Embassies or consulates are only open on weekdays. Furthermore, they often have limited hours for visa services. Traveling to a consulate or embassy to turn in your visa documents may require taking a day off of work, standing in a long line, or waiting in a busy waiting room. I have learned this the hard way. It may be less expensive to pay a visa processing service to handle your visa for you. All you have to do is mail them your passport, complete a visa application form that you can download from the Internet or that they mail to you, and pay the processing and mailing fees. If a visa processing company charges you $40 or $75 to take care of your visa, you should compare those prices to how much it will cost you to get to the consulate and take time off work. Some consulates won’t give you a visa on the spot and you may have to return in a few days to retrieve your passport. In that case, you have to calculate how much it costs to go to the consulate or embassy twice. A visa service sends a courier to the consulates and embassies and makes sure that the visas have the correct spelling of your name and the right dates for your trip.

Make sure to give yourself enough time to get the visas. Embassies and consulates honor the national holidays of the countries where they are located and their own national ones. This means that they have more holidays then you probably do.

Personal Story

I had to rush to get my Chinese visa in February 2008 because the Chinese consulate was closed for a few days during Chinese New Year. I wanted to save myself the trip to San Francisco to pick up my Chinese visa and asked a friend to get it for me. When my friend got home from the consulate and opened my passport, he called me and told me that the Chinese had re-baptized me and given me a new surname. I had to take a day off work and go up to San Francisco to fix the mistake and get a new visa.

application www.embassyworld.com

Visa processing companies in the US

1. www.travisa.com
2. www.traveldocs.com

Do you need your tea or coffee in the morning? Do you need a hot drink before going to bed? A simple immersion heater is an appliance that will save you money daily. An immersion heater is an electric coil with which you can boil water. People on a limited budget who are avoiding restaurant meals find it invaluable. Place it in a cup of water, plug it in, and you will quickly have boiling water. (Don’t use a plastic cup as it may melt. You can use a metallic cup but you should be careful when touching it as it may be hot.) It not only kills all disease organisms, it also lets you make a hot cup of tea, coffee, cocoa, or soup. You can even cook an egg by bringing the water to a boil, removing the heater, dropping in the egg, and waiting a few minutes.

Small, lightweight immersion heaters are inexpensive and available in dual voltages, though you may still need a plug adapter. You can buy a new immersion heater locally in most developed countries. Better-quality versions of these have thermostatic shut-offs. If you purchase a cheaper one, be sure that the coil is immersed in liquid whenever the unit is plugged in.

I’ve recently discovered the ease and comfort of traveling with a small suitcase with big wheels that also converts into a backpack. Samsonite, Swiss Gear, and other manufacturers make these convertible suitcases with a special padded pouch for laptop computers. This feature is wonderful because it’s easy to take the laptop in and out of the suitcase, and I don’t have to bother wrapping it in a sweater or something thick to protect it from hitting other items in my suitcase. The big wheels make it easy to roll the suitcase around. Small wheels break and chip easily, thus making it hard to roll the suitcase around. More expensive models have 360 degree wheels. When I have to walk upstairs and I don’t want to carry the suitcase in one hand, I just unwrap the backside of the suitcase, take out the backpack straps, and clip them to the bottom of the suitcase. Versatility and ease make traveling much easier.

This is probably the most important item to bring with you besides your wallet. Pickpockets love to lurk in your pockets, bags, backpacks, purses, and wallets. You need to hide your passport, money, plane tickets, and credit and bank cards from them. Travel pouches are like cloth envelopes with one or two pockets in which you can store your valuables. You can buy these in most travel and luggage supply stores or online. Some travel pouches hang from your neck. I advise against these as thieves can can cut the band around your neck and catch your falling travel pouch. The safest pouch is a cloth travel belt with an elastic band that you wear on your waist. It can be very inconvenient to wear, especially when it is hot and you don’t want a big pouch on your stomach that makes you look weird. Put only crucial items in there and avoid carrying physically large amounts of cash. I suggest putting the pouch on the bottom of your back between your pants and undergarments. You should keep your passport in a plastic re-sealable bag.

