Far-Away Phone Call

In addition to all the usual criteria - room size, comfort, nice bathrooms, quietness, heating/cooling controls etc. - I've now started to judge hotels by the quality and availability of their broadband services. Working in the room is always a given and, thanks largely to the usurious rates hotels charge for their phone calls, Skype has also now become an essential tool, especially if calling from overseas. I mention all this because the hotel I use in Stockholm - Radisson SAS by the train station - recently went from wired to wireless, which is good, but in the process screwed up both access and reliability a treat, which is very bad. I keep getting a duplicate IP address warning; signal strength is very variable depending on where your room is; it times-out overnight meaning you don't wake up with a nice fresh stack of messages ready to go; and they outsource the whole shooting match so are less than helpful if you call down to complain.

Everything else about the place is great, but not enough. This one issue now dominates what I need from a hotel and so I'll have to look elsewhere if this doesn't improve.

Up or Down?

Travelling is basically a destabilising activity, especially when 9 time zones & two climates are involved. Odd bouts of gloominess, sudden feelings of being too hot or too cold, stomach aches etc. are all part-and-parcel of long-haul flying and business trips. And that's before the lack of sleep, change in diet, general stress and everything else that all conspires together to make you ask the same question, at least three times a day, namely, "why am I doing this again?"

Even now, I look at that picture and have to reconstruct where I was, when, in order to answer the question of whether I was going up the escalator or down it. And it was only yesterday.