TRAVEL: APPS

7 Aug 2015

Finding apps to make my life a little easier in anyway are those that I love and when it comes to travelling, things can be stressful and I'v found some apps that relieve this stress just a little bit as well as jut being useful for my time away. 

COMMUNICATION

When you're abroad, contacting home or even others in the same country as you can be expensive and there's no point faffing around with international or new contracts with your network when there are apps already to use. Viber is a great one for phone calls; as long as each part as the app you can make phone calls across see for free you just need a wifi connection. WeChat is similar except can be used for texting and contacting others. Lastly is Whatsapp; this lets you text and call anyone who, again, has the app. The calling isn't as good as Viber but it still works if you want to have everything ready in one app! They all require you to have a good wifi signal which I'll get onto later on in the post.

PACKING

I, along with many, love a good list. Each week running up to my China trip I would rewrite a list of stuff I still needed to do until I found Triplist. This app is great to plan your packing giving you the options to add items of clothing, documents as well as stuff needed to be sorted before the trip such as getting a visa. It adds them all to a list where you're able to tick off when it's sorted or packed as well as giving you a percentage of how much you've left to add. Another good list making app is Wunderlist. This app gives you more freedom of the items you'd like to add to the list if that's something you'd prefer and also makes a satisfying "ding" when you tick something off your list. 

LEARN THE LINGO

I really do think that, if you're going to a country that speak another language, you should at least try to learn a bit of the language. In the Long term Duolingo is a great app to learn a range of languages and mainly focuses on the main languages you are likely to learn such as French, German and Spanish etc. As for the short term just by looking up Chinese into the app store before my China trip I found and app called Learn Chinese- Mandarin Phrase Book which included some really great and useful phrases for all aspects of travelling. If you type in "Codegent" into the apple app store, the same person has create many of these phrase books for different languages such as French, Italian, German including languages that you wouldn't find on Duolingo such as Japanese.By selecting an English phrase, played it in Chinese which you could then repeat or if you would rather just play it to the person you're wanting to speak to; I'd suggest giving it a go- it's all part of the fun!

VPN

If you're in a hotel where the wifi isn't the best or are in a country that has certain restrictions on sites, VPN apps are great as what they do is connect you to a better wifi connection nearby or faraway. For all round better wifi connection Betternet is a simple app to use and can also help out on those restrictions as well. Tunnelbear is the one to use for restrictions as you can manually select where you'd like your wifi to connect from by choosing a country. This way you can access any apps for social media where the websites have been blocked with ease. Betternet gives you unlimited free VPN and Tunnelbear gives you 500MB free a month but,if you'd like, you can buy more. 


These are just a few apps that I found really handy when travelling through China and hopefully they'll help any of you still waiting to go on holiday this summer or in the future!
Have you got any useful apps for travelling?
Hope you're doing great,
Sarah x

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