This is an amazingly well thought-out video created by Kenichi for his final thesis. It was originally designed as an informational piece for Japanese citizens about what is going on in the Country, but its also a nice intro to Japan for first time travelers. There apparently used to be an English version of the video available, but its since been taken down. The text is in English, and you can get a pretty good sense of the narrative from the awesome graphic design.
The next big step for travelers is going to get navigation off the grid. Although Google maps is nice, international roaming fees are a killer. Mapdroyd is a new Android-based application that allows you to download the map info straight to your phone (or android enabled device) before you travel. The downfall to this is obviously no GPS, but MapDroyd does mark your last known position to help you navigate yourself around. The app does show major gas stations and restaurants, its just not as pretty as google maps.
There are brazen people out there that do not mind pulling out their camera at a moments notice, asking others to take pictures for them and stopping in the middle of a square to record their trip. I on the other hand resist “looking like a traveler” so more often than not, I’ll take my useless Sony DSC-T200 when I could lug along my nice Nikon D40. With the new camera bag from Cloak I can go incognito with my picture taking ways. It is a very cool bag, but it seems very difficult to operate the camera using the bag.
The Heads of State revamped the classic travel poster with a modern styling in their new line of limited edition travel posters. The best out of the bunch is definitely Phoenix which may actually make me want to go to that dust-bowl. See the entire collection below, or buy them here.
