Since cheapskate lil ole me didn’t feel like paying $15.00 US ($3.50 per minute for internet time) to start a thread while I laid over at Narita airport in Tokyo today, I have instead weasled out and waited until I am in my hotel room in Taipei, Taiwan to begin this poll.
What are some of the weirdest or most remote locations you’ve ever posted from? This one is definitely the strangest, so far. If all goes right, I’ll have an even weirder location to post from later this year, but until then, this is the winner.
I love it, trucks with running lights that could put many Christmas trees to shame. Motorscooters zipping around like blennies at a cleaning station. Advertisements that I cannot possibly read. Alluring street vendors and their stalls festooned with yummy little skewers of roasted meats that will probably give me the Hershey squirts for a week if I eat 'em.
Even better, all of the trucks have the equivalent of cow catchers on all four sides of them to prevent the accidental assimilation of a motoscooter as a shiny new hood ornament. I wanted different and I got different.
I posted from San Christobal de Las Casas, Mexico last year. Oh, and I also posted from Dublin somewhere last October, but the circumstances are rather vague in my mind…
I posted from the top floor of a brewery that had been converted into a mall, in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. About 700 miles from home, making it the farthest and the weirdest.
Hmm…I don’t know if I actually posted from these places, but I know that I at least lurked at an internet and international calling center in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic, last summer. That was an interesting experience, because you can’t really rely on anything–especially anything even somewhat publically available and mechanical–to work on demand there. You can get government flunkies to work for you, but you have to bribe them. (Some women can get them to work by charming them. I don’t have the tolerance for my own powerlessness to do that well at all.) Since computers are receptive to neither direct offers of money nor indirect offers of sex, it can take a while before you find one that will do what you want.
I lurked, and maybe even posted, while in a Jerusalem hotel lobby last January. (I wanted to post or lurk from an internet cafe in Jerusalem, but I couldn’t do that. Since there were lots of bombings going on, the capacity of the phone lines was always full-to-bursting with people calling each other to make sure their friends, neighbors, and family were OK. Getting any internet access at all outside of my hotel was impossible.)
I made one (brief) post from a shack near Thule AFB in Greenland. Getting data traffic through was a challenge–the Arctic hares had been chewing on the cables again (they couldn’t bury them because of the permafrost).
For reference, it’s 37 degrees F (3 C) at Thule right now. It’s even farther north than tisiphone’s maybe-post.
I posted a couple times from my relatives’ house in Wesel, Germany. I’ve also posted from my Dad’s office in Durham, N.C., when he had a one-year position there. (Wesel, is near Essen, BTW.)
