Wish you were here

I decided that my last post was just too dark and gloomy.
So I re-wrote it. The voyeuristic amongst you can now get a
glimpse into the creative process :

---

I always find bookstores somewhat unsettling. On one hand there is this
orgasmic mine of information, entertainment, raw thought and, womens
magazines. But on the other hand it is also a little overwhelming because
there is this endless towering amount of information, entertainment, raw
thought and, womens magazines.

Suffice to say that I can usually last about two hours before I have to
either purchase something or just get out and breathe.

The store I was just in was no exception. On the flight over I realised
that my current tome was nearing an end and if I wanted to make it through
the week (and the flight back) I needed a refill. So I rocked into an old
haunt near the university but the deathly palor that consumed the place
was quickly unbearable. The aisles were full of pasty faced vegetarians
fresh from the health food shop next door. They were all moving slowly
through the sociology section which is, unsurprisingly, right next to the
self help section and I just couldn't focus.

I should also point out that these sort of places smell just plain weird.
It is an odd combination of 'Old Person', the great unwashed, slightly
damp books and years of burning incense to hide all the other smells.

So, I took the default approach, grabbed some cheap detective novels and
got out of there before the guy behind me in the line started a long
painful diatribe with the checkout person on the effects of Derrida on the
working classes. His beret and cloak were a dead giveaway.

Then again, this could have just been a side effect of, for want of a
better term, 'High Rent Jet Lag'

I want to say that I was rewarding myself by getting a first class ticket
to Sydney for Christmas, but the truth is that is first class were only
tickets available, so I just had to suck it up and and enjoy the ride.

For the record, anyone who thinks that first class is some bacchanal romp
involving endless champagne, massages and fawning minions is not flying my
airline. (except for the endless bubbly, that much is true)

Instead you spend and an uncomfortable two hours in the first class lounge
where there are only three of you and the place is deathly quiet. It is
like some sort of old hotel, replete with the occasional rustling of
papers and the unmistakable sound of a cube of ice settling itself deeper
into the glass. I half expected to see a geriatric bell hop totter past
under the weight of far too many bags.

The First class Cabin was equally bereft of soul. For some unheard of
reason only half the seats were taken and everyone was so far apart that
there was no way or method for people to intercommunicate. Even the staff
did their best to leave you alone because you, presumably, were far too
important to be bothered.

So you do what everyone else does. You bury yourself in a book or a
movie, sleep when you can and hope that there are normal people at the
other end.

I ended the day waiting for my sister in a bar down by the beach, as she
had the keys to the house and rode out the evening doing my usual 'I'm not
homeless, just interesting' impersonation.

It was supposed to be a balmy summer evening with people filling the
streets celebrating the end of the year. But instead it was
uncharacteristically cold, the rain was beating down and everyone was in
hiding. About an hour ago I finished my book, and would be talking to the
bartender except he went out the back for a smoke.

Instead I thought back to the flight.

Somewhere over the Hawaii they had to reboot the entertainment system and
for about thirty minutes all we had to listen to was the Pink Floyd's
'Dark side of the moon'

"...There's someone in my head but it's not me..."

How I wish you were here

It is sometime after dark. I'm sitting in a bar waiting for my sister to
meet me with the keys to her house. As a result I'm having a bit of a
existential crisis because I now feel truly homeless.

It it supposed to be a balmy summer evening with people filling the
streets celebrating the end of the year. But instead it is
uncharacteristically cold, the rain is beating down and everyone is in
hiding. About an hour ago I finished my book, and would be talking to the
bartender except that the staff have gone out the back for a smoke.

In my defense, I did try to be organised earlier today and find a
bookshop. I hit the one near the university but the deathly palor that
consumed the place was unbearable. I don't know what is it about these
sorts of shops but the place was full of pasty faced vegetarians fresh
from the health food shop next door. They were all moving slowly through
the sociology section which is, unsurprisingly, right next to the self
help section and I just couldn't focus. I should also point out that
these sort of places smell just plain weird. It is an odd combination of
'Old Person', the great unwashed, slightly damp books and years of burning
incense to hide all the other smells.

I needed real people, I needed just one good conversation.

The flight here probably didn't help. I can't think of a more solitary
experience.

I want to say that I was rewarding myself by getting a first class ticket
to Sydney for Christmas, but the truth is that is first class were only
tickets available, so I just had to suck it up and and enjoy the ride.

But I just couldn't. It was all too, well, odd.

I had to fly via LAX and spend an uncomfortable two hours in the first
class lounge. There were only three of us in there and the place was just
deathly quiet. It was actually like some sort of old hotel. There was
the occasional rustling of papers and the unmistakable sound of a cube of
ice settling itself deeper into the glass. I half expected to see a
geriatric bell hop totter past under the weight of far too many bags.

In the plane the First class Cabin was is equally bereft of soul. For
some unheard of reason only half the seats were taken and everyone was so
far apart that there was no way or method for people to intercommunicate.
Even the staff did their best to leave you alone because you, presumably,
were far too important to be bothered.

Anyone who thinks that first class is some bacchanal romp involving
endless champagne, massages and fawning minions is not flying my airline.
(except for the endless bubbly, that much is true)

Sometime later they had to reboot the entertainment system and for about
thirty minutes all we had to listen to was the Pink Floyd's 'Dark side of
the moon'

"...There's someone in my head but it's not me..."

I'm a Whore to my Airline.

Seat 24C, the second worst seat on a Boeing 777. (The worst seat is just
behind it, in the exit aisle). I am, as usual, suffering for my art and
doing a long haul across the pond. I had hoped to get some sleep during
the ten hour ordeal. I had also hoped to get an upgrade.

Instead I'm enjoying the unenvious position of being a) Close enough to the
toilets to enjoy the usual water cooler conversations that seem to run too
loud and too late into the night. b) My seat actually sticks out into the
aisle so EVERYONE bumps my seat as they walk past. c) The couple at the
other end of the row have a baby that won't stop crying. And, as icing on
the cake, d) I'm stuck next to someone who has decided that they do not want
to sleep and would rather work all night on their powerpoint presentation
that, now that I've had all night to read it, looks like crap.

You would think that these people would be aware of the folks around them
and reconsider their actions. But there is nothing I can do about it, I
just have to suck it up and enjoy my time in the coach ghetto.

So, I could be feeling a lot of pain, but at least I'm not Bob.

Bob travels as much as I do and by some odd coincidence he is actually on
my flight. Bob is also, I've decided, insane. He is doing something that
is affectionately called a 'mileage run'. He is flying to from San
Francisco to London where, after knocking back a few pints in the
departure lounge, will then get back on the plane and fly back to The Bay

He is doing this to get an extra 20,000 miles which will bump his frequent
flyer status. His argument is that with his improved status he has a
better chance of getting upgraded on later flights. So he is feeling the
pain of slumming it in coach for 24 hours just so he doesn't have to
slum it later.

I tried to point out that if he just didn't fly so often, he wouldn't feel
the pain at all.

It is kinda like buying things on sale. Sure the item is cheap, but you
would also save a lot more money if you just didn't buy the damn thing.

However, this is not why he is insane, well not directly. What is dumb is
that he is taking luggage with him. Here is the perfect opportunity to
travel really light. All you would need is a clean shirt, passport and a
credit card. Even Indy Jones couldn't get this good, he still had to find
somewhere to hang his whip.

Instead Bob has four DVDs, three days worth of clothes, two laptops and,
probably, a partridge in a pear tree. He muttered something about 'having
to get some work done'.

My only response was to just be a smug bastard and tell him that I have
three days of clothes because I'm going to Barcelona.

Unfortunately this meant that I had to endure the extra security while
moving between terminals at Heathrow, the usual connecting flight delays,
discovering that trains in Barcelona do not have route maps (I guess
people just 'know' where they are going). I barely had enough Euros and
was mostly guessing as to where the hotel was. Maybe turning around at
Heathrow was the saner thing to do.

When I did finally stumble into my accommodations to check in, 'Hotel
California' was playing over the sound system.

"...You can check out any time you like..."

Crosseyed and Painless

(Part 3 of something that happend to me some time ago)

Our good deal waiting tables on the largest city afloat (at the time)
supposedly extended to our hours.

As the managements way of saying thank you for helping them out as such
short notice, we were given light duties. We only had to serve breakfast
lunch and dinner. We were being excused from serving Afternoon Tea.

My idea of saying thank you would have been to let us off at the next port

However, once you were used to the routine the hours weren't that bad. Two
hours for breakfast, three for lunch, and say, four for dinner. So you got
some time off in the afternoon and between 11pm and 7am, your time was
your own.

"What do you do?" I asked,

I was curious as to the options, sunbake, swim, write?

"No mate" my roomie tells me.

"The pool is only open from 8pm. The only deck with seating and sun
is funnel deck, called so for obvious reasons, and the bar opens at 7pm"

He paused to take another drag from his cigarette.

"Do what everyone does, sleep"

And so the routine was set. Get up, work a bit, sleep, work some more,
get drunk, pass out, get up in time for breakfast. And don't get seasick.

Seasickness is not really a problem. The sea moves, you get sick, no
problem. But as Captain and Doctor alike will tell you, it is all in the
head. If your brain can see where your stomach is going, you'll be fine.

