The $35 bagel and the curse of the “luxury” hotels

I’ll tell you one thing; upscale hotels are ripping their customers off left, right and center. I stayed at one of the supposedly best hotels in the city for the first few days, Mark Hopkins San Francisco. The room rate was reasonable (although, I later found out, so deeply discounted I didn’t even get points for the stay!), but the more or less necessary extras were far from it. Parking? $52/day. Internet? $19/day. Breakfast? $32 + tips. Bottled water? $6.50/bottle. Shower? Malfunctioning. Water pressure? Nonexistent. The list goes on. Thanks to one busy morning, I once had just a bagel. Because the breakfast was a fixed-price buffet, this meant I had a $35 bagel; and that only by tipping far less than is the generally accepted norm nowadays.

And no, the price-quality ratio was not too great at that level. It was a pretty ordinary $1-level bagel.

On top of that, “basic” luxury amenities like swimming pools were nowhere in sight. The typical clientele is obviously from a different socioeconomic group than me, which became apparent when I asked if there was a swimming pool nearby. The concierge said sure, there’s a pool a couple of blocks down the hill. The catch? They charge what the hotel concierge said is “a nominal fee of $20” to use the pool. Now I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell don’t think $20 is a “nominal” fee for a swim.

Sure the company paid for the stay, but there is a limit to how much I like even them to be fleeced, so for the latter part of my stay I switched to Crowne Plaza in Palo Alto. Not only was it more convenient considering my last day’s schedule, it was a much better deal. At a lower room rate, one got a bigger, better equipped-for-work room, a swimming pool with hot tub and all, free breakfast, free (actually truly high-speed) Internet and free bottled water. Oh, and a shower that works with decent water pressure and that works without having to call maintenance in the first place.

Enough with that, however. During the weekend I managed to get out and take some photos:

Photos

First, the Muir Woods National Monument; gotta love the big trees.

Another walk took us to the Big Basin area; nice environment for walking and driving alike:

While the forests were ideal bushwalking destinations for the day, The Dish at Stanford was better experienced in the not-too-hot late afternoon sun. This scorching jogging track near the dish is most likely not a pleasant destination in the midday summer sun:

Hotel fountain:

San Francisco, though often foggy, had a couple of sunny breaks. This view is from the Top of the Mark, the restaurant of the first hotel, which admittedly had some pretty splendid views:

The sunny breaks were followed by copious fog pretty much every evening:

It was my first time that I flew on an A380. It was a very pleasant experience, though the inner decor that Qantas chose – various shades of grey – was boring to say the least. Apart from being new, the biggest plus was probably that it’s a noticeably quieter plane than, say, a Boeing 747. Supposedly the cabin is also pressurized to a lower altitude than is typical, so one should feel less jet-lagged. Based on just two legs on it, I don’t feel I can comment on whether it really made a big difference or not. On a negative note, the in-flight entertainment system was a bit flaky, with some ground crew idiots performing a remote system upgrade while the plane was airborne, resulting in an hour of reboots and restarts before it started working again. Btw, it runs Red Hat Linux.

Oh, and the Rolls-Royce engines contained themselves well, thankfully.

On another note, I can’t believe how many people take long-haul flights in full business gear, i.e. suit and all. I felt very positively out of place in my ultra-casual flying attire. It’s not that hard to do a clothing switch at the airport, but it makes flying so much more comfortable.

Over my free weekend in Brussels, I toured some of the main sights. Brussels had a pretty good free aviation museum, that had some old planes, newer planes, small plans and bigger planes – a fairly extensive selection.

Then there’s the Atomium, originally built for the World Fair expo of 1958. Giant spheres, 18m in diameter, that house a science museum of sorts.

One of the more positive surprises was the Cantillon Brewery that turned out to be an educational experience on the nice tour they have there. Lots of interesting beer facts that managed to lift my respect for beer, particularly lambic, a little bit. No, I still don’t particularly like beer.

The Justice Palace was a pretty intimidating place. I could imagine it being an inspiration for, say, the game Doom (which is the most recent FPS that I can remember playing..)

All parks were, in the typical Central European fashion, very geometrical. They would’ve been a lot more pleasant had it not been freezing.

Probably the #1 attraction of Brussels, the peeing dude (aka Manneken Pis) was having a wardrobe crisis and was covered in strange clothes every day. Probably for the better, I mean it was cold..

Trains. Gotta love the high-speed rail in Europe. With 1h20min to Paris (with poorly functioning WiFi on board) it was a joy. However, not all logistics was quite up to scratch. On my way back, I had a horrible time getting to the airport in Brussels, with the train system messed up and the information – particularly in English – lacking badly. Frankfurt airport, on the other hand, was a disaster both ways – almost worse than Heathrow. The more I travel in Asia, the more I prefer Asia to Europe. For example, the Singapore airport was still perfectly functioning and a pleasant place as far as airports go; yet they were completely redoing the terminals. In Europe (as well as in the US) everything tends to get run down past their useful lifetime and only then do people start thinking whether something perhaps should be done to fix them. Airports are a prime example.

In Paris, I had a sunset view of the Eiffel tower. The most entertaining part of the tower was watching the guys who sell the metallic mini-Eiffel towers near the real one. They run back and forth, spreading their mini-towers for sale and then scooping them up and sprinting away the next second when the cops approach, only to return 30 seconds later. It’s like a real-life Tom&Jerry-show. The cops obviously didn’t care enough to actually sprint after them and the security forces didn’t care at all (nor did the salespeople care about them).

