Cell phones have their time and place, and I definitely appreciate how they enable me to go out for an hour (or three) during "normal" working hours without feeling like I am leaving my co-workers in the lurch.
However, the audio quality is such that it's no substitute for a proper phone in a quiet place. I don't particularly enjoy having conversations when the person at the other end is on a cell phone, because there's always lots of background noise and dropouts and robot-voice - especially in the USA where cell phone service is so shoddy. I cheerfully tolerate it with my friends and colleagues, but with a stranger? No way. If someone makes a sales call to me from a cell phone, for instance, they're almost definitely wasting their time.
The company where I used to work full-time (and now telecommute part-time) has gradually evolved in this direction. Today the "office" is one sublet room downtown with some servers in it. Someone goes in a couple times a week to collect the mail. She's the only one person who's even still in the same town; the rest of us have spread all over the place (for instance, I'm living 9500 miles away).
It was VoIP that really facilitated the diaspora. We thought about using Asterisk but decided that the cost-benefit ratio of running our own phone system was not favourable - nobody wanted the responsibility of keeping the CEO's phone working. So now we're using Nuvio, which has been quite good but not perfect. The pluses:
Seamless from the perspective of an outside caller. As far as they can tell, we're all sitting in adjacent cubicles.
There's some psychological advantage about having 3-digit extension dialing between colleagues. People are much more likely to pick up the phone and ask each other questions than before we got the system, even though their calls were getting paid for.
The Polycom IP phones are great, particularly the speakerphone. I regularly find myself collaborating with co-workers on speakerphone for extended periods of time, sometimes both of us writing or typing and not talking for long stretches, just keeping the line open until a question or comment comes up. I find it quite nice and it really isn't much less effective than working together in person, especially when combined with IM so you can copy and paste stuff back and forth. Also, the Polycom echo cancellation works even when I'm 300ms ping from the SIP server.
There's just something special about attending all my meetings while sitting on the balcony in boxers.
A few minuses:
When we first started using the system, there were a few quirks. One-way audio, dropped calls. That all seems to have stopped now.
It's not cheap. $25-$55 per seat per month, depending on features and calling plan.
The only way to activate/cancel call forwarding is via Nuvio's slow and cumbersome web interface.
Overall I think the virtual office is working. There are some slackers, of course, but that's always going to be the case. Mostly people find themselves being more productive than they were before. I know I do.
Also, it's allowed the company to retain people who otherwise would have quit because their spouse got a great job somewhere else, or they wanted to spend more time at home with their children. One of the most solid employees is a stay-at-home dad.
The amount saved on office expenses makes it easy to fly people in on those occasions when face-to-face really is necessary - big client meetings and so forth.
The stuff I do is based back home, so I'm insulated from southeast Asian work habits. Most of my friends with white-collar jobs have Saturday and Sunday off and leave the office by 6 or 6:30. I get the feeling people work a little harder in Singapore than here.
But how was it getting yourself set up there? Visa, renting an apartment, bank account, medical insurance, car, that kind of stuff. Was it tricky? Particularly assuming you didn't speak Malay....
Visa: No visa required to spend 4 months a year here. Actually you can spend 5 months at a time (three automatically on entry, then a 2-month extension). But the clock resets every time you leave and come back in.
Apartment: Just found something in the newspaper. I spent about a week looking when I first arrived, but it seems to be a renter's market. My landlord says they're really overbuilding.
Bank account: Haven't bothered. ATM and credit cards from elsewhere work, and there's online banking. With a spouse visa you should have no trouble setting up a bank account. Or your wife could.
Medical insurance: I kept my insurance from home in case of emergency, but haven't used it. Doctor's visit plus prescription usually runs me about US$15. Dental - I got a crown, the full cash price was less than my deductible would have been back when I was living in the US.
Car: I don't like driving. Here in the centre of town there's little need. I can walk to most of the places I need to go. I never have to wait more than 5 minutes for a taxi and the most expensive taxi ride I've ever had, other than to the airport, was less than US$5 (most are less than $1).
Language: A considerable number of people are completely fluent in English; everyone speaks some. It's obviously a self-selected group, but the vast majority of my friends here speak it as their preferred language. Some examples about the ubiquity of English: My lease is in English; when you go to the phone company web site to read about DSL, the information is only available in English, not Malay; there are four major English-language daily newspapers in Kuala Lumpur; foreign movies are shown in their original English (sometimes with Malay subtitles) in the cinema; the Yellow Pages is in English; and so on.