This, naturally, calls for fresh air and a window, two things that don't
exist for crew. So instead you just have to tell your brain to ignore
what your stomach is saying, assume your ears are faulty and plod on
regardless. It takes some time to get used to, but if you keep yourself
busy it works.

If it doesn't work and the hangover is just too much there are toilets
conveniently placed near all the danger zones with that reassuring wet,
slippery floor that tells you you are not the only one.

You are, I guess, all in the same boat.

Even now, many years later, I can still recall that one morning, after we'd
had a very nasty bender the night before, when one of our customers, the
bastard, decided that they wanted kippers for breakfast. We had to take
turns to go out there. We could only last 5 minutes before one of us
wanted to hurl.

Looking back now, I can, at best say, that it was an experience. I got
off lightly with just a taste of what i could have committed myself to.

A standard contract was 7 days a week for 3 months. Free room and board in
the finest post industrial steel spaces the Empire has to offer and
everything for sale is duty free.

If you need a free passage across the planet and can get used to the
unchanging routine and disgusting hours, the job is not particularly bad.
It's a cheap way to live.

If you actually care about your sanity, you should probably consider
driving a taxi.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled programme.

The ship that shagged me

At this point in time I would request that you don't ask how
it happened. I don't know.

Friday afternoon I was contemplating an eggplant foccacia and by lunchtime
Saturday I had checked in for 5 days hard labour and was contemplating
suicide.

I had signed on as a waiter, Sydney to Fremantle. Good money, huge tips,
excellent experience and street cred. 'You should do it', they said. I
should have trusted my first instincts and told them to get stuffed, but
no, I had had to say yes.

It was broken to us gently (of course). We were shown into the boardroom,
filled out forms etc, allowed to smoke, relax, get numb. Then we were
shown around the facilities. The two dining rooms that sat 500 each (this
was where we were to work).

We were shown the other more lucrative Princess and Queen's Grills, for
the full fare paying passengers. The penthouse suites, with direct access
to the Queen's grill so the folk never have to mix with the other
passengers. The casino (one day someone will explain to me how a roulette
wheel works on a ship), the bars, the theatre, TV studio, bank, night
club, gym, sauna, spas, pools, Harrods... I was just endless.

Then we were led to the staff quarters.

'Through here' our guide said, He opened a solid steel door and the carpet
stopped, the wallpaper stopped, the ceiling stopped, everything that was
not needed for ultimate survival had been removed, you know, chairs,
tables, windows. There were just Bare steel walls and bare steel floors.

On the back of the door were 2 signs:

Please wipe you feet before
entering passenger accommodation

and:

Please keep this door closed
to avoid the smell
entering passenger accommodation.

Our guide also chose this point to remind us that under no
circumstances were we allowed in passenger areas, except when
on duty

"Full facilities are available in the crew area", He said

Yeah, right. We had access to all the mod-cons including a crew mess and
a bar. The bar was, of course, showing all the signs of having never
been cleaned since the maiden voyage. Wood benches, linoleum on
the floor, complete with cigarette burns, and no windows. It was also the
most popular room on the ship because it supported the most popular
pastime : Getting Drunk.

'Fine' we said, 'OK' we said, 'we can handle this..'

Offshore employment, tax free, food and lodging included, duty free bar
prices, beer at 60c a can. Sure everything's in US dollars, but we can
handle that, our wages will cover us right?

Nope.

Apparently, we got the good deal. Apparently.

We were going to be paid $20 a day and, since we were on for such a short
time, another $38/day in assumed gratuity. The normal wage, we found out
later, was about $12 per day.

We, were of course, welcome to any tips we could make in the restaurant.
But, and the whole reason I was here in the first place, The bulk of the
guests were locals from Sydney who were jumping on the opportunity to
ride the great beauty on one of her first trips around the Antipodes.

The problem here is that on the QEII all meals are included so,
knowing myself and any other full blooded tight arsed Australian,
if I'd just forked over $1800 for 5 days 'First Class' travel only to
find that my cabin is two feet above the waterline, I'm stuck on
the one table in the dining room for the whole trip, and it's 50
feet from the nearest window, with nothing to do all day
but sit eat drink and read, I'd be bloody glad I didn't have to pay
for dinner (if you could call it that)

In fact I'd probably be pissed off at paying $25 for
a bottle of nasty white burgundy and buggered if I was going to leave a tip.

On a transatlantic crossing you can earn over $2000 in 5 days, But you are
also mostly dealing with Americans who 'respect your right to smoke', but
not your right to do it at your leisure. Those are the sort of people who
would tip you if you don't cough in their direction. Two Grand - easy.
But on the Australian leg of a world tour - Buckleys.

Poor, Tired and Starving, we made the best of our days.

I'll tell you more later.

Going down on Her Majesty

Recently I had a conversation that digressed into the topic of Cruise liners.
This led me to recall an experience I once had...

Despite what people may tell you. Regardless of any advertisement
featuring happy smiling people enjoying a horn-o-plenty of earthly
delights on the high seas, Whatever they say, it is all lies. This is not
a luxury liner, this is not the greatest experience you can have in one
lifetime, it is, though words escape me when it comes to expressing the
true nature of the QEII - Hell Afloat.

The fact that it is not painted black with barbed wire on the gunwales,
flames spewing forth from every port-hole and a large sign painted on the
side in blood, saying 'this is not a good idea' only leads me to confirm
the sadistic nature of the management.

To be concise, in a way that only one of the bard's supporting characters
could be, If you wanted to create the ultimate prison, from which escape
was 100% impossible, where life was miserable beyond imagination, and
pestilence ran through the ranks to the point where to repent and confess
to all number of sins (both true and untrue) was the only means of
retaining ones sanity and certification of human existence. Well, just
try your average ocean going vessel.

I guess this is why the founders of my once great nation (Australia) ended
up where they were. If I was given the choice of six to nine months miles
from anywhere on a ship, followed by spending the rest of my life in an
unknown land with no known means of support or survival or, option number
two, just spending the rest of my life stick on a ship, miles from
anywhere (which, if you can't swim, means the middle of the Thames) on a
ship. I'd offer to tow the thing. (This also makes me suspect that to
let any Australian on a ship is just the English way of reminding us how
lucky we are). However I digress.

Many years ago, when I was stil young, foolish and in desperate need of
spare change, the QEII rocked into town. It arrived with the offer of
cheap passage and a call for extra crew. Foolishly I not only applied for
the job, I accepted it when I made the grade. I was not a waiter on the
worlds finest luxury liner.

Looking back, I can now offer this sage advice.

If you get a job on said ship, DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES ACCEPT IT.

Don't even contemplate a passage, do not get on, do not think 'holiday',
do not think 'relaxing option', do not pass go and do not collect $200.

Think, (and burn this forever in your brain) 'Most disgusting example of
Eco-Terrorism and capitalist exploitation imaginable'. Better still
think, as a colleague so aptly surmised, "SURREAL".

Let my try and paint you a mental picture here.

On my few hours off when I wasn't seasick and there was still some
daylight, I Headed to the outdoor staff area on 2 deck (which was under
the passenger 1 deck, so tanning was a no go), I could hear what sounded
like recorded explosions. Being the curious sort I leaned over the edge,
resisting the temptation to just throw myself overboard, to see what was
going on above me.

What I saw were bright orange clay pigeons were being cast into the sea
whole. Having been shot at electronically, as some sort of sacrifice to
the resources that were being exploited to make this whole thing
possible, they cast into the depths.

Out to my left the horizon was lined with half a dozen of the Bass
Straight oil rigs, lighting up the sky as they burnt off excess gas as
some reminder of the consumption that was keeping this circus afloat.

Everywhere you go walk your nostrils are assaulted by a stale smelling
blend of Chanel #5 and sea salt. It would remind you of your
grandmother's house, if gran also happened to be first mate to the Dread
Pirate Roberts.

A feeling of death is always on the mind, like the ship is one huge
vampyric beast, I would lie awake at night wondering if the splashes I was
hearing were from the dessicated remains of the engineering crew being
cast overboard in the dead of night.

In the public areas it is deathly silent, even during the day, the staff
are moving through secret passages below the waterline. Not even Muzak
can survive. The life blood of everything is consumed by the dead and
dying who lie passed out on the leather lounges, exhausted from a hards
days breathing, desperate to make their final days become final weeks.

It would make a great retirement option for those not so loved ones you
can't wait to get rid of, if it wasn't for the fact that for every
bloated, dying passenger, there were two dead waiters.

Surreal indeed.

I'll tell you More in a few Days.

How to be a good waiter

This was prompted by the musings that I occasionally read over at the
waiterrant (http://waiterrant.net/). and the fact that I've spent far too much
time in restaurants. This has made me a) A critical SoB, because I want good
service, and b) Self-righteous about it, since I can claim the whole 'Been
there, done that, paid off my education working tables for many years' angle.

So, If you think you know the industry, sit down and take notes.

Write it down.

You aren't a savant and we will have changes. I don't care if you think
you can remember three courses for three people, you also have a lot of
other crap on your mind (Did you check out the dress that girl was
wearing?) and you are going to forget something. (Did I mention I have
allergies ?). Get a pad, Get lots of pens and write it down.

Don't run away when asked a question.

