After traveling in Italy for the past two weeks, I learned a lot about how digital devices and various other tools can help with travel logistics. This was the first big international trip where I made a significant effort to use digital tools; it’s stunning how much easier it is to get oriented when you’re not only relying on static offline tools.

Jailbroken iPhone
All of Italy (and most of Europe) is blanketed in fast 3G, making the iPhone one of the most useful tools. You’ll need to jailbreak your iPhone first. iClarified is the easiest way to do this.

After landing in Italy, all you need to do is go to a local wireless provider and get a prepaid SIM card with data plan, which will run you around €15. I went with TIM, which provided 3GB of free data and great coverage even in the most rural areas of Italy. I also hear good things about Vodafone and Wind.

Once you get this setup, you’ll also be able to tether your iPhone 3G connection to your other devices. This is useful since many hotels in Italy still charge highway robbery fees for WiFi. If you have an iPad without 3G, you can grab the MiWi app to create a WiFi hotspot using your iPhone. As far as I know, this is the only way to share your internet connection from your iPhone to your iPad.

Evernote
I made heavy use of Evernote throughout the entire trip. It’s the perfect tool to throw all those random bits of information like receipts, reservations, and itineraries. It’s also an easy way to share information between your iPad, iPhone, and laptop.

Language Apps
In bigger urban areas like Florence and Rome, you can get by with English. But, in smaller towns like Bologna, you’ll have more problems. It’s a good idea to get the basic phrases down, and rely on a full dictionary for more difficult situations.

I recommend these two apps for Italian:

Italian Phrase Book – The best “phrase book” app. It allows you to easily build phrases for various different situations, with clear audio pronunciations.

WordRoll Italian/English Translation Dictionary – Quick and easy to use It/Eng dictionary.

Google My Maps
Google My Maps is the best way to create and manage itinerary of places. You can access it by going to http://maps.google.com and clicking on “My Maps”. The UI isn’t the most intuitive, but I’ve found it’s really the best way to manage a bunch of locations you want to see. Also, it’s the best app to get a “feeling” for a place, especially since you can easily see nearby places, zoom into street view, and add google search results to your maps.

Once you make your map, you can access your map on the iPhone by going to http://my-maps.appspot.com/. This is a 3rd party solution, since Google doesn’t yet offer a native solution. From here, you will be able to browse all your maps, and see all your mapped points at once in the Google Maps interface on the iPhone. Very handy.

Using this, I was able to easily navigate the streets of Rome and Milan. And trust me, the streets can get very hairy, with many street names ending and starting at the most unpredictable places.

Here is a list of my maps that I’ve created:
Milan
Florence
Bologna

TripAdvisor
Yelp may rule the roost for reviews in the US, but TripAdvisor is king internationally. As always, you should take reviews with a grain of salt, but I’ve found TripAdvisor to be pretty reliable, especially for hotels and restaurants.

Food Books
Okay, so these aren’t digital, but if you’re into food, and want to taste traditional Italian cuisine, I suggest taking a look at L’Osteria Italia and Fred Plotkin’s Italy for the Gourmet Traveler. Many people don’t know that it’s actually easy to eat badly in Italy by falling into tourist traps.

Understand the food, the traditions, and prepare a list of restaurant options before heading out! The last thing you want to do is to duck into a restaurant that cooks Americanized Italian food just because you were to hungry to look for anything else.

New York 2008 from James Yu on Vimeo.

Beef noodle soup is a classic taiwanese staple dish. Walking in the city, I was bombarded by restaurants blazing red signs touting their award winning beef noodle soup. Where, indeed, is the best?

The beef noodle soup was actually introduced to Taiwan by the Chinese Muslims and have since become a staple dish in the Taiwanese culinary arsenal.

Like many deeply rooted culinary dishes, beef noodle soup had as many renditions as cooks. Some people make it with a light, clean soup, while others serve up bowls of deep, dark broth. Then, there is matter of the beef: should it be a straight cut? Or, should it contain some tendon?

Given I only had two days, I decided to go to a place Joanne’s parents suggested. It’s a place called Lao Zhong, and it’s tucked away in the Zhong Shan district near the center of Taipei.

