walki-talki.com Travel Blog

Traveling around Europe, I often get the feeling of traveling backwards through time. Everything is so much older here compared to the United States where a mall dating back as far as the 1980’s might be considered ‘ancient.’

But while old Europe’s well preserved cities are of course quaint, fascinating and eminently historic, I can’t help but think sometimes that everything around me was built by dead guys (A thought that first occurred to me after visiting the Catacombs in Paris).

Perhaps that’s why my favorite monument in all of Europe is the Segrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona. It’s not old. In fact, it’s still growing.

The Temple of the Sacred Family was started way back in 1883. The intent was to built a Cathedral that would represent Christendom, as well as show off Barcelona’s newfound prosperity from the Industrial Revolution. The original architect on the project was fired after a year and replaced by Antoni Gaudi who was just 31 at the time. Despite being color blind and suffering from cripple rhumetism, Gaudi had already become one of Barcelona’s most well known architects. He was the leader of the art movement known as Moderniste, a Spanish offshoot of art Nouveau. Gaudi worked on the Cathedral of the Segrada Familia for 40 years and dedicated the last 16 years of his life soley to the Cathedral. By the end, he even lived inside temple year round to help speed construction and was called “God’s architect” by the Barcelona people. When asked once about the length of construction on the project , Gaudi responded by saying: “It doesn’t matter how long the project takes… My client, is not in a hurry, “

It’s a good thing. Because almost 100 years later, work is still going, funded entirely by private donations. Work is now continued under the direction of Etsruo Sotoo of Japan, with Gaudi no doubt keeping an eye on things buried beneath the central crypt.

Nowhere else can you watch history unfold brick by brick as its spires twist and stretch to the sky like a forest of giant beanstalks (The central tower will eventually reach 170 meters – by far the tallest in the world). Part of the fun is that there is always something going on. The building literally changes before your eyes. The constant movement of cranes, scaffolds and sculptors at work makes the Cathedral feel alive. If you decide to visit, you can also be happy knowing that your admission price goes toward helping to complete the Cathedral – that some day you too can be a dead guy who helped build something great.

I know I feel better.

Yes, here at walki-talki.com, we emphasize how easy our tours are to use with iPods, but we are committed to making tours that work with any music player. That’s why we record and distribute our tours in standard mp3 format so that they are playable just about everywhere. One thing is for certain, however: iTunes sure does make the process of transferring files to the iPod very easy.

Then, the question that may come up is this one: can I use my generic mp3 player with iTunes? The answer is “yes”! Enter iTunes Agent. This is but one of the many wonderful free, open source software titles we will mention in this blog. iTunes Agent is a completely free program that synchronizes your iTunes library with any mp3 player. As you can see in the graphic, you can synchronize your iTunes library with mobile phones, too.

So, if you like the simplicity of iTunes, but you are not impressed by the hype around the iPod, get iTunes Agent, and take your music with you. Better yet, take our self-guided mp3 audio walking tours of your favorite European cities with you.

iTunes agent is for Windows only, so we Apple users will have to wait.

Payam

The self guided mp3 audio walking tours at walki-talki.com could have been the first travel application for the iPod, but William Bright beat us to it by creating iSubwayMaps. “Little Bill” created this site as soon as the photo-capable iPods were introduced. He surmised, quite correctly, that it would be useful to have subway maps on the iPod. So, he painstakingly adapted high resolution photos of various subway systems around the world to be used on the iPod.

Why painstakingly? Because the documents had to be broken up into pieces so that you could zoom in on a particular part of the system when you need to do so. The result is quite nice, and by now, the selection of maps is large enough that you are almost guaranteed to find the map you want.

But, just in case you can’t find the map you want, go to amadeus.net There you will almost certainly find the map you need. amadeus.net provides maps in pdf and Micro$oft Word formats, only. Therefore, you will have either to figure out how to view pdfs with your iPod or other media player or to take a printout with you.

In due time, I hope to cite enough resources to allow you to take everything you need on your iPod. For now, you have walking tours and subway maps, and that may suffice.

Payam

PS If you read the posts on the isubwaymaps.com home page, you will learn that New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority prohibited Bill from using the MTA’s official map. So, he had to create one from scratch in order to avoid their alleged copyright violation. Bill also had to change the name of the site because Apple objected to the word “iPod” in the site’s original name. It is always interesting how progress is achieved despite the best efforts of large business and big government. PNM