We haven't got all day, and nothing is more annoying than having the
server disappear half way through the ordering to 'Ask the chef'. It also
doesn't sell your ability to remember our orders if you can't retain a
single question for three minutes. Write down the question, and move on
to the next customer.

Know who ordered what.

If you even dare come over here and ask "Who has the fish ?" I'm
sending the whole order back. Number the seats, clockwise, from the seat
closest to the kitchen. Write down the order and the seat number. (Did I
mention that you should write things down).

Learn the menu.

If I ask for a recommendation, be able to suggest something. Work out
what goes with what. When in doubt lie, If I knew what I wanted, I
wouldn't have asked you.

Don't suggest big meals.

Look at your customers and think about how much they can eat. If they
have room for dessert, they may actually order it. If you just stuffed
them with pasta, they'll have a small coffee, a small bill, and leave
before they pass out.

Make eye contact.

You don't want to be the waiter who walks around with their head up their
arse, There are customers who want your attention. They are easy to find,
they will be looking at you.

Learn to open a bottle of wine

Plunging the sharp end through the foil and battling for 10 minutes to get
the damn thing to give up the goods doesn't paint a picture of
professionalism. Get a good Waiters Friend, an empty bottle, a pile of
old corks and practice. Better yet, buy some of the wine that is on the
list, invite some friends over and get loaded actually tasting the stuff.

Don't bring my next course before I'm ready

This has so many problems. A) I'm here to enjoy my meal, not feel like I'm
being rushed through the experience, and B) Where do you think you're
going to put the dish ? There is already a plate in front of me, and I'm
using it.

Here's a Tip : No-one takes more than 15 minutes to eat a course. Even
with breaks it is possible to serve a 3 course meal in 45 minutes. (Trust
me, I've worked pre-show diners where we had to). Just get your timing
right.

There is no such thing as a Well-Done Steak.

Get the customer to describe how they want their meat ruined, let them
pick from the words: Rare , Medium-rare , Medium, and Not-pink. You can
always apologise later and get the meat cooked a bit longer.

The couple in the corner want to have sex

Do not take forever to bring them the bill. They do not want to be left
alone any longer. This is turning out to be a hot date, They have had
good food and wine, and if they can get home and get their clothes off
before they lose momentum they will tip you big time.

And Finally:

Bring all entrees at the same time.

Bring all starters at the same time.

Don't piss off the chef

Don't fuck up the order

Don't be late for your shift

Your guide to European Rail Stations

Tips for the great unwashed

The ability to get around large amounts of the continent by simply jumping
on a train is, astounding. It is also good to know that no matter where
you go, European rail stations are always the same:

Fast Food. Don't panic, your saturated fat-laden diet is safe here. You
won't have to worry about mysterious herring salads anymore. Just keep
looking and you will find any or all of a McDonalds, Starbucks, Pizza Hut
and or Burger King.

Backpackers. They will always be there standing in line for a ticket or
washing their underwear in the water fountains. You get no points for
spotting them. They are in fact a piece by the artist in residence at
the Stockholm Institute of Anthropological studies. If you approach them,
carefully, they will be quite friendly and you can ask them for a guide to
the installation. They will never speak in your language.

Tickets. There will be a line, and the staff will continue hate you, just
get over it. In fact, ticket staff are a classic demonstration of the
difference between 'nice' and 'polite'. Only a seasoned station attendant
can perform their public role with such practiced disdain. How else can
they sell you a ticket and at the same time make perfectly clear that you
are ruining their day by not only asking them for something, but also
getting them to speak English.

Drink the water, It is good for you

Don't drink the coffee, it is made with that water you just drank.

Pee. Somewhere, when you least expect it, you will find yourself near a
corner that smells of rancid urine. I'm still not sure how the managers
of rail stations have not made the connection between making people pay to
use a toilet (or locking them completely) and why their buildings reek of
yesterdays beer.

Dogs, they run a close second to the 'packers. I don't know why it freaks
me out, but there is always someone leading their dog through the station.
I'm thinking is because they like the smell of pee.

Empty first class. I'm also perplexed as to why there is a first class
section of any train. As far as I can tell, the kind of people that can
afford first class are also the kind of people that would want to be as
far as possible from a place full of junk food, backpackers, dogs and
smells of pee. Yet there are all these nice and shiny carriages just
waiting for Madame DuPont to turn up with her three steamer trunks, furs
and personal assistant.

All I can assume is that first class is actually a form of purgatory, a
special hell reserved for self important upstarts who don't tip the valet
and feel it is important to send the room service back twice because it
isn't up to scratch. You want the first class treatment ? Be careful of
what you wish for.

Two tickets for Brussels, please.

Time for a good deed

[ note : I haven't written anything for at least two months because I've
had a busy summer that has lacked the usual combination of boredom and
bitterness that drives me to write another five hundred words. ]

Travel, on the whole, Bites.

It is not getting any easier. Getting on planes is just more difficult
and, on the whole, People Suck.

This weekend, for example, I decided to try something completely different
and drive to my destination. What I hadn't factored was the inventive
level of hell that is 'Holiday Traffic' and the way it can put the most
even tempered person into a cursing, cat kicking funk that only years of
alcohol abuse can ever hope to temper.

In my case, a sequence of delays left me somewhere near Reno at about
11pm, exhausted and in desperate need of a hotel room. I had foolishly
thought that, being a casino town, this would be a piece of cake. I was
wrong. There was nothing, nada, zip. The whole town was booked out.

After driving past many ( I lost count after 10 ) no vacancy signs. I
started to just walk into places and ask if they knew of anything. They
didn't. This city was so closed that people had stopped caring.

This is where I need to point out just how bad people suck.

I actually stood in line at one hotel while the fool behind the counter
checked people in and then suddenly, AFTER WE WERE STANDING THERE FOR 15
MINUTES, he looked at all of us and said "Sorry we're full, I only had the
a few rooms in the first place".

Somehow, while most of my brain was thinking of inventive ways to tear him
a new one, a tiny rational collection of synapses kicked in and reminded
me that I had a 24 hour 1-800 number to my travel agency. (yes, you can
call me stupid now).

The conversation went like this :

"I'm on the 80, headed west from Reno. Find me the first room in my path"

"Ok, I'll call you back"

Less that 10 minutes later she called back and had found me a room that
was in the next town.

"Call this number and ask for Bob, he is expecting you"

A few short minutes later I fell into the hotel where the night manager
looked at me, looked at the line of people waiting for rooms and without
hesitation said

"Sorry, we're full"

"No," I replied, "I have a reservation"

So while I was feeling full of myself about being clever and organised I
had to be taken down a few notches by talking to another couple who were
in the line. They had been turned away, were even more tired than myself,
and were seriously considering sleeping in their car in the carpark.

But, I think the night manager knew what to do. As he was checking me in
he gave me the two keys for my room and said "All I have for you is a
suite". Sure enough, when I opened the door, I was faced with a palace of
two rooms, two bathrooms, a sofa bed and two room keys.

I didn't have to think for long before I ran out the carpark, found them
just as they were driving around the corner and thrust the spare room key
in their hands.

"Play nice, no snoring, we'll work put details in the morning"

I slept very soundly that night.

Re-inventing dullest blog on the planet

By a bizzare twist of fate I mis-typed the URL of my blog today and found
myself at what can only be described ad the saddest blog on the planet.
At first I wasn't going to draw your attention to it, but there is
something about a train wreck that just makes you want to call all your
friends over

So here it is :

http://rtfp.blogspot.com/

Now before you bother clicking the link, I may as well point out that the
most interesting blog is reproduced in its entirety here:

"I got to watch the squirrel for a good 15 mins before it got scared off.
All the time it was feeding the birds tried to join in."

Now, this post could have just stayed as a draft forever, but, no someone
actually decided this was something the world needed to know about.

So, your first reaction might be something like 'why did they bother', or
why, since they went public with this, didn't they put their heart and
soul into it and make the damn thing exciting.

Now, I can't really throw too many rocks since I've been silent for the
last month ( It is summer, I blame the heat ). But on the flip side I
could just as easily summarise my life by saying :

"Checked into hotel, Watched CNN for 2 hours, apparently there is a war
going on, had a shower, crashed early."

But that is hardly interesting is it ? Anyone can write, anyone can say
something, you just have to put your mind to it. And this is what I was
really left thinking about this post.

'What a waste of good material'

There is a goldmine of stuff here. You've got the photo, the whole life
at home thing going on. You just have to fill in a few gaps :

--

"Mon July 19 2004

Saw a bird outside the window. This was especially odd because I live on
the 27th floor of a wasteland apartment block that was built in the 60;s
when no-one thought that people would want the mess and bother of things
like flora or fauna. oh, and the tree is plastic.

I thus had to assume that the bird was just another victim of the crack
addicts that seem to live in the stairwells and was going to spend an
indereterminate amount of time trying to get nutrition from the
unresponsive tree until it either dropped dead from its earlier snack or
just fainted from starvation.

I've started to track the crackheads because the elevator stopped working
about 6 months ago ( and the homeless keep using it as a toilet ) and I
need to know when it is safe to descend.

I stared at the bird for a good 15 minutes because I still couldn't find
my feet and I was contunally baffled as to how that tree got there in the
first place. I last saw the tree on the roof around christmas when the
Russians on the 17 floor put it there and had some sort of party.

