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Organizing Your Money While Traveling Abroad

However you travel, be it by land, sea or air, you need money. More money than you would probably need for the same amount of time at home following your daily life. There is always the unexpected to deal with — The Emergency Fund — and money to pay to get around, pay for hotels, and such.

Here are some of my observations after my latest foray into foreign territory where the European-wide cash card/debit card I carry was fed into the wrong slot of a ticket vending machine and promptly swallowed up along with all my Euros.

A lot of people advise credit cards for travel. This is usually because the conversion rates can be more favorable. There are, however, transaction fees on many cards as well as the exchange conversion rate. Some cards do not charge for transactions in the same currency which makes traveling around Europe a lot cheaper if you are European. Credit cards are also favored because, even with the charges incurred, they cost less to use than old fashioned travelers cheques.

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Foreign Faces in American Deaf Schools

As the American medical community continues to “heal” Deafness — by surgically altering Deaf infants at four months of age with cochlear implants — we must begin to wonder what will happen to Deaf schools in America that were founded in the aftermath of the 1960s rubella plague that deafened and/or blinded an entire generation of children.

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Learning Foreign Languages Online

Janna and I have been professionally teaching American Sign Language — Hardcore ASL — online for over five years.  We use video chat, movies, images and one-on-one interaction with our students to bring home the learning even though we’re far apart.  In a similar want to teach and learn, the famous “Foreign Service Institute” series of language courses are now on the internet for download and you can learn a new language at your own speed and in your own space.

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Intellectual Elitism: The Fake Foreign Policy Genius List

How do you feel about a new “Genius List” of the “top 100 public intellectuals” that was decided by — and then published by — Foreign Policy in May?  Yesterday we had a curious, and oddly strange, addition to that list as voted by their readership to create the “top 20 public intellectuals.” 

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Building a 700 Mile White Picket Fence

There’s nothing quite like watching your American tax dollars go draining down the pork trough. You can smell the mess that is the 700 Mile fence — hoped to be built in the name of Homeland Security to keep out all those nasty foreigners traveling by land and never by sea — straight up to here in New Jersey. 

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Verbal Crimes

by María L. Trigos-Gilbert

When we think about a verbal crime, we reject the thought because indeed it doesn’t seem a bit realistic. It is as when you look at a person with eyes like bullets. If looks could kill, the world’s amount of people would be near to the number zero. Yet the question is still pending: What’s a verbal crime? It’s when one uses the wrong word to describe or to define someone or something. Of course, I’m not talking about those times when we forget the exact word that our mind searches. I’m talking about when we intentionally ill-use adjectives, nouns, and even verbs to approach any given subject, person, or situation.

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