar and normal (in a good way), and we’re getting our feet under us. We’ve been lucky enough to spend some time with a string of different folks who we somehow managed to get connected up with (all connections from before we got here), and we’ve done some more tourist things, plus started getting some real work done.
These updates are as much for my memory as for any interest they may (or may not) be to other folks, so I don’t doubt that they will bore a lot of you to tears. This is a big one…
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Since arriving in Santiago, I’ve been posed with the challenge of finding good locations to work from. I like to work from cafes, which I refer to as “cafeworking”. Whether you’re traveling or just wanting to get out of the house for the day though (assuming you work from home, like I normally do), your selection criteria are probably similar either way. I decided that I’d document some of the things I look for when I’m trying to find a good place to work for the day. Feel free to add your own criteria in the comments.
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It’s now the first Sunday after arriving here in Santiago, Chile, so I wanted to do a bit of a round-up of how things have been so far, post some photos and get down my first impressions. I’m lazy, so I’m going to use bullet-form to get down a bunch of random bits and pieces:
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In a few days, I leave to go to Santiago, Chile for 40 days. It’s not a vacation. It’s not a work trip. If anything, it’s an experiment. It’s a test of the concept of truly remote working and of living a more portable (nomadic?) lifestyle. Hopefully, it’s a test of the future.
My apologies in advance, I have a feeling this post is going to ramble a bit…
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