A year ago today was my first full day in Bolivia. I woke up in La Paz having just flown in from Sao Paulo the night before. I'm looking at my journal from that day and recollecting:
9:15am
...sure enough, Portuguese has effected my Spanish. I just asked for water and pronounced it "Agwa Meeneraow" like in Brazil.
...
9:10pm
I'm in a peņa, wihch is a sort of live music restaurant, called Calicanto. I'm told the music will begin soon. I have just barely navigated the ordering process... ooh, the beer does fizz a lot more here, 'cause of the altitude... this language thing is so tiring. How to relax but deal with communicating in this foreign tongue? Stranger in a strange land...
Hah. Yeah, wow, amazing to think back on that mind-blowing time.
Meanwhile, back in the present - I used Skype for the first time yesterday. Where have I been? Why haven't I been up on this amazing piece of software, and how have my parents been using it for a month before I try it? It would have been so easy to take calls from anywhere in the world when we were doing our AFTA radio show a couple weeks ago. I think I just assumed it was PC-only, or that it didn't really work, or maybe the fact that the name sounds like some livestock disease made me unconciously dismiss it. What I want to know is, what's the catch? What is the company going to get out of a million people making free long-distance phone calls? And do we really know it's secure? Or does Homeland Security have a backdoor?
Posted by steev at Diciembre 15, 2004 08:14 AM