It’s exactly 3:58am here in Guam and I’ve been tossing and turning in bed trying to catch some zZzzZz’s with no success. It’s probably because I drank that Hazelnut Iced Coffee from McDonalds at around 11:00pm tonight, which I knew I shouldn’t have done.  Ever since I first tried it three days ago I’ve been craving for it and couldn’t resist not getting one tonight! So here I am contributing another post to the “Miscellaneous Ramblings” category of the blog, brought to you by McDonald’s Premium Iced Coffee.

There has been some things I’ve been wanting to incorporate into the blog, one of them being videos. I already have the MiniDV digital camcorder, now all I have to do is find a free and decent video editing software online; so if anyone has any suggestions feel free to email me or post a comment here otherwise I’m going to be looking for one on the net. I’m going to be taking out my camcorder tomorrow (or actually today) to a popular surf spot on Guam to test out. Hopefully I’ll have some good surf footage so I can practice my video editing skills tomorrow and post a video for you guys.

I’m still debating whether it would be better to host the videos on my own server or at Youtube, but I’m heading on over to Youtube right now to open up an account so I can test it tommorrow when I have my video ready.  After that it’s off to search for a video editing software on the web!  So until then “Esta Later” (means “See You Later” in Chammorro)!

With the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China just 3 months away I started doing some research online to see if it would be possible for me to make it to the Olympics. It would be a great opportunity for me to travel to China and cover as much of the Olympics as possible for Traveling Project.

Well, within a few hours of my research I noticed that hotel prices in Beijing around the time of the Olympic Games cost between 6x to 10x as much compared to the regular rates. Hotels in Beijing that would normally cost approximately $50 per night are around $500 during the Olympics! I’m pretty sure all other types of accommodations are inflated as well during the Olympic Games. Below is a screenshot I took of the rates for one of the hotels in Beijing:

Seeing the inflated prices pretty much killed the possibility for me of going to China during the Olympics. When I started doing my research I was already hesitant of even considering traveling to China for the Olympics because of the short time frame I had to prepare for the trip, but I thought to myself, “What the heck, if the prices are reasonable then I might as well go for it”. Well they weren’t, so no Olympic Games in China for me. You can be pretty sure wherever the Olympics are going to be 4 years from now I’ll be there to cover it for Traveling Project.  You can quote me on this!

Over the last year the U.S. dollar (USD) has continued to decline when compared to other international currencies. While this may be a good thing for travelers in other countries who come to visit the United States, it’s not as good for U.S. travelers who want to visit other countries. A weak U.S. dollar means services and goods in other countries will cost us more after we exchange our United States dollar for the local currency of the country we are visiting.

Below I took a snapshot of the 5-year exchange rate for the U.S. dollar to both the Japanese yen and the Euro. You can see that in both exchange rates we get a lot less of the countries currency for exchanging one U.S. dollar. It’s not only with these two currencies either, it’s pretty much like this across the board.

As far as when the dollar will get stronger, I don’t see this happening for awhile with the current state of the United States economy. So what’s the point of this post? I guess there really wasn’t any except bringing to attention it’s not so great a time for U.S. citizens to be traveling abroad; but on the other hand, it’s a great time for international travelers to take a trip to the United States because the exchange rates are in their favor. (While looking at exchange rates online I just thought it would make an interesting post.)

I received some new gadgets in the mail today, specifically my USRobotics Internet Phone which will come in handy when I’m traveling. The total cost of the phone was just under $40.00, and  I haven’t tried it yet so can’t tell you anything about the quality of the sound.  The USB Internet phone plugs directly into a computer and using Skype’s service I can make free phone calls through the Internet from anywhere in the world. This is great to have for people that do a lot of traveling, and I’d recommend the Skype service to anyone.  I’m glad to add it to my collection of gadgets I bring with me when I travel!

Donating to EDN yesterday for Earth Day put me in a giving mood, and I remembered coming across a micro-lending site called Kiva.org where normal people like you and me could help finance small loans to needy entrepreneurs located around the world, usually in third-world countries.

I decided to head on over to the site and open an account. After opening up an account I funded it through my Paypal account and made three loans of $25 denominations each to people from Nicaragua, Samoa, and Tajikistan! You can see my profile page here: http://www.kiva.org/lender/TravelingProject. The loans are usually used to help these entrepreneurs start up a new business or make improvements to their existing business.

I think helping people through Kiva fits perfectly with this blog, not to mention it makes me feel good knowing I’m helping less fortunate people. Being an entrepreneur at heart and the focus of this blog being about traveling around the world, I think there’s no better way than to help other entrepreneurs from around the world through a non-profit organization like Kiva! In fact, I think Kiva makes such a perfect fit with this blog that I gave it a permanent section on my sidebar to help promote it to my readers!

Maybe in the future I can travel to see some of these countries, and actually meet the people I have helped face to face; documenting the whole trip to share with readers of this blog! This is something I just might have to really think about and look forward too!