I've gone a bit crazy on my tea purchases this trip. I picked up this T2 tea from Australia at a local Singapore mall and I purchased some French tea while in Marseille and Lyon.

I particularly loved the branding, packaging and containers of T2. Now I'm going to have to visit Australia to visit a true T2 store.

In brief: the airplane flight over was horrible for various reasons, but I arrived in one piece on Sunday and was whisked away from the airport by my gracious local tour guide, friend and client Dan to the opulent Scarlet Hotel in Chinatown and then to dinner. Since then, we've mixed sightseeing with amazing amounts of delicious and varied food, and shopping. I'll write a blog post of just the food alone in the coming days.

My first impressions of Singapore are quite different than I expected. The city is more Western and wealthy than I think most Americans would realize. A number of ex-pat Caucasians, Indians, Chinese and other Asians mix in with the local population to make this a truly international, cosmopolitan and beautiful city!

(Stock photo above, to be replaced by one I take)

Here's a quick little video I made to remind myself of my spartan living conditions here in France. My sister is living and playing professional volleyball in a small suburb outside of Lyon, where they give her very little salary and this apartment. At my age, I could never do what she's doing, but I think it's great she's getting the experience.

I'm certainly looking forward to staying in a boutique urban hotel next week, but I'm not looking forward to the 19 hours of flying upon which I'm about to embark.

Since this is a working holiday, I researched a great deal about staying in touch with clients while overseas. I had been following blog coverage of MAXroam, the international roaming SIM provider, for a while and decided to pick one up. For €30, I got a SIM card, a US-based number and €5 of talk time. I topped my card off with another €30. It costs me €0.21/minute (around 33 US cents) to receive a call and slightly more to place a call or send a text message.

Alternatively, I could have paid another US$6 to AT&T for the month of April and received their international traveller rates of US$.99 to place and receive calls. For about 2 hours of calling, it was worth picking up the Maxroam SIM.

Overall, I'm fairly happy with the service, with a few caveats.

To place an outgoing call, you dial the number and then hang up. MAXroam's service calls you back and then connects the call. Apparently, this is a standard practice with international SIM cards and this normally wouldn't be a problem, however my unlocked iPhone doesn't really enjoy this process. When I place a call, my iPhone gets stuck in a loop thinking the call didn't go through and tries to dial the number again. After frantically hanging up over and over, I'm finally able to free the line for MAXroam to return my call and connect me. I've gotten pretty good at the navigating through the process, and I'm sure it wouldn't be this much of a pain on another mobile phone, but it's still annoying.

MAXroam doesn't provide data services, so if I'm not near wifi, there's no way to check my email. For another $60, I paid for AT&T's 50MB international data package. It's a hefty amount to pay, but I feel better knowing I can check and respond to email while away from my laptop and speeding 300 km/hour on the TGV towards Marseille. Since I can only use one SIM card at a time, I've gotten very good at swapping cards while standing on the bus or train. I probably should have picked up a cheap GSM phone to use for voice while keeping my iPhone for data, but for now, swapping every few hours hasn't been too difficult.

I have a feeling MAXroam's global voice roaming is only a beginning. I wouldn't be surprised to see the Irish company release a data service, VOIP/GSM failover and more. While most SIM companies seem shady and non-transparent (Google "roaming SIM cards," I dare you), MAXroam's chief has a blog and seems to engage fellow bloggers. Stay tuned, I bet we'll see some pretty cool things from them.

Overall, I'd recommend MAXroam (and perhaps a dash of Skype) if you need an inexpensive way to keep in touch.

Pros:
1) Cheap voice calls.
2) US-based number so clients and friends don't have to dial internationally.
3) Maxroam's website allows you to forward your incoming calls to a local number/SkypeIn for free.
4) Quick email/web support.

Cons:
1) Annoying method to place an outgoing call.
2) Spotty SMS service in France which I only found out about after emailing them while in France.
3) No data services, although very few international SIMs provide this.

Related:
MaxRoam: Travel global, pay local (SocialMedia.biz)
MaxRoam Makes Improvements (VOIP Watch)

(Yet another French student strike?)

The Rhone River flowing through Lyon.

St Jean Cathédral

A treat!

I woke up this morning to see Flickr introduced video! Since starting my experiment with video, I've wished Flickr would allow video uploads since all of my photos are already there. It just makes sense to also keep my moving photos there, too.

So far, the upload experience has been buggy, but they'll work out the kinks soon, no doubt. I don't mind the 90-second limitation, since the longer videos I've uploaded to Vimeo aren't exactly exciting to watch, even though the Vimeo experience is the best in video sharing so far. Flickr's "long photos" make perfect sense.

Today, we headed down to Marseille on the TGV, the first time I've been able to ride the train of grand vitesse! It was a long day in this port city, and quite cold, but we had a great time seeing a good portion of the city.

First up, the long hike up a hill to visit Notre Dame de la Gare. I think we took out my poor mother's knees.

Then we headed down to the Vieux Port, for a bateau ride out to the Frioul Archipelago, a chain of four mostly uninhabited islands off the coast. Unfortunately, the tides prevented us from visiting Chateau d'If, made famous by Alexandre Dumas' novel The Count of Monte Cristo.

After quite a bit of more walking around, we took the metro up to Palais Longchamp, a beautiful but aging colananade built to welcome the Durance canal and fresh water to Marseille.

A long and sleepy TGV ride back to Lyon, and we called it a day.

We rested up today and just went to my sister Betsy's volleyball game. Tomorrow we're off to Marseille.

Lyon, France - Opera and Hotel de Ville from Aaron Bailey on Vimeo.

Lyon, France - Place des Terreaux from Aaron Bailey on Vimeo.

Lyon, France - Bellecour from Aaron Bailey on Vimeo.

I arrived, albeit a bit delayed, to Lyon where my mom, sister and sister's teammate were waiting to pick me up. After a quick trip to the supermarche, we headed into the city center to grab some dinner and see the sights. I have more video to post lately, but we ran across this store and I thought it was appropriate to hightlight.