I don't recall much of the events, something about it being very cold,
something about death by mis adventure, a faulty railing or something, and
the police who were searching the courtyard for days looking for body parts

Suffice to say I woke up about three days later and this tree was taking
up most of my balcony.

I was going to move it but well, it added some colour, and blocked the
view of the land fill across the way.

So, on closer inspection then I realised that it wasn't a bird, but
actually a squirrel and I was right, it was dead. it had probably
overdosed on the crack like the rest of the mice that live in the
cupboards, and keep me awake with their constant talking"

..."

Anyway. You get my point.

Life is only as boring as you want it to be, And remember you may not be
the only one trying to turn nothing into something

http://reambrad.blogspot.com/

Where do you start

Do you curse yourself by saying that all you ever need to survive is a
Passport, Credit Card and a Laptop.

Do you start with having your laptop die a horrible death one day onto a
three week trip through Europe.

Perhaps you start with heading to the nearest geek store only to discover
that laptops in Paris are configured with funky keyboards that make it
hard to spell even the most simplest of words like 'Merde'.

Or do you start with your journey out of hell? Do you try and describe
what it is like to spend eleven hours in coach in a middle seat on your
way back from Germany.

Do you start with giving up your window seat so that a wife can sit next
to her husband, who is not feeling so well, and may need special
attention. Do you take the time to mention that the old man next to you
was close to death that you just had to believe them.

Do you start with the senior flight attendant, about half way through the
flight making that breathtaking announcement and begins with :

"If there is a medical practitioner on board..."

Do you start with being stuck in Belgium for two days because there were
'issues' with getting as new visa and you had to wait out the time in a
hotel in downtown Brussels.

Do you go on to mention that when it was all fixed, there were no flights
out of town for another two or three days.

Or do you go back even further in time and start with realising that women
in France actually know how to wear perfume.

Do you take the time to point out that they just plain smell nice, instead
of resembling the aftermath of some sort of comical escapade involving a
40 litre display of Chanel #3, a a bull and a lot of broken glass.

Do you start with the rental car, no map of Paris and trying to determine
which is the correct exit for the freeway before you do your third lap of
the Arch De Triomphe.

Do you start with attempting to drive a Small French Car on the authbahn
and the looks you get from the Porsche Drivers when they over take your
sewing machine on wheels at twice your current speed

Do you start by noticing that all caravans on European highways are being
towed by the Dutch

Do you bother to mention that the average toll on a French highway is
about $3 per mile.

Do you just segway in to driving through Champagne country and never
actually seeing a vineyard

Do you go on to mention having one of the best meals in your life in a
simple Brasserie and try to find ways to describe that a 'Trio of Creme
Brulees' is really like.

Do you start with then drinking too much Bordeaux on a Friday night and
spending an unknown number of hours listening to MP3s of bands playing
nothing but covers of other bands songs.

Do you start with trying to sober up the next day in a fairly nice cafe
while the two old men next to you polish off a bottle of Burgundy in less
than 30 minutes.

Or do you just start by saying that the world is a very strange place.

You'll never notice unless you get out and see it.

Been there, Done that

Things I do not need to do before I die :

Go somewhere because it just 'seems like a good idea'.

Buy a cheap novel from an airport newsstand.

Get a table for one in a restaurant.

Order room service.

Fly first class on an international trip.

Sit in with the band.

Drive a rental car in the USA.

Ask for directions.

Go somewhere with just the shirt on my back and a toothbrush.

Eat an airline meal.

Drive a rental car in Europe.

Chat with a member of the local law enforcement.

Order off the menu.

Drink airline coffee.

Catch a train through Europe.

Eat in the smoking section.

Rent a convertable.

Get a free upgrade, for anything.

Go to Las Vegas, stay more than a week.

Lie about my age, profession, or nationality.

Fly standby.

Switch hotel rooms.

Drink whatever comes out of the tap.

Eat in the best restaurant in town.

Fly a red-eye.

Fly to another country with no notice.

Miss a connection.

Use my phone to get internet access.

Spend more than four hours in an airport lounge.

Leave the 'do not disturb' sign on all day.

Hang out with the chef.

Travel on an expense account.

Ride the london tube.

Check my email from the beach.

Sleep overnight in an airport lounge.

Go to Scandanivia in winter.

Sleep in a youth hostel.

Ride the BART.

Get SSSS on a boarding pass.

And,

Book my own travel.

Back in the saddle

It is a Monday, 10 am, and I'm in the airport. I've just spend an hour on
the a conference call ( taking a break to get through security ) and still
have 3 calls and 40 emails to catch up on before the plane takes off.

It is also the week before the Memorial Day long weekend and everything is
booked solid. Foolishly I tried to get a coast to coast non-stop and
wrangle an upgrade with one of the infinite free vouchers I have that are
due to expire. Of course the gate agents just announced that the flight
is full and there will be no upgrades. I'm lucky I brought my own lunch.

I guess you can say that I'm back at work.

I was beginning to enjoy the break I gave myself. I took a week with no
phone or email, toured the wine country, tried to recall what a normal
life looked like and generally decompressed.

Of course, that didn't stop me noticing that some things, with
the right set of glasses ( e.g. my tired, stressed, bitter and twisted
pair) are interesting, annoying and or bizzare.

My Saturday was spent playing 'spot the tourist'. I was in the local dive
bar where an R&B band was cranking out classics like 'Dock of the Bay' and
'Mustang Sally'.

The locals were easy to locate, dirty jeans, grape skins under the
fingernails and drinking , well, either, domestic beer, margaritas,
tequila shots, or arguing the points of some new bottle of Cabernet
someone found.

The tourists: clean jeans, clean fingernails and drinking , well, either,
domestic beer, margaritas, tequila shots, or arguing the points of some
new bottle of Cabernet some found.

Ok, so maybe not so easy to spot.

It is easier to just wait a few hours, let the alcohol kick in and see what
happens. The locals just get a bit more belligerent or run away then the
tourists get rowdy.

the tourists, not only get rowdy, but, set free from their environment,
reveal wonderful examples of human behavior such as the group of desperate
housewives who were burning a hole in the dancefloor, and making eyes at
the drummer who had the whole shirtless, tattooed, cap on backwards thing
going for him.

I can only assume that this sort of thing happens all the time because the
next day I definitely got the hint that they wanted us to all leave.

It was Sunday, after 9pm, and all the restaurants were closing their
kitchens. So I was stuck at the only place still open and being
entertained by some swarthy latin wannabee playing smooth jazz. It is
almost beyond description and I'm not sure where to start.

His outfit was classic Banana Republic and would be predictably
non-threatinng except that he was enjoying his work beyond a point that
made me comfortable. He was actually humming along to the tunes, and had
this whole head bobbing 'In the groove' thing going for him. It was
really quite scary.

It didn't help that he was sporting a textbook accountant haircut and had
matching black glasses. This was not buddy holly thing , this was like
the High School Dweeb had a secret job as a musician but forgot to change
into the uniform.

To make matters worse he had a wireless receiver and was trolling the room
serenading the diners. I felt like I was trapped in a version of hell
where the only entertainment was Al Jarreau, if he was white, five foot
one and had put on about 20 pounds.

I accidentally made eye contact at one point (big mistake). He looked
back at me and nodded with an unsettling "I'm cool eh?" type smile,
changed key and tried out a solo I'm sure he had been practicing in his
bedroom for the last four weeks.

I guess I probably shouldn't mention he also had drum machine.

It almost made me want to go back to work.

I blame the Dutch

When asked to describe the Dutch I usually rant about the fact that they
are a bunch of windmill turning, clog wearing, dike stuffing, tulip
eaters... and go downhill from there.

The second thing that crosses my mind is a scene from 'Goldmember':

GOLDMEMBER

Can I paint his yoo-hoo gold now? It's kind of my thing, you know...

DR EVIL crosses the room in his moving chair and comes in close to the
camera. He pauses, working up to the answer.

DR. EVIL

How 'bout no, you crazy Dutch bastard.

Either way, I'm convinced that the Dutch are weird and don't do things in
a conventional manner. This includes the practical things like getting
around.

I was supposed to be in Amsterdam for 1 or 2 meetings. So we had all
planned to come up the night before, have an extra diner meeting that
evening and get back to the regular business the following day.

But at about 4pm on the night before I got a message from the Dutch rep
that the next day's meetings were not in fact in Amsterdam but in a town,
Maassluis, that was, not only 1.5 hours from Amsterdam but 1/2 way between
where I was at present and the meeting that night.

Sucking up my two steps forward, one step back. I got up at the crack of
dawn the next morning, fell out of my overpriced single bed downtown, and
trudged to the rail station.

After standing in line for 10 minutes I found out that the station didn't
take credit cards, none of the vending machines did, and unless you had
cash you were S.O.L.

Handing over the last of my notes, I sat in the train for the first leg
of the journey, got off at the correct station, then tried to find a cab
for the last portion.

Simple, you may think, but no. Not only did the cab driver have no idea
where the address was, but he didn't take credit cards, and neither did
any of the others.

