What do you learn most from traveling? It's finding your way through things.
A GPS is quite a necessity here in California, most especially so when my brother, Londong, and I drive off to buy things by ourselves. A GPS is a small machine that helps you find your way on the road. It is no bigger than a calculator but you can punch into it an address or a destination and it gives you a map and a lady's voice which tells you where your next turn will be. The voice is rather mechanical and stern and it can be quite irritating at times but it can keep you from becoming entirely lost in a place you've never been to.
But you have to remember it is only a brainless machine. It can tell you the proper exit out of the freeway. If you miss a turn it will say to you "recalculating, keep left, exit highway 51" and so forth. But it will not know the state of the traffic on its suggested route. Neither can it tell if it is taking you through the roughest parts of town. If you do not know what you're doing it can take you in circles. And there are addresses it does know yet so you may still get lost if you do not know what your doing. But one gets better at it over time.
Jim Bateson, my friend and brother in law, has a better way of finding his traveling routes. He googles and prints out roadmaps for himself. This way he saves himself the consternation of having to listen to the GPS lady's voice. After a while of listening to the lady recalculate and bring you into traffic jams and the most dangerous parts of town all the time, you begin to understand why this makes so much more sense. Google maps are apparently easy to access. A lot of people swear by it. But you have to have computer savvy.
Computer savvy is quite a requirement here. The California culture is centered on the personal vehicle. There are only a few buses and very few taxies on the road. In all cases, they are unbelievably expensive. So everyone drives whether the latest model Harley Davidson or the most beat-up Japanese car. Do you want to shop for a good deal? The fastest and cheapest way is to google the item or the shop before you even leave the house. That's what the good shoppers do here, compare prices on the internet or find out which shop has special sales. Is the item cheaper on Costco or is it Best Buy, in Ventura or in San Bernardino? Everything it seems is available on the Internet.
Soon you learn how to find your way through the web here. A long distance phone call can cost you a lot of money. But you could talk to anyone with an email address for free. And you can talk to anyone all over the world. Here you learn the value of Yahoo Messenger. If you get far enough with it you could learn how to activate the voice and webcam so you can talk while your looking at the person your talking to through the screen. Bring it still farther and you can arrange for yourself a YM conference with a batch of friends. It takes a while before you can master the process. It can be touch and go for a while but it is also a lot of fun and a modest mastery of it can yield wonderful returns.
After a while you begin to ask yourself: what have I been doing all these years? Why is it I'm so ignorant with these things?
And what about the irony of all these? Safe in your comfort zone, the regular work and home, you never really needed to know how to work the internet. Now, thousands of miles away from home you begin finally to realize the computer's importance even as you also begin to realize the value of staying in touch and how easy it has become in this day and age.
After everything you realize finally that you are now learning not just the rudiments of traveling through geographic space. The computer after all is also virtual space through which you must learn also to navigate if you want to find for yourself the treasures it has to offer. One can only resolve to get better at it though time.
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