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The Civilized Explorer Portal

Your Home Away From Home Page

Before you need any of these items, try them out before hand. Several of the Web- based services require advance registration. Registering before you need email or calendaring services saves time, but more important it saves aggravation.

| Calculator | Calendars | Currency conversion & Delivery | News & Weather | Other resources |

Calculator

Enter a math expression and click "Calculate."
Use +, *, -, and /; you can use () to
control the order of operations.

Equation Result

Calendars

JavaScript Calendar

This JavaScript calendar opens a new window on your screen. This may come in handy when you are browsing a ticket site and need to keep the days and dates on the screen. Drag it off to the side so you can access the reservations pages but still keep an eye on a month's worth of dates.


Currency conversion & Delivery

We have two sites that offer both currency conversion and currency delivery. We have not used either site to buy foreign currency. We find it useful to have some local currency when arriving in foreign airports for tips, luggage carts, and small purchases. Having it delivered is more expensive than getting the currency locally, but sometimes delivery may be the only way of obtaining a particular currency.

OANDA

OANDA Corp.is set up to convert dollars to euros, but you can change it to any of the remaining currencies. The converter is available in
English
French
German.

You may get a small printable cheat sheet on current values of dollars to Euros. You may choose the Interbank rate, a typical credit card rate, or a typical cash rate of exchange.

(OANDA sells small ads that appears on the pages; once in awhile it is for doing "investigations." The Civilized Explorer does not track your movements, so feel free to ignore whatever ad pops up.)

You may order currencies from OANDA. We have not used this service, so we cannot address any issues which may arise from its use. We do find it useful to have some local currency when arriving in foreign airports for tips, luggage carts, and small purchases. Having currency delivered is more expensive, but for many it may be the only way of having some local money on hand.

xe.com

Our second resource is xe.com. This site provides a page with conversions to many different currencies, and it updates itself with market rates every minute. XE also delivers foreign cash by courier (we don't know who) in one or two business days.


News & Weather

News sites

Weather-related sites

St. Barthelemy Weather Forecast, Guadeloupe
Fort-de-France Weather Forecast, Martinique

The graphic below will pop open a small browser window to Weather.com's world weather page. Move the window around and resize it to suit your needs as you plan your trip to pleasant weather in your main browser.

The New York Times RSS feeds for text-only news. (Also good for your mobile device.)


Other Resources

Google
 
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