I took Malay classes for 6 weeks and enjoyed it, but I haven't had much chance to use the language except for ordering in restaurants and basic polite formalities. Now I'm planning to study Mandarin instead.
I'm not sure about anyone else but that sounds like one of the worst "vacations" possible to me. Perhaps his type of work lends itself to productivity in such an environment. I wouldn't be as productive and more importantly I wouldn't enjoy my vacation all that much. I see the appeal and relative productivity of sitting in a cafe or park and getting work done but to really travel and sight-see?
Three years ago, with yet another business trip to the other side of the world (Asia) coming up, I decided on a whim to put all my stuff in storage and give notice to my landlord. I had a bunch of projects in Asia on the horizon, so I figured I'd just hang out there for a few months.
Well, it's been more than a few months. I am renting an apartment in Kuala Lumpur, where I spend about 1/3 of the time (those periods when I really need to sit at my desk and focus). Another 1/3 of the time I'm on-site for work, which could be anywhere in the world.
But the good part is, since my expenses are so much lower over here (I'm paying half the rent for a flat twice the size), I have plenty of money left over for plane tickets. So the other third of the year I toss my laptop in a bag and go anyplace that sounds interesting that the airlines have on sale. Australia, Bali, Spain, Morocco, Korea, to name some of the most recent. Heading to Oman in a few weeks. I find hotels with decent internet connection (believe it or not, it's usually the cheap ones where you get the best net access) and let Asterisk route my calls to me, and nobody's the wiser.
No, it's not a traditional vacation. I don't spend a rigidly demarcated two weeks totally divorced from routine, with colleagues and work a distant memory. I normally have to at least think about work every day, and occasionally I find myself doing 10 or 12 hour days in a place where I'd really rather be outside.
But when my "vacation" lasts 4 months a year, I don't mind that. The memory of a few 10-hour stretches melts away when I walk outside and spend the rest of my time being fascinated by my environment, eyes wide open and days filled with discovery and wonder. Since I buy my air tickets in Asia, I can normally push back my return to make up for unexpected work, without paying change fees.
And to be honest, the other 4 months, the ones I spend in Malaysia, are pretty vacationey too. Tropical weather, weekend trips to the beach, monkeys in the trees, exotic holidays and festivals around every corner... the thought of going back to spending the year sitting in the office unless pulled elsewhere by work, well, it's unthinkable.
Why are you doing that? There are much cheaper ways to call mobiles.
One of the easier ways is to pick a service from Betamax (link is to a 3rd-party price-comparison grid that will help you pick the Betamax service with the best rates to your destinations).
The problem that arises is most cell-providers use a white-list of ESNs. For example, if you move your SIM card from a Verizon phone to an unbranded, direct-from-manufacturer phone, your will get rejected of service because the ESN isn't in that whitelist.
I don't know about Verizon, but I've only ever used Cingular with cheap phones purchased in Asia. No problems at all.
You said it yourself, some people don't have travel friendly banks. I happen to be one of them unfortunately.
Walk into a credit union or a small consumer-friend bank, set up a traveling account, and put money in it before your trips. If you need to later, you can top up using your laptop.
A calling card is a backup for when your cell phone doesn't work, which in my experience was pretty often. My phone barely worked in Vietnam and Malaysia and much of China at the locations I was staying. Cheap call shops are not always readily available in all locations and if you travel on business trips like I do, you may not have time to find one. As for their cost, calling cards can be very cost effective. I've gotten rates of $0.25-1.35/minute which ain't cheap but it was a hell of a lot cheaper than my cell phone.
Maybe the problem is with your "rather nice" phone?
I also travel on business, with international trips every week or two for most of the year. My busted-down old phone gets 7 or 8 signal bars (out of 8) pretty much every vaguely populated place in Malaysia (with the sad exception of the lift in this building). Digi SIM card costs US$5. Calls to the US run that down at US$0.05/minute. Forwarding my US and European numbers to the Malaysian (or Thai) SIM card so I can receive calls costs me US$0.01/minute. In China and Singapore it costs me $0.00/minute.
You might have access through your phone but that's location dependent and potentially pricey.
In less wealthy countries, GPRS data access can be really cheap (admittedly not everywhere). In Thailand you can get 50 hours of data free with your SIM card. In China you can get a month of unlimited access for US$25. Not to mention that every hotel I've ever stayed at in China - except for the super-upscale ones, which I generally avoid - either had broadband or let me do dial-up internet from the room for no charge at all (and supplied me with the number to dial as I have no Chinese account). This includes towns too small to have a petrol station.
