Greetings from Germany!
I’m visiting here and am amazed by and immersed in how Europe has become a different technological world.
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None of this will be new to world travelers. But if you’re an American who hasn’t been to Europe recently, you might enjoy these notes:
* On the flight over, Finnair offers in-flight Wi-Fi. How? Slowly and expensively — via satellite.
Using this service, you pay by the megabyte (as on cellphones), not by time (as in hotels). I decided to
try it out: $5 for 10 megabytes.
What did I get for my five bucks? About three e-mails and seven lines of instant messaging. What the heck? How could a little text eat up 10 megabytes?
I suspected that something was sucking down the megs behind the scenes. After scratching my head at 39,000 feet, it finally occurred to me to turn off the iCloud feature of my laptop, which keeps my calendar, address book and other data constantly synchronized with the Web. Genius! That was it.
Now, for another $5, I was able to text-chat for about an hour.
* Americans like to think that conserving power and water is a huge inconvenience. But in Europe, it’s just the way things are, and somehow people survive.
Toilets have two buttons: a big one and a small one, depending on how big a flush you need.
In public buildings and hotels, motion sensors turn the lights on when you enter a hallway, off again once you’re past.
Hotel showers tend to have wall-mounted shampoo dispensers, to prevent millions of small plastic bottles from winding up in the landfill every year.
And most controversial (to Americans) of all, your room key has to be inserted by the hotel-room door to turn on power and air-conditioning.
Yes, it means that your room takes a couple of minutes to cool when you return in the summer. But it also means that you can’t leave for the day with all lights and chillers blazing. (As a handy by-product, you can’t misplace your room key, either.)
* Speaking of room keys: the hotels we stayed in all had stripeless key cards. That is, you just place your key card next to a sensor rather than inserting it into a slot. The beauty of this system is that there’s no magnetic stripe to get demagnetized by a phone in your pocket.
* I won’t point out how much less expensive cellphone service is here, and how superior the coverage.
* In one of our hotels, there was no Wi-Fi in the rooms — only a wired connection, an Ethernet cable. Since our rooms were adjacent, we resorted to a sneaky trick you might need someday: we hooked up the Ethernet to the producer’s laptop in the middle room, and turned on Internet Sharing.
That’s a feature of both Mac OS X and Windows that turns any computer into a Wi-Fi hot spot. In our case, that meant that the laptops in the rooms on either side could get online.
* I didn’t bother signing up for one of those international roaming plans for my cellphone; it has stayed in airplane mode all week, except for Wi-Fi. I used services like Google Voice and Messages to send and receive text messages whenever I had an Internet signal.
* In Germany, T.S.A. doesn’t stand for “tub stacking agency.” Once you’re past the X-ray machine, you set your tub on edge in a special sloping track. It rolls on its own, gravity-style, back to the front of the line, where the next passenger grabs it. Nobody wastes time collecting them and hauling them around.
The power, water and time savings of the tweaks we’ve observed here are designed to address whole-world problems. And they’re something more American institutions might want to consider.