Lunch over IP

On traveling 207 days in 2005

The more I’m on the road, the harder I’m finding it to embrace what’s great about traveling - new places, new people, new food, new sights - and the more I find myself missing the big and small pleasures of home. And the longer I’m away from home, the harder it is to get back into local rhythms. My friends in the Berkshires no longer even pretend that I really live here anymore. They’re surprised to see me and are wondering when I’m leaving again, not in a mean-spirited way, but in a very real acknowledgement of my transiency.

This comes from my friend Ethan Zuckerman's blog (he's the founder of the GeeksCorps and currently a Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center). Getting some vacation between Christmas and New Year and finally finding a moment of calm, I just caught up with his thoughtful post about traveling – a "meditation", he calls it. I feel I could have written parts of it myself.
Ethan calculates that between February 1 and November 27 (the day he posted) he has spent 148 of 300 days on the road, visiting a dozen countries. I did my own math, and the result took me genuinely aback: in 2005 I've been away from my home in the Swiss Alps 207 days, not including the short one-hour commutes to nearby cities. I knew I have been traveling too much, but I hadn't realized how excessive that "too" was.
What justifies so much travel, so little stillness, such a nomadic continuum, the surrender of some social and family life? The truth is, as Ethan writes, that most of the time, and despite the inherent disorientation and the induced lethargy, traveling is a blast: the people you meet, the places you get to see and experience, the ideas you gather, the projects you get to work on, the difference you (think you) make, the energy that comes with being on the road, the things you study. It's like pulsing with the world. It's a sort of high, and sitting still for a few weeks, even in the midst of gorgeous alpine valleys and among family and friends, can therefore often feel like withdrawal and turn quickly into a desire to take off again.
I met Ethan in October in Maine, and we were both in the middle of one of those trips. That month I went through fourteen airports: LGW, LHR, CDG, GVA, BOS, PWM, LAX, SNA, SJC, SFO, MEX, DFW, LGA, plus five transits through my “home airport”, Zurich (ZRH).
I started observing them more closely. Security and boarding procedures have become long and painful; as a result, passengers are spending more time in airports; consequently, these have morphed. Airports were points of departure and arrival, they're now malls, information and entertainment centers, food plazas. They offer prayer (almost everywhere there are rooms dedicated to the practice of various faiths), rest, experimentation of advertising formats, culture, seduction ( what they don’t offer yet is enough electricity plugs). What they are not is a "place": airports don't really have a history, traditions, a language. They borrow all this from the people that pass through them hurriedly and anonymously on the way to somewhere else. A while ago I wrote down this sentence from writer Pico Iyer: "Airports are places where people from hundred of countries congregate, not communicating, thrown together in a generic space. I think they're the post-modern metropolis". I don't remember where I copied it from, but I would guess it was in a newspaper I read in an airports. When you go through so many airports in such a short time, you can't ignore their growing homogeneity. You leave from one to land in another that mirrors it: the same brands, the same chaotic services, the inevitable cup of Starbucks non-fat latte and the CNN screens, the same international magazines and candies on sale at the newsstand. You're there but feel really nowhere, and the only constant is the suitcase that you're carrying, which somehow becomes a surrogate of home compressed into a tiny space. And of course, the laptop and the cell phone: by their nature two "placeless" digital terminals that connect you to family, friends and office when you're in those "placeless" airport terminals described by three-letter acronyms.
And I started observing myself more closely, too. Like many frequent flyers I have developed my own habits when traveling: in long trips for example I don’t bring books, I bring the magazines and newspapers that I haven’t read in the last couple of weeks, so that after having read them (and taken a few notes, or ripped off articles I want to keep or share with others) I can abandon them and don’t need to carry them back, and other similar small tactics.
When you travel to certain cities more often than to others (in my case, London, Paris, New York, San Francisco and Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Geneva-Lausanne, Barcelona) you start developing local social circles that extend well beyond the business reasons of your trip, and that is a trap: because you start missing these “other tribes of friends” (as Ethan perfectly defines them them) when you’re at home as much as you miss home when you’re having coffee with them in Notting Hill or Brooklyn.
And then there is the way travel intersects with work. I mostly travel for work, and sometimes I plug a few days of vacation on the back of a business trip, just to avoid having to travel there again to catch white beaches or good ski slopes. Like many, my office is my laptop, so work is constantly with me, and while I sit still in an airplane, the other people working on the same projects (colleagues, suppliers, clients) are moving, and they expect me to move at the same pace. As the world is getting more connected (I’m talking about unproblematic access to Internet connectivity: honor to the guy who invented Wi-Fi – actually wasn’t that a woman, the actress Hedi Lamarr, who devised frequency hopping back in the 1940s?), as the world is becoming better connected coping is getting easier. But this makes me intrigued by Ethan’s notion of travel becoming a socially acceptable excuse for not answering phone calls and e-mails with the usual vigor and rapidity:

It is one thing to be inundated with email and unanswered phonecalls when you’re home at your desk - it’s another entirely when you’re on the train from Jaipur to New Dehli. In the first case, it’s your fault for being overcommitted and overwhelmed. In the second case, it’s still your fault, but it’s socially acceptable - laudable, even - as you’re trying to keep up despite the challenges of global nomadhood.