Now you may be thinking that this was just an isolated case but I was
when I mentioned this to someone who lived in Amsterdam, they had this to
say :

"...Been there, done that, have the T-shirt. This is Dutch service and
hospitality at its best. To give you a hint:

While having a nice dinner, the waiters start vacuuming and ask the
guests to lift there feet so that they can vacuum under the table.

My father was visiting, and asked the waiter for bread with his gambas.
The waiter said no and left.

I was going to a meeting outside of The Hague. Once I got to the train
station I called for a taxi. After 30min there taxi still hadn't arrived
and I called back. It was freezing, I might add. After a lot of back and
forth, it turned out that this taxi company did not pick up passengers
in this area and no other company in the area either. So the people
where I had the meeting had to pick me up. "

Oh yeah, and I'm never drinking Heiniken again.

Eating with the Locals

In my endless search to find a decent hotel room in a decent part of
town, I've made astute use of online restaurant reviews to try and get a
feel for the area.

Everyone has their own opinion and the gauge swings wildly. But you can
always tell, and know to ignore, any review by an American of a European
restaurant.

"...service was terrible, we had to wait 30 minutes for our drinks..."

Well, firstly, In some parts of the world people consider a meal to be a
social event that is to be enjoyed, instead of a personal curse that you
must get over with a quickly as possible. You are meant to take the time
to chat with friends and family and discuss the events of the day. What
you don't want is a waiter hovering over you learning about your personal
life.

Secondly, I often wonder if all the bad service is really just a clever
plan to annoy Americans.

"Our service is slow, but it keeps the Yankees away."

Thinking about this, I thought it was worth making a list of the many
other ways Europeans can make Americans feel out of place :


Drink alcohol at any hour of the day or night.

No, they are not alcoholics, they are just social. Contrary to popular
belief it is not crime to have a beer at lunch, you are allowed to order a
bottle of wine for yourself and, as you are not going to eat until 9pm,
you can have a Martini on the way home from work. But don't confuse this
with an excuse to do endless tequila shots or drink a 5th of Jack, Spring
break is so 'last year'.

Smoke everywhere.

It won't matter where you sit, or what you do or say. You can even try
and ask for a table in the non-smoking section. All you have to do is
wait about five minutes and then two people will turn up, sit right next
to you and start chain smoking. Eventually they actually bother to find
an ashtray. After you leave, they will go back to the bar and wait for
their next mission.

Not make you wait for your table.

Nope, no waiting here. They will take one look at those plaid pants
you're sporting and put you at the rickety table behind the pot plant near
the toilets, the one that is used for the staff meals. Go on, just try
and ask for 'that one by the window, when it is free'. Get back to me
when they stop laughing at you.

Foreign language menus.

If you can hold you liquor and beat a path through the smoke to the table,
the floor staff will stall you by giving you the menu in the local
language. Don't try and bluff them, they know you can't read it, that
camera bag was a dead giveaway. You can ask for the English version, but
the prices will be different.

Speak a foreign language.

You may have faked your way past the menu but they will then ambush you
by sending every bus boy, trainee waiter and the hostess past to ask you
a different question in a different accent. If you're adventurous just say
'no' to everything. You may end up there sitting there for a while and
your fish won't have any sides, but you won't ever see the bill.

Speak French.

This deserves a special mention because it annoys just about everyone.

Staff who actually have a clue about the menu.

In some of these places the same staff have been working here all their
lives. (They have to, Mum owns the place). So don't try and be clever
and ask them if they know how the duck is prepared. Not only will they
tell you, but they will also entertain you with a long and arduous story
about how it was raised and exactly which side of the valley the carrots
came from.

Detailed and incomprehensible wine lists.

Think you know what a Chardonnay is ? think again.

Expensive prices.

All that truffle oil and a a wine list thats puts just about any liquor
store to shame can only be attained through a carefully crafted art of
manipulating exchange rates, fleecing tourists and outrageous percentages.
It really won't help the experience if you convert the price of that steak
into dollars, just ask for another bottle and enjoy the ride.

No substitutions.

You don't want what's on the menu ? Try the place next door.

The only thing you should ever deep fry is bits of potato.

The Calamari is not undercooked. Yes, those are raw onions, and that is what
real Brie looks like.

Call 'fries', 'Frites'.

'Creme Fraiche', 'Moules', 'Au Gratin', they have a polite name for just
about everything, don't even think of asking for 'plain bread'.

'Sandoux' means lard.

It may sound exotic, but should you actually interrogate your server
about the interesting eel dish, don't be surprised when he says :

"It is, er, how you say, pork fat ?'

Not be fat.

Yes, the menu may be a minefield of butter, cream, starches, carbs and
Sandoux, and every table may be polishing of bottles of Bordeaux, but the
locals have this disgusting tendency to look mostly fit and healthy.
That's when happens when you are forced to walk to the railway station
twice a day and use the stairs. Bastards aren't they ?

Use the metric system.

Do you know how much 70cc is ?

Serve an entree the way it was meant to be served.

It is a 'Starter'. Your actual meal won't be here for another hour. It
is thus meant to be a small simple thing that doesn't require too much of
your attention so you can still talk, line your stomach against the next
bottle of red wine, and not die of hunger.

Cheese.

It's for desert, can you deal with that ?

Hide the bathroom.

Did you make it through the meal ? Did you just have too much wine ?
Well you had better be prepared ask. The bathroom is usually upstairs
behind an unmarked door and it is a 'unisex toilet'. Take note of those
two words. Unisex means that people aren't afraid to see a bloke whip out
the tackle and water a wall, and you don't have separate bathrooms at
home, so why should it be any different here ? Also, they aren't afraid
to call it a toilet.

Hide the restaurant.

So, you think you can handle everything they can throw at you ? Do you
honestly think you can pass yourself off as a local ? Well you stil have
to find the place. Bad directions from the concierge and lack of street
signs are only part of it. These places are hidden down alleys, above hat
shops or behind an unmarked door below street level. You won't find any
neon signs saying 'Drink Bud' here.

If you really want to eat, here's what you do.

Walk down the street until you find the first menu that looks interesting.
Present yourself to the waiter and everyone else inside and, in your
loudest and clearest english say the following :

"Your Restaurant looks wonderful. I want the finest your chef has to
offer and I have lots of money"

You'll be just fine.

I'm still friends with the band

Another country, another town, another restaurant,
and another basement with a band.

The difference is that this is a more up market place. The waiter was
telling me about it. It was in the old bank vault and still had all the
safe deposit boxes around the walls. The management decided to turn it
into a martini and cigar type venue, with the occasional live band,
thinking that the walls were thick enough to keep the sound under control.

I ended up down there because it was still early and I knew I could get a
comfortable chair, a coffee and relax for a few hours after dinner. I had
to agree with the waiter. This wasn't the going to attract the starving
students and they wouldn't have got past the bouncer anyway.

So as I settled in, and the band set up, I noted the arrival of the usual
suspects, namely family and friends. Well, more family really. The
people drifting in seemed to well dressed and over fifty. By the way the
place filled up I had to assume that the parents and extended family of
every band member was here.

You know it is a sign of your success when your parents give up telling
you and your dead beat friends to stop making that racket in the garage
and actually come out to watch you play. That or it is just resignation
that since you've survived to this age, then this must be more than
passing fad and probably even pays the rent. ( Although they still
secretly wish you'd dump that bass player boyfriend and put on some makeup
for once )

Also, the gig was nicely timed to be late enough for the folks to have
dinner, catch the opera and then go watch the kids play.

So they are out for the night and having fun. They get to drink in front
of the kids and not give a damn because it isn't their party, for once
they are the ones doing the crashing. They have cred because they know
the headline act, and they they get to tell the bouncer that 'they're
friends of the band'.

I'm willing to bet they will be respectfully quiet during the set but up
and dancing by the end of the night.

Some time later, when dad had finally made his way in after, presumably,
driving around for an hour looking for a safe place to park, the band
stopped tuning up, put down most of their drinks, and played music that
didn't actually suck.

They played a lot of old favorites from the R&B catalog and derivations
therein, including a deceptive funk version of 'all blues', which actually
works if you can keep it on the one, and you know what I'm talking about.
I saw the few strangers who didn't, and were expecting a sat night DJ and
house music, finish their drinks and leave.

Still, the band kept playing, there was an audience who cared, and fun was
had by all. Highlight of the night was when the singer thanked her
friends for showing up before one of the songs.

You just can't do better than someone in a breathy French voice saying
something from the heart and then banging out a version of 'Lady Marmalade'.

You know you're in another country when that happens.

Vive la difference

Sorry, we're closed

I'm in Copenhagen and I have just finished my book.

I hadn't expected to get through it so quickly, as I had cleverly
purchased a very dense 700 page novel that I had assumed would last me a
bit more than a week. But I had also assumed that Copenhagen would
actually be open on a Sunday and there would be lots of interesting things
to see and do. I had also assumed that my hotel was somewhere useful.

I made a lot of wrong assumptions

Getting into Denmark was fairly simple, once you got past the mad rumpus
that was a lot of Belgians and Danes hustling to get on the plane (orderly
queue is not in their vocabulary it seems) and I even managed to find a
train that went in the right direction and dumped me at the central
station

What wasn't so simple was that today was Sunday, on the easter weekend,
and everything was shut. Including Tourist Information.

So, unable to wrangle something as simple as a map, or even (gasp) ask
directions, I had to suck it up and jump in a taxi.