Given my weak Chinese reading skills, I simply asked them which kind of beef noodle soup they are famous for. The answer was the half beef half muscle gelatin. After a short wait, a piping hot bowl of soup appeared.

Unlike the broth in pho, the Taiwanese beef noodle broth has a more assertive and straightforward beef taste. The particular broth I had was the light kind. The beef was tender, and easily snapped when bitten into. The tendon rounded out the flavor of the broth and beef, and added a lusciousness to the dish.

A video montage of some of the footage I shot with my flip while in Taipei.

Taiwan 2008 from James Yu on Vimeo.

Places in the video:
CKS Memorial
Shilin Night Market
Shida Night Market
Ximending District
Taipei Contemporary Art Museum
Taipei 101
Taipei MRT (Subway)
Starbucks

Standing at just over half a kilometer, Taipei 101 stands tall over Taipei. Until the Burj Dubai building is complete, Taipei 101 is still the world’s tallest building. It also has the world’s fasting ascending elevator, which takes you up to the 89th floor in 37 seconds flat. For some reason, I had thought the elevator would give you a nice view of the city as you shot up like in the ending of Vanilla Sky. But alas, it is internal.

Once you’re up in the 89th floor, there’s nothing to do but just gasp at the breathtaking views. The view of the buildings looks like you’re literally playing Sim City.

Other than the views, there’s usually some exhibits on the inside. You can also view the gigantic spherical damper that is used to stabilize the building in case of earthquakes and typhoons.

Well worth the $12 to get up there.

Check out my other pictures from my Taipei trip on Flickr.

A few quick hits:

• The stark humidity took my breath away as a San Francisco native used to cool dry weather.
• The fog, on the other hand, I am used to.
• The subways are efficient and clean.
• Taipei 101 is amazing, like sim city.
• WiFly, the city Wifi, rocks. It’s a little spotty, but has enough coverage for me to tweet and flickr.

More photos and videos to come later today, or tonight, depending on where you are. Cheers.

Just landed in Taiwan. I’ve concluded that humans aren’t made for 12+ hour flights.

I tried to time my sleeping schedule as best I could, but I still got up at around 3am Taiwan time. I’ll try to bust through the day so I don’t collapse tonight.

On the plus side, they had in flight individual entertainment, which included a selection of new movies on demand.

And I opted to get some rice porridge, pressed soy tofu, and fresh fruit to start my day:

Now, to find my taxi ride.

Travelocity has an RSS feed that will notify you of any great deals on airline fares. You can specify which cities you want to watch, and also where you’re heading out from. It’s a great little feed that saved me about 40% on a trip to Washington, DC. The air travel dates may be limited for a particular deal, but if you’re flexible that’s OK.

Also, it can be a great boost for you to go for that trip you’ve always wanted to take, but were too hesitant because of the price.

I went up to Lake Tahoe over the labor day weekend. Overall, it was a very uneventful and relaxing trip. Tippy and I got to stay at a condo owned by Dolby Laboratories, which was very nice and cheap. The facilities were also very comfortable.

Let’s get this straight–there’s only two things people do at Tahoe: outdoor activities (skiing, hiking, sailing) or indoors spa-like activities. We really don’t fit remarkably well into either of these camps. Sure, we hiked for a few days, and it was gorgeous. But in terms of heavy-duty climbing or biking, we simply lacked the gear and mindset at the moment. So instead, we opted to relax.

My vacations usually turn out to be too eventful and rushed for me to relax. Oh, we have hit this spot, or we have to make this reservation, and so on and so forth. I resounded a thundering NO during the past weekend. We will leisurely do everything, and plan only as needed–finally, relaxation!

However, there was one thing amiss about Tahoe that really left a sour taste–the food. The vast majority of restaurants were surf and turf, presenting some boring rendition of steak and lobster we only knew too well. Peppered among these were mediocre Asian restaurants and satisfactory Mexican joints. All in all, Tahoe is really not worth the gastronome’s time. So instead of food, I have presented a picture of the lake. It really was worth it just for the views. Really.

It took forever to get down to the highway. It was, to put it lightly, quite annoying.

(Music: “Title and Registration” by Deathcab For Cutie)