Don't Leave Home Without It

A traveler atop Mratkino near Beloretsk

There's always a question about the most essential thing to take on a trip.  In this location a fistful of rubles is useful.  So is a credit card on a Russian bank.  Some people feel that they can't be without their cell phone,  Well, I don't have a cell phone with me.  I do have some rubles.  But in going to the top of Mratkino by cable car, I left something essential to me back at the hotel in Abzakovo -- my iPad.

As readers of this blog may have guessed, we have good wi-fi connection in the remote village of Abzakovo, population 3500.  Two years ago Slava and I were at a resort in the Caucasus with no Internet connection.  We had to walk to town to go to an Internet cafe.  Here I can read email, check the news, write "Travel Tales" and do lots more on my iPad in the comfort of my room.

There are some features that have suprised me in their usefulness.  TWC, the app for The Weather Channel, is perfectly willing to tell me what will happen in Abzakovo tomorrow.  I'm grateful to OverDrive, which lets me download e-books from the public libraries in Fairfax and Arlington Counties.  Hulu.com, however, is of no use.  Its website says, "Sorry, currently our video library can only be watched from within the United States. Hulu is committed to making its content available worldwide. To do so, we must work through a number of legal and business issues, including obtaining international streaming rights. Given the international background of the Hulu team, we have both a professional and personal interest in bringing Hulu to a global audience."  Oh, well.

I asked Maps to find Abzakovo, Russia, and the app responded, "Did you mean Abzakovo, Beloretsky District, or Abzakovo, Baymaksky District, Republic of Bashkortostan?" Uhm, I guessed Beloretsky, and I was right.  It's actually New Abzakovo, built up around a new train station.  The resort facilities are here.  (Poor Old Abzakovo is like tiny towns in the U.S. by-passed by interstate roads.) 

Google Earth is fun.  It's posssible to zero in on the cross streets of Abzakovo or zoom out to see the town in relation to Yekaterinburg (225 miles northeast, on the other side of the Ural Mountains) or in relation to Moscow (840 miles almost directly west).  Unfortunately Google Earth doesn't make it easy for me to capture images and put them here.

Yelp tried and failed to find restaurants near my current location.

iTranslate is not bad.  And Google Translate is powerful. I have not, however, found a Rosetta Stone type app at the price I want to pay, which is nothing.  I might spend a few bucks on a language program that looks really good, but I haven't found that yet.

Spotify gives me a variety of music choices.  Russian radio tends to feature, well, Russian music.  The pop music is not unpleasant; it has more emphasis on melody and rhyme than American pop.  But I like instrumental music as background listening.

TED Talks are a great substitute for television.  The videos are entertaining and more interesting than most TV programs, anyway.

I'm expecting to use BigOven or Epicurious next week when planning a dinner party. I've already decided on zakuski appetizers and on the entree.  Dessert should be something that uses the famous honey from Bashkiria.  It's useful to have big cookbooks on my iPad.  The app recipes might not specify Bashkirian honey, however it's convenient to zip through recipes to find those that contain honey as an ingredient.

I won't bother to say much about the always useful apps such as Mail, Camera, Calendar, Safari, and Skype. There are at least a dozen others I use fairly frequently.

Unfortunately not a lot of Russians are able to experience the utility of an iPad.  I saw one priced in a store and realized that stiff tariffs on various imports make the price sky-high.  Now that Russia is a member of the World Trade Organization, protectionist tariffs are supposed to come down.  But salaries also need to go up.  The iPad I saw in the store cost 21,000 rubles, which is about $670.  The average monthly salary of a teacher as reported for 2005 was 5,500 rubles, or $169.  I don't know what a teacher's salary is today, but I believe it is below the reported 2012 worker average, which is 153,720 rubles annually, less than $4900.  If an iPad would cost you several months' salary, you're not likely to buy it.  On the other hand, there are some Russians with a great deal of disposable income.

Apple is moving ahead with technology, and from here I saw videos on CNN about the release of the iPhone 5.   The product looks great.  Yet I appreciate my iPad more and more. The iPad is Goldilocks' sized, just right for my purposes. When I go on a trip in the future I'll say to myself, "Don't leave home without it."