"Do you know where the hotel is ?"

"Yes."

"Is it far ?"

"Not far."

"Do you take credit cards ?"

"Yes."

As the taxi pulled out I suddenly remembered the important fourth question

"Is it close enough to walk ?"

"Probably,yes."

Damn

A very short cab ride later we pulled up at the hotel and I remembered the
other important question to ask all taxi drivers.

"Where is downtown ?"

"Back across the river where we came from ?"

"And this hotel is the closest ?"

"Mostly."

Not knowing what else I could add to the conversation I checked into the
hotel.

The room was, of course, another example of Danish design from hell that
would put an Ikea catalog to shame, so I got out of there as quickly as
possible. (Oddly enough, I've been to Sweden and all the offices looked
like hospital rooms from the 70s. Any clever design skills Ikea might
have, they are keeping for export)

So, armed with a map confirming that I needed to go back to the station,
and went for a brief walk. And brief it was.

You see, as I may have mentioned earlier, everything was closed. So while
wandering the streets looking at locked buildings may have its
architectural merits, it is not the black hole of time I was looking for.
Instead I ferreted out the cafe with the most comfortable couch, ordered a
coffee in the best Danglish I could muster and promptly finished my book.

Well, there were brief interludes where I had the adventure of navigating
a menu that seemed to consist of a lot of words that looked like 'bork'
(although 'burger' is spelled the same in every language it seems)

But even that could not detain me from getting to the last page of my less
than worthy tome sometime around sunset and leaving me in limbo for the
rest of the evening. Even if I could find a bookstore, it was now past
closing time and, as I may have mentioned earlier, it was easter Sunday so
closing time was, oh, yesterday.

Now the thought of a lazy Sunday afternoon in front of the television
loses its appeal when you add in the hotel room component and I did humour
the idea of going and checking my email for a brief second before my
sanity kicked back in and made me consider other alternatives. I thought
about measuring how long it would take to do a lap of the city and even
considered flagging down one of the boats in the canal and bribing the
owner for a tour of the islands. But I still had to fill in parts of
tomorrow so I didn't want to blow all my options on the first day

Instead I just found another cafe and spent some time watching the world
go by and taking notes about how the universe operates.

I'll give you three guesses where I wrote this.

Could you hurry up and leave

I almost got stuck in Dusseldorf.

The problem was that in theory I could go anywhere and I had a few days
to myself. However, any whimsical fantasies I had about spending a few
days in the south of France, or getting lost in the Alps, were rapidly
being shattered by the reality that I hadn't made any bookings, it was
already 5pm and the start of the Easter long weekend.

So I was under the gun. The last train to either Brussels or Amsterdam
was leaving in less than an hour and I couldn't commit to anything.

Booking travel at the last minute is, frankly, a pain the arse. All those
web sites for last minute travel are designed to (hopefully) optimise the
cheapest flight to the cheapest hotel. Unfortunately, they are usually
only bound to one or the other or worse, to some fly by night package
operator who wants to send you to some forsaken town, that looks nothing
like the photos in the brochure, where their brother owns the local
taverna.

So what do you do if can only work one of these at a time or have a
particular destination in mind. Do you book your hotel first, then find
transport, or do you do it the other way around ?

You obviously don't want to get to your city to find that it there is no
room at the inn. Well, I don't anyway. But you also don't want to lose
the flight booking it took you thirty minutes to track down and risk
paying last minute rates just to get into dodge.

Location is also important. Just because you can get a hotel room, there
is no guarantee it is actually some where useful.

Be wary of anything that is 'close to the airport'. It may be convenient
for your flight but there will be nothing for miles, and the only 'good'
restaurants are in the local mall with the rest of the homeless. (I have
a first account of someone who was pointed to the local soup kitchen). If
you are lucky the airport will be close to the city like Alexandria and
Washington-Reagan or London city airport. But you still have to find the
room.

If you go down the path of getting transport you have to process the
matrix of airline flight offering, multiple airports per city, and then
factor in peripherals like 'do you need a rental car?', 'can you get a
train from the airport?' or will you have to resort to the local mule and
hitchhiking?

Then you have the commitment factor. If you are lucky to find a flight to
the right location, there is the fundamental problem that airlines are
bastards and can count in five dimensions. Cancellation fees, change
fees, and the fact that the price changes hourly make 'shopping around'
something from mythology. (hint: travel agents have magical powers of
cancellation that us mere mortals can only dream of)

So what should you do ?

Well here's a tip:

Hotels let you cancel at the last minute. So go crazy, book rooms
everywhere. Hell, order some room service, since you'll be getting in
late, and while you're at it, get them to put a bottle of champagne on ice
and turn down the bed. To them this is all just on paper. If you show
they make money, if you don't they can probably re-sell the room.

Then, try and wrangle some transport.

I went to Brussels. They had hotels.

Too many timezones

Not enough days.

San Francisco, London, Stockholm.

The problem with not understanding foreign languages is that you can't
easedrop on a conversation, it just never registers with the consciousness
in the right way. I realised this in the restaurant last night when I
suddenly heard someone in the crowd speaking English and noticed that
everything else was just line noise.

Still, while I started to work on a mental thesis about why lack of
sensory input is probably quite isolating and may explain why travelers
sometimes behave the way they do (like work on a mental thesis about their
lifestyle), I was at least out of the hotel. I had finally recovered from
jetlag limbo and I was, at least, taking in the sights.

I was even motivated enough to take photos, but my new digital camera was
still stuck in shipping and never made it to me before I got on the plane.

I should have taken this as a sign, never fly an airline in receivership.

After spending about 2 hours on the phone with the travel agent trying to
assemble my magical mystery tour of Europe into some sort of coherency. I
got off to a bad start by actually attempting to fly. Now I'm
not going to bitch and whine about the fact that my business class seat was a
'middle bulkhead' (if you know what this means, you know why you'd hate
it) as it is hard to argue with a free upgrade. But the seat wasn't the
problem.

It was just one of those flights.

It started with one of the staff demanding that I hand over my pillow and
shoes as they were blocking the aisle, veered into her not wanting to
close the overhead bin (that she opened), to stash said pillow, because it
was too heavy to close, rapidly careened downhill as, for the Nth time,
the only movie worth watching had random lines of static and audio
dropouts, blew past dehydration caused by the staff ignoring any call
button from anyone, ran over the the guy next to me who insisted on
reading all night with both lights on and finished with a bang when they
ran out of fast track immigration cards for Heathrow ( and I you know what
that means, you will know why you want one ).

Yeah, poor me, I hear you cry, but if you were actually paying for
International business Class Service, you'd be a tad pissed off as well.

Suffice to say the whole visceral experience just sent me over the
edge and messed with my ability to deal with my jetlag. I got about 3
hours sleep that night and the next twenty four hours were a blur. What I
do recall was finding myself in the railway station with more than nine
hours to kill before it was safe to sleep, a flu like pain in my muscles
and a relentless desire to just lie down and have a nap.

I seriously thought about finding a park bench under a tree somewhere but
that really would have made me just a homeless guy with a laptop.

So instead I just rode it out and somehow ended up at another airport with
the most uncomfortable lounge chairs ever, squeezed myself into a plane
with absolutely no leg room and sometime later found myself in a taxi with
no idea where I was going, except that there was a hotel and a bed at the
end of the ride.

I nearly got rumbled at Swedish Immigration where I was so incoherent I
couldn't clearly express the address of my hotel and had to fumble for
my PDA and try to sound intelligent.

It was only by the end of the next day that I started to resemble myself
again and finally had a couple of hours to relax in the lobby with the
local team. Of course, this meant that we also made phone calls and had
to check email.

So a few hours became three hours and then my PDA decided to have time
zone synchronisation issues and shifted all my appointments by an unknown
number of hours. As this included critical things like flight times, I
then had to be a geek and not only correct all the errors but also
diagnose the problem and ensure that it never happened again.

Sometime after dark I finally made it to the restaurant.

I would have gotten out of there earlier but, hey, the last thing you want
to do is miss a flight.

It's not the destination...

It's the journey.

I may have, on occasion, mentioned that I don't always have a clear idea of
what I am doing or where I am going. While this is par for the course, and
the odd change to the schedule is to be expected, This week was the gold
medal of diversions.

If you were to sum up all the the standard problems I bitch about, twist
them into some sort of artistic representation of what this whole road
warrior thing looks like and, say, to turn it into a movie, you
would come up with something close to what I experienced.

See it wasn't just one bad experience. That sort of plot device is too
short and kills the character in the first act. Instead this was just a
slow decline of one bad vignette after another where, if I was writing
this, the hero would either defeat the gorgons for the third and final

In the background we can see that all the flights are delayed and he is
waiting standby for anything that will make his connection.

Cut to : The usual cramped seat in the back of coach and the comical farce
that is people trying to fit supersized bags in undersized overheads.

Cut to : Arriving at the far end of a terminal in Chicago, the
connecting flight is leaving from the far end of another terminal. Begin
the Long Walk.

Cut to : The toilets. Focus on the intermittent fluorescent light
overhead. Pan down to the Old Guy at the sink. He has had one of those
operations that leave him with a hole at the base of his neck. He is
hacking badly and doing his best to clear the hole and his throat.

