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.