There's a lot of different variables here (country, rural/urban, time available to sort things out) but I guess I just totally disagree with you about the difficulty and expense of all this.
My work requires me to be online daily, sometimes for hours, and to be available by phone 24/7 to deal with problems that arise during certain project phases. I dread going to Europe or USA because I know it's going to be an expensive nuisance to satisfy these requirements, but here in Asia it's always been trivially easy. I do a lot of work in remote areas, and I can get sorted out much more easily in a Thai village than in London or Washington.
Don't be the American guy who dresses up like Ranger Rick to walk around foreign cities.
Why not? Everyone already knows you're a tourist as soon as they see you, no matter how much you try to fit in. And you're living out of a backpack; you're not going to be wearing neatly-pressed tuxedos or winning any best-dressed awards. So you might as well be comfortable.
Not your macbook. That's a huge label to get robbed in a lot of countries.
Have you ever traveled?
My suggestion is just set up a linux box runing `vncserver` (Mac probably has a vncserver, too) and get a good handheld device: Something with a color screen with enough processing power to play MP3s/OGG/FLAC and a vnc client
I've been to China, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand... You're not likely to talk on your cell phone much since rates overseas are usually US$1-$4 per minute.
Not in Japan obviously, but in the other countries, if you buy a local SIM card, you'll be paying less than 25 cents per minute to call the USA. Here in Malaysia it was 2.5 cents/minute for direct-dialed calls to the USA last year; sadly they doubled it to $0.05 on January 1.
GSM cell phone. If it can do email that's a nice bonus. (borrow/rent CDMA if you are in a country without GSM)
Small solar calculator (for negotiations if you need to buys something and don't speak the language)
Are there any phones that don't contain a calculator?
Currency for the countries you are visiting (airport/hotel conversion rates are expensive)
But ATMs are cheap, as long as you have a traveler-friendly bank. Changing cash is for chumps with money to burn.
An international calling card with at least 500 minutes
That's got to be the most expensive way of calling home short of launching your own satellite. There are cheap call shops everywhere that will beat the rate on any calling card purchased outside that country. Or just use your phone, as mentioned above, it's most likely much cheaper than going through the calling card too.
I was usually able to find an internet cafe in most big cities and rural areas typically lack net access.
Rural areas in the countries you list (except parts of Vietnam) certainly do not lack net access, unless you mean places that actually have no people in them.
as a photographer I think you would be better off bringing a few extra memory cards for your camera and uploading the pics when visiting a cybercafe or run into someone that might be nice enough to let you use their computer.
Each 10-megapixel photo will take about 2 weeks to upload from a cybercafe in Nepal.
take ones that use AA or AAA batteries. That way you wont get stuck with the bulk and restrictions, and hastles of chargers.
I agree with looking for cameras, etc., that use standard-size batteries. But not with buying disposables.
Buy a 20 pack of AA batteries every once in awhile and be done with it.
Halfway-decent rechargeables will last three or four times as long in a digital camera - on one charge - as premium disposables (Duracell Megavoltmaster 5000 Plus or whatever). Now multiply that by the hundred or more charge cycles you'll go through before they start to suck, and you're talking about a huge amount of wasted money using disposables. Not to mention the environmental damage (or do you always find a dedicated battery disposal receptacle?).
Definitely don't buy the Apple kit, it's the world's biggest ripoff. Also, why buy adapters that only work for your Apple device? For 1/10 of the price, you can buy adapters that will work for everything. Throw in an extra $2 for a tiny 1-to-3 cube adapter at Walmart and you're still way ahead of the game.
Living in Southeast Asia, my couch has been the halfway point for many round-the-world travelers over the years. I've seen those Kensington-style ones (many companies sell the same thing under their brand) and they're fragile as a butterfly. Normally it goes something like this:
HOUSEGUEST: Oh, you use those big UK plugs here, huh?
ME: Yeah.
HOUSEGUEST: Hmm, I have this stupid Kensington multi-adapter... oh shit, yeah, the UK plug part is broken off. I think a kitten looked at it funny from across the room once.
ME: Why are you still carrying that thing around?
HOUSEGUEST: Well, the Israel plug still works, as long as I hold my finger on the top and this piece of tape doesn't come off. Not really planning on going to Israel, but you never know.
ME: Here, have a proper adapter. Cost me $1. You can buy me a beer.