I had never thought of it in these terms. Ethan speculates that travel for types like him (and me) could be a coping mechanism for overcommitment – “I’m away, so, sorry guys but I can’t do this today”. I agree, and I don’t. I have offered that justification a few times myself when I couldn’t deliver a report or a story or something before deadline (luckily it doesn’t happen too often). But travel has a perverse (in the sense of virtuous) effect on overcommitted people: it helps them to sharply focus for a few hours at a time, and generally that’s their most productive time: when they are in airplanes, or waiting to board, or in a hotel room at night while it rains outside and there is no business dinner and the city’s night life is not particularly inviting, or at a café table waiting for the next meeting. They fire up their laptop, they have no disturbance (the colleagues are sleeping 8 time zones away, family too, there is no familiar noise – it’s easier to fence off the unfamiliar noises) and by the time they’re done they’ve caught up with days of work, in just a few hours. People who tend to be overcommitted also often tend to be vastly overproductive at times. That's what allows them to live the life they live.
OK, enough for now, I’ve got a plane to catch. (Just kidding).

A rounder ball, but not a smarter one

Football (soccer) balls may not look like the most sophisticated pieces of technology: they're round, they get kicked around on average 2000 times during a regular 90-minutes game, they come in different colors, are generally made of 32 pentagons and hexagons of leather stitched together, and when it rains they tend to become very heavy. Not so for the new Teamgeist ball (picture) that  will be used during the 2006 World Cup, which will take place in Germany from June 9 to July 9: it's a hi-tech device, and it is also a gorgeous object.
Adidas presented the new ball on Friday during the Cup's final draw. It weights between 441 and 444 grams and is made of 14 panels of polyurethane bound together with a thermal process. That makes it much smoother and perfectly round. Yes, all balls are round. But this one is said (by experts at a British university) to be much rounder than any other, and - because of the fewer panels and the absence of stitches - less prone to deforming after a kick, giving the ball better aerodynamics and the players significantly more control.
But another technology won't make it into the World Cup balls, and that's one whose development I've been following for a couple of years now. After inconclusive testing, FIFA (the world's football body) decided last week against using "smart balls" containing a tracking system based on an electronic chip. German firm Cairos intended to use them to help referees avoid mistakes (Did that ball cross the goal line? Was that an off-side?). The scheme was based on a wireless microchip installed in the center of the ball, whose signal would be picked up by 12 antennae positioned around the field, analyzed by a computer and immediately relayed to a "watch" worn by the referee. Last time I met Cairos' head of biz dev Christian Holzer, at a conference in Lausanne, he told me about a more ambitious design which would have involved putting microchips on the players as well (on shin guards). That would have created some serious impact on football: think of being able to relay to audiences both in the stadium and on television tons of statistical data about the game (players' position, ball speed, offense vs defense, and so on); or think of the mass of new and very detailed data that a trainer would have at his disposal to prepare the next game. But, as FIFA's Urs Linsi told Reuters, "the technology is not yet ready".

Voicemail from the North Pole

In my weekly column for the Swiss Sunday newspaper "Il Caffé" (in Italian) I write today about meeting recently (on separate occasions) two of the only five or six people who have reached the North Pole "solo" and unsupported: the Norwegian Borge Ousland (he got there in 1994 and 2001, and will leave again mid-January to retrace his route during the Polar winter) and the Brit Ben Saunders (in 2004).
Among many other things they said, both shared anecdotes that illuminate the fantastic reach of modern technology - more specifically, of helicopters and satellite phones - and at the same time how absurdly we use it.
In his 2001 trip, Ousland left Siberia and arrived at the Pole a day earlier than planned. He offered himself some rest before going all the way to Canada. The next morning, two helicopters landed a few meters from his tent, and from one came "a real sheik from the United Arab Emirates", tells Ousland. "He took some pictures, we talked a little, and then they left and I was there alone, again".
When Saunders reached the North Pole, he called his mother, his girlfriend and his sponsor with his satellite phone: "I got three voicemails!", he says, still amused.
If you read Italian, the whole column is here.