Personal story

While traveling in Kiev in 1997, I had a travel pouch on my stomach. It was raining outside. The moisture on my skin seeped through the travel pouch and got the gold eagle paint on the outside of my passport wet. The gold paint went through the material of my passport and stained my passport photo, making it look fake. This was a disaster as I was leaving later the same day and had to go through customs with a suspicious looking passport. Lesson learned. I always keep my passport in a re-sealable (Ziploc) bag inside my travel pouch.

www.worldtraveler.com

The way I get to accrue miles is because I play the games offered by the airlines. Each airline has its own credit card that it wants its customers to use. You get a 15,000 or 21,000 mile bonus when you sign up for the credit card. Usually for each dollar you spend on the card, you get one frequent flyer mile. Many times, the annual fee is waived for the first year. Some cards that have no annual fees at all, only award you one mile for every $2 spent. With 25,000 frequent flyer miles, you can have a free domestic ticket in the US. If you get a 21,000 mile bonus upon signing up for the card and you take at least at 4000 mile flight, you already have a free ticket.

Airlines say that you can’t get bonus miles more than once with their credit card partners. This is not always the case as I’ve closed cards for which I got many bonus miles and then opened new ones with the same airlines and still got the new bonus miles.

The American Express Gold card lets you accumulate points that you can then use to pay for part of or all of your plane fare.

I have had credit cards from several airlines and have always paid my balance in full each month. I never carry a balance. If you are unable to control your spending and are afraid of running up credit card debt by getting a new card to fund your free travel, then don’t get it. I don’t want to encourage people to get into debt. We already have a horrible savings rate in the US as it is. Be responsible.

http://www.indexcreditcards.com/travel_airlinecreditcards.html

List of airline and travel credit cards with interest rates and mileage credit policies.

Buy a calling card online and use in 50 countries and are ideal for travelers. Many countries do not have coin operated machines anymore and a prepaid calling card is ideal. Callingcards.com provides local access numbers for the particularly city/country. You dial the local number and enter in your calling card number and then dial the country code and number of the person you are calling. So, you can call from a hotel phone or private residence and not incur long distance charges because the calls are considered as local calls within that country and you will never be blocked for dialing a toll free number. This is particularly convenient when you get free local calls from hotel rooms. For example, the rate from most countries to the US costs 2.7 cents a minute.

www.worldaccessnumbers.com

Bringing a small first aid kit is important, no matter where you travel. Hotels are notorious for charging high prices for simple medicines like Tylenol and cough syrup. In most drugstores you can buy inexpensive pre-assembled first-aid kits that include Aspirin/Tylenol, Band-Aids, alcohol swabs, cotton swabs, and medicine for stomach problems. If you are traveling to countries with severely different climates and foods than what you are used to, bring Pepto Bismol and anti-diarrhea medicine. Unless you are traveling to a country with a poor health care system, you don’t need to bring a suitcase full of medicine with you as you can buy most simple medicines abroad. You need just enough to last for a few days in case you get sick.

Personal Story

While traveling in Chicago in June 2008, I got food poisoning and didn’t have my usual first aid kit with me that I bring on international trips. I had to pay one of the bellmen at the hotel to go to the nearest pharmacy at 1am to get me Tylenol and Pepto- Bismol. I realized that the same precautions I take for travel in foreign countries should apply to domestic trips.

There are free walking tours in London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich, and Paris operated by Sandeman’s New Europe. Tours are always available in English. Some cities have tours in German, Spanish, French, Hebrew, and other languages. The guides work for tips. I took the tours in Munich and Berlin and both guides were extremely knowledgeable about the history of each city. If you are in another city, you can do a search on the Internet to see if there are free tours offered. For example, if you go on Google and type in “San Francisco” and “free walking tours,” the first listing is for San Francisco City Guides. Volunteers who love to show their city give these tours of various parts of San Francisco.

www.sfcityguides.org

Find music in your target language that you like. It doesn’t matter if at first you don’t understand the lyrics. Pick music you like. You may start singing along without even knowing what you are singing. That’s fine. You are not only learning the rhythm of the language, you are learning new vocabulary.

Relax and close your eyes. Turn off the lights. Lay down or sit in a comfortable position. Close your eyes and listen to the music. Don’t try to understand the words, just listen. You might fall asleep or day dream. Give yourself the time to simply listen and not do anything else. Your mind needs to be calm in order to absorb the sounds. Your ears need no other distractions to let them properly hear all the high, medium and low frequencies of the language. Do this regularly.