I travel with a small set of WonPro adapters. No moving parts, tough as nails. They take up a little more space than the gimmicky Swiss Army ones but no more weight, and they have never let me down despite years of abuse. A set that lets me plug in any device almost anywhere in the world cost about US$6.
Not sure if you can get them so cheap in the USA, but like many things, it's better to wait and buy adapters once you've started your trip.
My iBook went to 50 countries - in Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, Australia - before entering semi-retirement as a media server at home. It rode on buses and ferries, trains and cross-country cycling trips. It was rained on, blasted with sand in the Iraqi desert, tossed around, and frozen. It looks pretty beat-up, but it still works as well as the day I got it.
Its replacement, the MacBook, has already been to 10+ countries (many of them several times - it flies internationally almost every week, I am looking into getting it its own passport) in its few short months of life, and seems no worse for the wear.
Someone knows where you can get an awesome burger for lunch that didn't come prepackaged and microwaved. There's an awesome family-run place around the corner from my office. $5 gets you a great bacon cheeseburger, in and out in 30 minutes. Drive a little farther and there's a burger dive, complete with deep-fried whatever-the-hell-you-want: $8 gets you burger, onion rings and either jalapeno poppers or a real milkshake. For office meetings, an Italian restaurant serves up pizza.
What's the point? No matter how family-run it looks, it all came from Sysco, most of it pre-prepared.
I'm trying to imagine how a bus would save time over driving...
These are company shuttles, they don't make that many stops. They are able to use dedicated bus lanes. And most importantly, you get all the time back, since rather than sitting in a car for 45 minutes, you can read, work, or sleep on the bus.
BART seats are gross. I always get this sticky feeling from the fabric. I much prefer New York's easily-cleaned seating, even if it doesn't coddle my butt.
Depends on the city. Some bus routes in New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco (to name three US cities I've lived in without a car) have very upscale white-collar crowds.
Slashdot Mirror
Cell phones have their time and place, and I definitely appreciate how they enable me to go out for an hour (or three) during "normal" working hours without feeling like I am leaving my co-workers in the lurch.
However, the audio quality is such that it's no substitute for a proper phone in a quiet place. I don't particularly enjoy having conversations when the person at the other end is on a cell phone, because there's always lots of background noise and dropouts and robot-voice - especially in the USA where cell phone service is so shoddy. I cheerfully tolerate it with my friends and colleagues, but with a stranger? No way. If someone makes a sales call to me from a cell phone, for instance, they're almost definitely wasting their time.
The company where I used to work full-time (and now telecommute part-time) has gradually evolved in this direction. Today the "office" is one sublet room downtown with some servers in it. Someone goes in a couple times a week to collect the mail. She's the only one person who's even still in the same town; the rest of us have spread all over the place (for instance, I'm living 9500 miles away).
It was VoIP that really facilitated the diaspora. We thought about using Asterisk but decided that the cost-benefit ratio of running our own phone system was not favourable - nobody wanted the responsibility of keeping the CEO's phone working. So now we're using Nuvio, which has been quite good but not perfect. The pluses:
A few minuses:
Overall I think the virtual office is working. There are some slackers, of course, but that's always going to be the case. Mostly people find themselves being more productive than they were before. I know I do.
Also, it's allowed the company to retain people who otherwise would have quit because their spouse got a great job somewhere else, or they wanted to spend more time at home with their children. One of the most solid employees is a stay-at-home dad.
The amount saved on office expenses makes it easy to fly people in on those occasions when face-to-face really is necessary - big client meetings and so forth.
The stuff I do is based back home, so I'm insulated from southeast Asian work habits. Most of my friends with white-collar jobs have Saturday and Sunday off and leave the office by 6 or 6:30. I get the feeling people work a little harder in Singapore than here.
Visa: No visa required to spend 4 months a year here. Actually you can spend 5 months at a time (three automatically on entry, then a 2-month extension). But the clock resets every time you leave and come back in.
Apartment: Just found something in the newspaper. I spent about a week looking when I first arrived, but it seems to be a renter's market. My landlord says they're really overbuilding.
Bank account: Haven't bothered. ATM and credit cards from elsewhere work, and there's online banking. With a spouse visa you should have no trouble setting up a bank account. Or your wife could.
Medical insurance: I kept my insurance from home in case of emergency, but haven't used it. Doctor's visit plus prescription usually runs me about US$15. Dental - I got a crown, the full cash price was less than my deductible would have been back when I was living in the US.
Car: I don't like driving. Here in the centre of town there's little need. I can walk to most of the places I need to go. I never have to wait more than 5 minutes for a taxi and the most expensive taxi ride I've ever had, other than to the airport, was less than US$5 (most are less than $1).