Cut to : Waiting at the gate, all the flights are delayed again.

Cut to : Drinks service on the next plane. He has free drink vouchers.
Just as the Flight Attendants get to him, the plane hits turbulence and
they seat the staff for the duration of the flight.

Cut to : The Hero getting out of the plane after midnight and walking down the
long terminal. He is at the last gate. The terminal is a ghost town.

Cut to : Him trying to get past other passengers to old and deaf to get
out of the way.

Cut to : Those same passengers overtaking him later in a golf cart.

Cut to : Waiting outside for the rental car shuttle. Standing right next
to him is a Businessmen, smoking a cigar. Our hero is downwind from the
smoke. Pull back to reveal that the area is completely empty. There is
no-one else around.

Cut to : Arriving at the rental lot, It is windy and cold. His car is
a convertible mustang.

Cut to : The clock in the car says 1am. He is on a deserted country
road. The driving directions seem meaningless.

Cut to : The hotel. He is looking down a very long corridor. The room he
is given is at the far end of the building.

Cut to : The next morning, there is no breakfast on the hotel.

Cut to : He is back in the car, A coffee shop can be seen in the
distance. But the road is blocked by sequential 'no left turn signs'. No
matter how much he turns, the cafe is getting no closer.

Cut To : The cafe parking lot, as seen from inside The Mustang. Focus
on the BMW parked diagonally. It is taking the only 2 parking spots left

Cut to : The dashboard of the mustang. A coffee is in the cup holder. The
clock shows that he is late, He is speeding.

Cut to : The lobby of an office. He meets The Customer.

CUSTOMER
You're 8 hours early, we aren't doing anything until 6pm.

Cut to : Back in the hotel room, the hero is reading email :

MSP may catch fire again.

Need you back there next week for a few days

Need to delay trip to UK by 1 or 2 weeks

Cut to : A chain restaurant in a mall, around it is nothing but carpark
and cars. It is late evening, his work is done for the day. Our hero
parks in an empty spot miles from anything. It is still cold and windy.
He gets out of the convertible. The restaurant is called the 'Bahama
Breeze'.

Cut to : The Hero, he is sitting at the bar, reading the menu. He speaks
to the barman.

HERO
What do people do here ?

BARMAN
Drink

Fade out.


Tags travel,philly,hotel,restaurant,bar

Viral Marketing

Apparently, more than one person reads this blog.

So I want to try an experiment in Viral Marketing. The process is fairly
simple. It is like a chain letter, but without the guilt or any hope of
making large amounts of money.

I want you to find 3 other people and tell them about the blog. If they
like it, get them to tell 3 other people. If you have a really short
attention span you could just cut and paste the following:

---

Dear <fellow-surfer-of-the-net>,

I found this blog from some
<fool|guy|dot-com-victim|frequent-flyer> who seems to spend a
lot of time on the road and finds the <odd|interesting|bizzare|humorous>
side of what it takes to bounce around the country.

http://rftp.blogspot.com/

I thought you might find it
<interesting|useful-research|worth-plagarising|good-for-blackmail>.  If
you like it feel free to spam your friends and get them to read it as
well.

Share and enjoy.

---

Actually come to think about it, Tell as many people as possible, I'm
curious to see how far this can spread.

Can someone wake the man in the corner ?

Detroit, or Ferndale, or Troy, or wherever the hell this place is.

All I know is we are doing about 90 miles per hour on the freeway in the
general direction of somewhere civilized while I try and make a hotel
reservation over the phone. However, as we have no real idea where we are
at present I'm playing a geographically oriented version of '20 Questions'
with the reservation agent :

"We have a hotel in Troy"

"How far is that from here ?"

"Where are you ?"

"Um, Plymouth. No. Northville. I think. We just passed the 96."

"Ok, let me look"

"Oh. No. We're actually on the 96. I think we passed the 275. We're
heading east..."

And on it went.

We were only doing this because all the hotels in Ann Arbor were full.
There was something interesting going on in town, but they wern't going
to tell us what it was and we weren't allowed to sleep there. So we had to
try our luck in the suburbs of Detroit.

Eventually we just cut our losses, got some hand waving directions from
the agent and, an indeterminate time later, checked into a motel in the
middle of nowhere and went to get something to eat.

That's when we found The Party.

Walking into the first most decent place we could find we decided that we
would just settle down for one drink and a nice meal. We were sitting in
what was, at the time, the quiet end of the bar area debating what to
eat when we noticed that it was getting increasingly more crowded. Almost
unpleasantly so. After we had moved our table about three feet and the
waitress had tried to squeeze her way past for the fourth time, we finally
bailed her up and asked what was going on.

Oh, yeah, sorry about that. You see tonight is kind of special"

"How so ?" I asked.

"Well, one of the regulars here died the other day.

"He died ?"

"Yes. He was a really nice guy. He used to come in all the time and would
always sit here at the end of the bar. He was often in my section.

"Really ?"

"He was like only 40 or something, it was really sudden. So all his
friends are here to, well, say good bye."

Now I was honestly curious, I had to ask.

"So, how did he die ?"

"Oh," She said. "Liver failure."

WTF ?

On the inside I know we were both screaming to say something like "What,
liver failure? Are you out of your minds ? Are you having any guilt
issues right now ?". But on the outside, we did our best to keep our
composure.

My sales guy nearly sprayed his drink all over the table and tried not to
laugh. I tried keep a straight face and change the subject as
quickly as possible. I think we ordered more water for the table just to
make her go away.

As I watched them order another round of tequilas, I wanted to be
incredibly cynical and ask something like if any of these guys were in a
gun club. I wanted to know if when someone accidentally killed themselves
did they celebrate by getting together and shooting each other
in the foot.

"This might have killed Frank, but look, I can still walk."

But I figured that might get me thrown out. Instead, we ate as quickly as
possible and got out of there before either of us said something
embarrassing or offensive.

I guess you just have to get back in the saddle.


Tags travel,detroit,hotel,restaurant

No, I said 'Punt'.

Todays ramble comes from Dr Language Person, who is spending the weekend
in Cambridge:

The word 'Punt' ( apart from just sounding rude ) has many different and interesting meanings.

The most common one is the football term, to punt the ball. I'm not sure how this is considered different from just kicking the ball, as one can punt in all sorts of situations, but I believe it generally means that you hand ( well, boot, actually ) said leather object to the other team, who are hopefully a long way away.

This then makes more sense of the next meaning , 'to punt', that is often used in the business world, where one would hand off something to another person. ( "The project was so screwed that jack punted it over to operations" )

Now, where I come from - a good British colony, punt has another meaning and it is a gambling term. 'To have a punt' means to place a bet on something. It can also mean to just 'take a chance', and is just yet another word that can be used to add colour to a conversation, "I'm punting that she will call back".

If you end up at a place where there are a lot of people all gambling, like at a racetrack, you can also use the collective plural term the gambling community and refer to them as 'the punters' , or just a bunch of fools.

This close association between foolishness and taking a chance is no coincidence and the word 'punter' can often be used to describe anyone stupid or desperate enough for anything. ( "Did the alligator wrestling night attract any punters ?" )

Now lastly, the word 'punt' can also be used to describe a boat, or more specifically a water borne form of transport. 'Punting along' usually means to move so slowly that the boat leaves no wake and that there is no general plan in the direction or timing of the journey. So one can rightly assume that to 'go for a bit of a punt (on the river)' is just another term for a pointless meandering waste
of time. It is also fairly easy to follow the evolutionary path of the terms
'punting along', 'punting about', 'Farting about' 'Piss Farting about' and
'screwing around'

Curiously enough, in the college town of Cambridge, punting on the river Cam has become so popular that the wooden, flat bottomed boats are themselves called 'Punts'. The fact that this gives a fairly formal association between one of the worlds great universities and a bunch of people screwing around wasting time is something best left unexplored. But I'm sure some scholars out there who are dying to tell me that the boats were called punts first and that the term 'punting' was invented because no-one wanted to admit that they were just 'farting around in the punts' ( actually, I'm punting on it )

It is more interesting to conclude that the many variations of the word mean that you can assemble some truly bizzare sentences indeed, such as this one :

"I'm punting that it will stay sunny when the race is on so we can grab a punt and have a punt with the punters, unless the weather changes and they punt the event to next week"

Fresh Brains

It is 6am, I'm on a plane (again) and I feel like a zombie. Forever
banished to stagger the earth's airport terminals in search of a gate and
intelligent conversation.

There is a excellent scene in "Sean of the Dead" where he is sitting on
the bus hungover and half awake and on his way to his dead end job. The
funny thing is that he doesn't notice he is surrounded by zombies. They
all just look as tired and bored as he is.

So that's how I feel.



A friend called me and asked me how I was doing. All I could respond with
was

"I've spent two weeks on the road living in strange hotels, eating alone
and having business meetings with people I will never see again."

"If I don't have a real conversation soon I'm going to kill someone. What
I need, my friend, is fresh brains..."

Not only am I a mental train wreck, but physically I'm not much better. I
picked up a cold on the flight back from London. So for the two days I
actually had at home I spent most of then limping and sniffling and
moaning around the house searching for more kleenex. My head felt about
two sizes too small and the last thing I wanted to do was get on another
plane and fly back across the country.