You can find songs to download for a cost at
www.itunes.com

www.rhapsody.com

Browse music videos in the language

www.youtube.com

Don’t underestimate the power of the FM and AM bands on your radio dial. We may be in the Cyber age, but millions of people listen to the radio everyday for news, entertainment, and music. In the United States, where millions commute daily in cars, the radio is a popular medium. Immigrant groups in the United States have many radio stations and broadcast in their native languages.

When you first start listening to radio broadcasts, the radio announcers may sound like they are emitting a stream or storm of sounds and not individual words. In time, you’ll hear familiar words repeated and will learn to distinguish them. Language teachers call this “acquired competence.” Like with the music section, you can actively listen to the radio attentively and take notes, listen to it in the background or just close your eyes to listen without straining yourself to understand.

Personal Story

For years, I listened to Rádio Comercial Portuguesa, the Portuguese radio station in San José, California. The radio station served the Portuguese immigrant community from the Azores Islands. While driving and being stuck in traffic, I listened to their local advertisements for Portuguese companies that ranged from plumbing contractors and construction supply companies to Portuguese padarias (bakeries). I could care less about construction companies and their wonderful supplies, but I listened to the announcers just to get a feeling for the rhythm of Portuguese and to learn vocabulary. Since the community was very religious, the station broadcast their Catholic mass in Portuguese at the same time everyday. I am not Catholic and was not keen on learning the “Our Father” prayer em portugues, but I listened anyway. The music was mostly not of my taste either. Old Portuguese fisherman songs and folk tunes dominated the programming. I loved melancholic fados, but they were rarely on air. It didn’t matter. I was stuck in my car and had the choice of listening to news or music in English or learning more Portuguese. I chose the latter. The station often aired radio news directly from the national news service of Portugal, giving me news about many countries in the Portuguese speaking world.

The result was that, despite the fact that I had few opportunities to speak Portuguese, I was passively learning it for years. As a matter of fact, I thought that I spoke Portuguese like Tarzan because I had mostly taught myself the language and had only taken two basic classes in adult school. In 2006, while living in New York, my Brazilian roommate Carla invited Silvia, her friend from Brazil, to visit during Christmas. Silvia barely spoke English. I had to speak in Portuguese, even though I was embarrassed for what I thought was my Neanderthal-like command of the language. To my and everyone else’s surprise, sophisticated words and long sentences came out of my mouth with ease. Carla and Silvia commented that my accent sounded like it was from Portugal. I found out that I knew much more Portuguese than I thought. All those years of listening to fishermen’s songs and Catholic masses paid off. I spoke Portuguese! I had been reinforcing the vocabulary and sentence structure rules that I had learned by just listening to the radio. The music was inside of me for years.

You can create your own symphonies as well. Just listen!

(Now, my accent is more Brazilian sounding as I have traveled in Brazil, speaking to Brazilians.)

Look in your phone book under the radio section. If you are in the US, use the Yellow Pages and look under “Radio Stations.” The foreign language stations usually list their language in their title.

Go to the Yahoo Directory of radio stations:

http://dir.yahoo.com/News_and_Media/Radio/By_Region/

Look up the radio stations in your area, checking for the language you are learning. It’s best to search under regions rather than your city. There might be a radio station in another city nearby that broadcasts in the language that you want. If you only look for radio stations in your town, you will not find others in your vicinity.

This may be the first time in your life when watching television is your homework. Take advantage of the opportunity!

Let’s say you are learning Spanish. You have found a local Spanish language TV station in your area or you are watching the national Univision news. Even without knowing all the words, you will be able to get the gist of some of the news reports. The images and video footage of events already tell you what the news announcers are talking about. Tune into HOW they are speaking and the words they are using to describe the images on screen.

Even if you can’t watch TV all the time, it’s all right to do errands around the house as you listen to the TV in the background. Think of the TV as background music like you would hear in a café or restaurant. Even though it’s not at the forefront of your consciousness, your brain is still processing it and getting used to the flow of the language. Remember, we listen before we speak.

Extra bonus: Not only will you be learning how the language sounds, you will also be exposed to news you may not see on your local or national television news. If you are learning Mandarin Chinese and find a local television news station broadcasting in your area, you may learn a great deal about the Chinese community that you never saw reported in mainstream news. You will learn about what is going on in places where the language is spoken. It’s quite possible that the Italian news will have more news about other European countries than a news channel in the United States or Taiwan. So, keep your mind open. You are not only learning a language, but another view of the world.