Language: A considerable number of people are completely fluent in English; everyone speaks some. It's obviously a self-selected group, but the vast majority of my friends here speak it as their preferred language. Some examples about the ubiquity of English: My lease is in English; when you go to the phone company web site to read about DSL, the information is only available in English, not Malay; there are four major English-language daily newspapers in Kuala Lumpur; foreign movies are shown in their original English (sometimes with Malay subtitles) in the cinema; the Yellow Pages is in English; and so on.
I took Malay classes for 6 weeks and enjoyed it, but I haven't had much chance to use the language except for ordering in restaurants and basic polite formalities. Now I'm planning to study Mandarin instead.
I'm a night owl, so not really. I make up for missing late afternoons by my remarkable responsiveness super-early in the "morning".
Three years ago, with yet another business trip to the other side of the world (Asia) coming up, I decided on a whim to put all my stuff in storage and give notice to my landlord. I had a bunch of projects in Asia on the horizon, so I figured I'd just hang out there for a few months.
Well, it's been more than a few months. I am renting an apartment in Kuala Lumpur, where I spend about 1/3 of the time (those periods when I really need to sit at my desk and focus). Another 1/3 of the time I'm on-site for work, which could be anywhere in the world.
But the good part is, since my expenses are so much lower over here (I'm paying half the rent for a flat twice the size), I have plenty of money left over for plane tickets. So the other third of the year I toss my laptop in a bag and go anyplace that sounds interesting that the airlines have on sale. Australia, Bali, Spain, Morocco, Korea, to name some of the most recent. Heading to Oman in a few weeks. I find hotels with decent internet connection (believe it or not, it's usually the cheap ones where you get the best net access) and let Asterisk route my calls to me, and nobody's the wiser.
No, it's not a traditional vacation. I don't spend a rigidly demarcated two weeks totally divorced from routine, with colleagues and work a distant memory. I normally have to at least think about work every day, and occasionally I find myself doing 10 or 12 hour days in a place where I'd really rather be outside.
But when my "vacation" lasts 4 months a year, I don't mind that. The memory of a few 10-hour stretches melts away when I walk outside and spend the rest of my time being fascinated by my environment, eyes wide open and days filled with discovery and wonder. Since I buy my air tickets in Asia, I can normally push back my return to make up for unexpected work, without paying change fees.
And to be honest, the other 4 months, the ones I spend in Malaysia, are pretty vacationey too. Tropical weather, weekend trips to the beach, monkeys in the trees, exotic holidays and festivals around every corner... the thought of going back to spending the year sitting in the office unless pulled elsewhere by work, well, it's unthinkable.
Why are you doing that? There are much cheaper ways to call mobiles.
One of the easier ways is to pick a service from Betamax (link is to a 3rd-party price-comparison grid that will help you pick the Betamax service with the best rates to your destinations).
I don't know about Verizon, but I've only ever used Cingular with cheap phones purchased in Asia. No problems at all.
Walk into a credit union or a small consumer-friend bank, set up a traveling account, and put money in it before your trips. If you need to later, you can top up using your laptop.
Maybe the problem is with your "rather nice" phone?
I also travel on business, with international trips every week or two for most of the year. My busted-down old phone gets 7 or 8 signal bars (out of 8) pretty much every vaguely populated place in Malaysia (with the sad exception of the lift in this building). Digi SIM card costs US$5. Calls to the US run that down at US$0.05/minute. Forwarding my US and European numbers to the Malaysian (or Thai) SIM card so I can receive calls costs me US$0.01/minute. In China and Singapore it costs me $0.00/minute.
In less wealthy countries, GPRS data access can be really cheap (admittedly not everywhere). In Thailand you can get 50 hours of data free with your SIM card. In China you can get a month of unlimited access for US$25. Not to mention that every hotel I've ever stayed at in China - except for the super-upscale ones, which I generally avoid - either had broadband or let me do dial-up internet from the room for no charge at all (and supplied me with the number to dial as I have no Chinese account). This includes towns too small to have a petrol station.
There's a lot of different variables here (country, rural/urban, time available to sort things out) but I guess I just totally disagree with you about the difficulty and expense of all this.
My work requires me to be online daily, sometimes for hours, and to be available by phone 24/7 to deal with problems that arise during certain project phases. I dread going to Europe or USA because I know it's going to be an expensive nuisance to satisfy these requirements, but here in Asia it's always been trivially easy. I do a lot of work in remote areas, and I can get sorted out much more easily in a Thai village than in London or Washington.