Compound that with the jet lag from London and all the cold wanted to
make me do was sleep, so my internal clock was totally out of whack.

Thus clogged, tired, mentally under-fed, and as usual, cranky, I had to
drag my arse out of bed at 5am this morning to spend the day flying to a
mysterious tropical island. To add insult to injury, there was no hot
water at home so I had to debate the benefits of a cold shower whilst
nursing a cold or spending fourteen hours on aircraft with the rest of
the great unwashed.

Somehow I made it to the airport and continued the zombie shuffle: Wait in
line for check in, kick bag forward, wait in line for coffee, kick bag
forward, wait in line for security, kick bag forward, wait in line for
xray, dump bag on conveyor, wait in line for bagels, kick bag forward,
wait in line at the gate, kick bag forward.

When I finally did get on the plane it was totally empty, there were
about ten of us in there. It just added to the whole 'last humans
alive' thing I was experiencing.

As my plane lands I find out that not only do I have change terminals in
Denver but there are no staff around so we have to hold at the gate for
20 minutes. This means that I have to do the unthinkable and run for my
next flight, which, unfortunately, I reach, gasping and wheezing, in
enough time to have no overhead space. As icing in the cake ( literally )
we are 'this close' to take off before we have to turn around to hold on a
de-icing pad.

Of course, none of this factors in the added detail that my last leg is on
a different airline, so I still have to go through a second check in in
Miami. This is something you really never want to do.

So, after landing late, we do the shuffle again: check in, security, gate,
lather, rinse, repeat. Except as an additional bonus I got 'SSSS' on an
interim boarding pass and told.

"You'll have to go to the gate for a seat assignment."

Suddenly my two hour layover became negative 10 mins and I was going to be
bounced because the plane was too full. I also ran into some colleagues
who almost missed the flight because they didn't realise they needed
passports. So we all just stood around looking stupid waiting for someone
to tell us where to go. Eventually they let us on the plane where we sat
for some indeterminate amount of time without actually going anywhere. I
was sure the handlers were debating which heavy bags they could 'just
leave behind'.

I knew things were really bad when the pilot left the cockpit, looked at
me, and the chaos around us, and said "What a fiasco."

Not having had time to stop and eat. All I had for a response was to groan
un-intelligibly and say "brains, we need brains."

Sometime late in the evening I got to the hotel, having never seen
daylight.

I'm hoping for the day that someone perfects teleportation. Ill gladly
pay for any technology that can get me there in an instant, sober me up
and remove a few kilos in the process.

Travel smarter.



Tags travel,bahamas,hotel,airline,restaurant,bar

"I'm with the band"

It is sometime after 11pm. After much research and investigation I have
finally been able to locate the mandatory Bar, cafe, restaurant, Internet
aware, book exchange, and Laundromat that every university town requires.
I was here under the pretext of looking for a comfortable couch and a
decent espresso, but it was probably just my desire to get bandwidth that
kept me here.

Fortunately the sound of deep thumping from somewhere below me pulled me
out of my self absorbed obsession with email and made me go for a wander
into the basement.

What I found was surprising not only because there was an entire
subterranean level to this place that I hadn't discovered, but it also
explained why people kept disappearing downstairs. I thought that they
were just going to the toilet, but my subconscious head count wasn't
adding up. Luckily I was right :

There was a band playing in the basement.

And this really was a basement. A standard household basement that could
barely hold 20 people and was thus causing a certain amount of discomfort
for the 30 or so people who were in there.

Not being one to shy away from adventure I paid my dues at the bar ( yes
there was a bar down there ), decided against squeezing myself between two
broken chairs and a patch of carpet and instead stood in the corner with
my head at an uncomfortable angle so I could see what was actually going
on.

Well, yes there was a band, but this wasn't exactly a stadium gig we were
dealing with here. It was definitely the ad-hoc hand built set up that we
have all grown to know and respect from our struggling student days. The
guys had a second hand missing desk, some borrowed music stands, the
keyboard player also had to do the mix and they had one acoustic pickup to
share between them.

"We need to take a break now while Darren rebuilds his guitar"

I'm also sure that one of the two speakers wasn't working, but no one
cared. They were all friends anyway, this was just a chance to play some
music without the neighbours sending around the constabulary to 'turn
that music down!' at one minute before midnight.

After the second set, the writer of the music then settled in to talk, in
an apologetic way about his home produced EP and how it had taken him a
year to produce, he still felt that it needed some changes, but, '...If
you don't mind the few mistakes, you may want to listen to it more than
once'

Inside my head I found the daemons screaming the harsh reality to this
poor fellow : 'Your music is just fine, the only reason it you don't like
it is because you, like every other consumptive artist out there, are a
chronic perfectionist and can't leave well enough alone !!'

If he's just laid down the tracks, done a rough mix and then handed it off
to some friends to clean it up, he could have had the whole thing done in
less than a day.

Thats the problem with all these 'desktop publishing tools' they give you
too much time and not enough feedback. If he'd been paying an hourly rate
for the studio and had a Sound engineer shaking his head and reaching for
the Jack Daniels every time he said 'Can I just do that bit again' he
would have nailed it by the second take.

Never publish your own stuff. Everyone needs an editor, even me.

As I settled back and pondered this, I watched them play with their
no-frills setup and noticed how the guitarist kept tripping over his cord
that was obviously too short. It made me wonder at what point in your in
your success path do you finally go to your agent and say

"I'm not doing this again without a wireless amp."

It also made me wonder, that in this day and age when people are bent out
of shape about the health aspects of wireless equipment, why has this
never been a problem for the rock and roll industry.

And why, and this is food for thought, is it that, of all the wireless
equipment that exists in the world, mobile phones never interfere with
musical instruments ?

Then again, perhaps here are some things that aren't worth worrying about.


Tags travel,london,hotel,restaurant,music

Where am I going, and who am I meeting ?

Sunny London, England, United Kingdom, Great Britain, or whatever the
name of this crazy island is.

Either way, this is where I'm to make my home for the next week or so.
For some reason all my friends are jealous of the exercise but I keep
trying to explain to them that I'm not actually whooping it up in the posh
part of Kensington, I'm not spending my time at the Tate Gallery, nor am I
rubbing shoulders movie stars or billionaires.

Instead I'm stuck in a town on the edge of the city that bears the scars
of the soulless town planning of the 1960's and unless I want to spend the
evening in the local bowling alley, or hang out in the pub, there is sod
all else here to do. A friend of mine pinged me, and when I told them I
was at dinner the response was,

"How's the food ?"

There was really only one possible reply :

"English"

Pub Grub: You can have anything you like as long as it comes with mash and
a beer. Breakfast of Champions. And don't get me started about the
coffee. Frankly when it comes to the fine art of a well balanced
combination of freshly ground beans and just the right amount of water,
the English make a very good cup of Tea.

Still, I have noticed that I tend to write better when I'm all bitter and
twisted, my sarcasm has more room to maneuver. So I'm certainly getting
creative value out of the exercise. I have no hesitation in saying that
I'm in the kind of place that you only see in movies, where someone gets
murdered in the first reel and the rest of the cast are working class
dropouts living in housing developments.

My bitchiness is also because I've really had no idea what I was doing on
a day to day basis and have had to play it by ear. I found I kept asking
the local sales team if "...I'll be close to London, so I can find a hotel
that doesn't smell and get rid of this expensive rental car."

Not only was I adverse to being stuck in another Village of the Damned,
but I was also trying to get myself over to Italy for the weekend or
anywhere else that would get me the hell out of dodge. I had even heard
of a 3 hour meeting in New York on Friday that I was supposed to attend.
I had not only considered going back across the pond for the weekend, but
had even booked the flights before my calendar was magically filled.

I got the phone call about an hour after speaking to my travel agent and
suddenly I was supposed to be in London on both Friday afternoon and
early Monday morning. This blew my trip to New York out of the water and
also screwed my plans for Italy, all the flights on Saturday were booked.

Meanwhile my friends were asking me when I was going to be back on town
so we could go out and, you know, have a social life. Well, my kind of
lifestyle not only doesn't offer that sort of luxury, but I also found
out that my company wanted to thank me for all the hard work by flying me
to the Bahamas for 2 days. Next Week. This was just what I needed,

"Thank you for all the hard work and travel, why don't you jump on a plane,
again, and fly on a Sunday, again, for 2 more days away from home"

They even said I could bring a guest, where was I going to find one at
such short notice. Thanks guys.

Still I was finally able to get rid of the car, ( Although, doing 70 miles
per hour on the motorway, on the wrong side of the road, in the rain and
fog, with a stick shift, is an interesting experience ). I also found a
really nice hotel in London by the river. It was actually a yacht, with
large rooms, a large bed, internet access and nothing outside my window
but the water and a few ducks. I even get to stay here for 5 days.

So, somewhat grounded, I'm now stuck on a train, with no leg room, nowhere
to comfortably put my laptop, my left leg going numb and a strange pain
developing my right elbow. I'll be here for 2-3 hours while I head to
the south-west of this island for, presumably, a 1 hour meeting. I will
then turn around and head back again.

C'est La Vie. I did sign on for this mission.

It looks like next month I'll be going to japan as well.


Tags travel,london,hotel,restaurant,trainairline