Let’s keep in touch

Tuesday, 25 Oct 2005 | Life in Asia

This morning I spoke to my friend Simone. She gave birth to a beautiful baby boy named Aidan a few days ago and she was telling me about how her friends and family all around the world have been kept informed about her pregnancy and the birth of Aiden.

It made me think about ‘staying in touch’ after I’ve moved next year. There are so many ways I can keep in touch with people. Ofcourse e-mail is an important option, which I use a lot and is convenient for most people. But there are better ways to have ‘live’ communication. For instance, I chat with friends and family on instant messaging networks (such as MSN and ICQ). There are ofcourse normal phonelines. Calls to Thailand don’t come cheap but when using carrier select services calls can be as cheap as 13 cents per minute - less than calling a dutch mobile phone! A hybrid of the two I expect to use a lot is Skype, which is basically ‘phonecalls over the internet’. If they start offering a SkypeIn service for the Netherlands, I’ll certainly get a number there. SkypeIn means people with a ‘normal phone’ call a local number and it gets connected to my computer whenever I’m logged in (always, when I’m home). So if you ask me … there are so many possibilities to keep in touch, I don’t see this to be difficult.

The big problem will not be opportunity as much as it will be timing though. For my friends in Western Europe, there is a 5 hour time difference which means the only option for live communication (except for weekends) is at dinnertime for them (midnight for me). My friends in North America will be a lot harder to get ahold of, since the time difference will be 11 hours, a whole day basically. That will be about weekends mostly.

Ofcourse there is always the wonderful medium of this website, through which I plan to keep everyone updated even when I have moved.

Then again, Arjan and I don’t talk as much as we used to when he was in Amsterdam. This has to do with living on opposite sides of the world, but also because we’re not an immediate influence on eachothers lives anymore I guess. Which is a shame, but to be expected.

So I guess despite all available technology, I should prepare for being in touch less frequently than I’m used to.