On your next trip, look into packing some paragraph breaks.
Why not? Everyone already knows you're a tourist as soon as they see you, no matter how much you try to fit in. And you're living out of a backpack; you're not going to be wearing neatly-pressed tuxedos or winning any best-dressed awards. So you might as well be comfortable.
Have you ever traveled?
Have you ever traveled?
Can you point me to a single laptop computer for sale anywhere that does not work with 220v? Not including museum pieces...
Yep. There's no other way to live. I'm too spoiled to ever go back to an office.
Not in Japan obviously, but in the other countries, if you buy a local SIM card, you'll be paying less than 25 cents per minute to call the USA. Here in Malaysia it was 2.5 cents/minute for direct-dialed calls to the USA last year; sadly they doubled it to $0.05 on January 1.
Are there any phones that don't contain a calculator?
But ATMs are cheap, as long as you have a traveler-friendly bank. Changing cash is for chumps with money to burn.
That's got to be the most expensive way of calling home short of launching your own satellite. There are cheap call shops everywhere that will beat the rate on any calling card purchased outside that country. Or just use your phone, as mentioned above, it's most likely much cheaper than going through the calling card too.
Rural areas in the countries you list (except parts of Vietnam) certainly do not lack net access, unless you mean places that actually have no people in them.
Each 10-megapixel photo will take about 2 weeks to upload from a cybercafe in Nepal.
I agree with looking for cameras, etc., that use standard-size batteries. But not with buying disposables.
Halfway-decent rechargeables will last three or four times as long in a digital camera - on one charge - as premium disposables (Duracell Megavoltmaster 5000 Plus or whatever). Now multiply that by the hundred or more charge cycles you'll go through before they start to suck, and you're talking about a huge amount of wasted money using disposables. Not to mention the environmental damage (or do you always find a dedicated battery disposal receptacle?).
Definitely don't buy the Apple kit, it's the world's biggest ripoff. Also, why buy adapters that only work for your Apple device? For 1/10 of the price, you can buy adapters that will work for everything. Throw in an extra $2 for a tiny 1-to-3 cube adapter at Walmart and you're still way ahead of the game.
Living in Southeast Asia, my couch has been the halfway point for many round-the-world travelers over the years. I've seen those Kensington-style ones (many companies sell the same thing under their brand) and they're fragile as a butterfly. Normally it goes something like this:
HOUSEGUEST: Oh, you use those big UK plugs here, huh?
ME: Yeah.
HOUSEGUEST: Hmm, I have this stupid Kensington multi-adapter... oh shit, yeah, the UK plug part is broken off. I think a kitten looked at it funny from across the room once.
ME: Why are you still carrying that thing around?
HOUSEGUEST: Well, the Israel plug still works, as long as I hold my finger on the top and this piece of tape doesn't come off. Not really planning on going to Israel, but you never know.
ME: Here, have a proper adapter. Cost me $1. You can buy me a beer.
I travel with a small set of WonPro adapters. No moving parts, tough as nails. They take up a little more space than the gimmicky Swiss Army ones but no more weight, and they have never let me down despite years of abuse. A set that lets me plug in any device almost anywhere in the world cost about US$6.
Not sure if you can get them so cheap in the USA, but like many things, it's better to wait and buy adapters once you've started your trip.
My iBook went to 50 countries - in Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, Australia - before entering semi-retirement as a media server at home. It rode on buses and ferries, trains and cross-country cycling trips. It was rained on, blasted with sand in the Iraqi desert, tossed around, and frozen. It looks pretty beat-up, but it still works as well as the day I got it.
Its replacement, the MacBook, has already been to 10+ countries (many of them several times - it flies internationally almost every week, I am looking into getting it its own passport) in its few short months of life, and seems no worse for the wear.
What's the point? No matter how family-run it looks, it all came from Sysco, most of it pre-prepared.
You have to go Asian to avoid the factory food.
These are company shuttles, they don't make that many stops. They are able to use dedicated bus lanes. And most importantly, you get all the time back, since rather than sitting in a car for 45 minutes, you can read, work, or sleep on the bus.
3 hours? About half that.
BART seats are gross. I always get this sticky feeling from the fabric. I much prefer New York's easily-cleaned seating, even if it doesn't coddle my butt.
Depends on the city. Some bus routes in New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco (to name three US cities I've lived in without a car) have very upscale white-collar crowds.