When departing Brussels, I saw the most contrails I’ve ever seen at once. It reminded me of their impact on global warming, which apparently is still being debated. There is a recent Nature-article on them, suggesting contrails have a significant impact.

Upon return to Melbourne, I was greeted with what was a truly warm morning and a nice sunrise. A welcome event after being in the cold for a couple of weeks. Also, Melbourne airport was a remarkably easy place to get out of early in the morning. With nobody around, it took me under 15mins to get from the aircraft door to the taxi with the luggage and everything. The taxi part, however, sucks. Seriously, Melbourne should get a rail line to the airport, no matter what the people with vested interests against it say (who seem to be the most vocal in this issue).

You’ll find more photos from the appropriate section in the photo-gallery.

Other than that, it had been a few years since my previous US trip. Among the interesting observations that I made were:

• AT&T still sucks. Seriously, how hard can it be to build a decent network? (Ok, so actually, it can be pretty hard in the US, but still, it shouldn’t take this long)

• Silicon Valley is a pretty ironic place when it comes to environmental awareness. On one hand, it felt rather uncomfortable parking my V8 Dodge Challenger rental (thanks to Oracle OpenWorld participants for renting out the city’s normal cars..) next to the Teslas and Priuses. On the other hand, the whole place is still 50% parking lot and 50% one or two-story office buildings. Incredibly inefficient.

• Surprisingly, particularly in light of the crappy networks, Silicon Valley has quickly become the place for advanced mobile services development and incubation. The transformation that has happened in just the past 5 years is amazing – not only the speed activity has ramped up in the Valley, but also the speed at which much of the rest of the world lost the lead.

All in all, I still love San Francisco. Too bad it has to sit on the San Andreas fault which will likely deliver some bad news in the not-too-distant future.

Ironically, the EC building where I worked was one of the nicest things. Not a bad lobby, eh?

I usually like parks, so one of the first chances I got, I headed to Park de Bruxelles Warandepark – the biggest park in the downtown area. On the the edges it felt alive, with people running around the park:

Unfortunately, when you ventured further in, it was quite close to dead in the center. Even though it was beautiful weather, the park felt like it was abandoned last fall (or some earlier fall for that matter) and left to die. Rather sad.

On the other side of the park the sight was beyond sad and downright filthy. It might’ve been an aftermath of a big event, but I did not expect to find quite this:

That, however, was foreshadowing what I witnessed right in the downtown shopping district also. Look ahead and you see a vibrant shopping street. Look left and there’s a desolate strip of road with everything closed and not a soul in sight. Strange.

You can find photos from this example and more photos from Brussels at the Brussels-album.

I’m sure nobody wants to hear any boring musings & ramblings on the great-when-it-works public transport in Bordeaux, on the friendly-but-English-challenged French people, on the nice fashion, on the ubiquitous WLANs (17 networks visible at a remote tram stop!), on the +24C-and-sunny-weather or stuff like that, so let’s just say it was a nice place and leave it at that.

All airlines that I’m aware of have been operating fully non-smoking flights for as long as I can remember. And to my knowledge, even when some weirdos allowed smoking, it was forbidden in the toilets. So why on earth are brand new planes still equipped with an ashtray in the toilets? That’s mind-boggling. I mean it even weighs more than just a door so you’d think they’d get removed in the name of fuel economy

Seats for midgets

A word of warning: avoid economy class in Cathay Pacific’s new Airbus A330s if you’re tall. I’m 6’2″ and the seat on the right is designed for people classified as midgets from my point of view. The problem lies in the unadjustable, molded-to-shape seat back, pictured on the right, lower part of the photo. Unfortunately, with my height, the seat ends way too soon and the molded upper part jabs me somewhere around my shoulder blades. The head rest becomes an awkward neck rest and the whole contraption is uncomfortable as hell. Worst I’ve ever experienced. It took four pillows and two blankets to cover it sufficiently to just survive.

Does Finland have to be 100% more expensive?

While in New Zealand earlier this month, I ate at Subway a couple of times when in a hurry. The following points struck me as somewhat unfair:
• The prices, as numbers, were more or less the same as in Finland. The problem: 1 Euro = approximately 2.08 New Zealand dollars, meaning it was >50% cheaper in NZ.
• When you order a meal, you get two cookies instead of one like in Finland.
• Soft drinks come with free, unlimited refills, unlike the different sizes you have to pay for varying amounts over here.

*hmph* Is it only our God-forsaken location way up here near the North Pole that gives us such ridiculous prices? Or could it involve some lack of competition also?

Spending 9+11hrs in economy class – and then repeating the drill 10 days later – is never exactly a lot of fun. But when the destination is New Zealand and Australia, you can somehow accept that it takes a small sacrifice to get there And it’s always worth it.

In other news, it again dawned on me the other day that I should focus more in this blog. Too often I give in to the temptation to write about a bunch of stuff in a single post – and as we know, when you say everything, you say nothing. So from now on, I’ll try to have a single – seriously like one (or two. Three max.) – point in any one blog post. That may mean shorter posts but that’s probably good.

In that spirit, the point of this post is to advertise the photos from the aforementioned trip. The photos are in their separate galleries, so click on the below images to see the gallery for the city in question:

As far as the trip itself is concerned, it was a lot of fun. So am I glad to be back?

To my family? Yes.

To Finland? Hell no. More on that later.

More photos to follow a bit later once I get around to it.

As fuel prices continue their relentless rise, airlines are in a financial nose-dive with many already having crash-landed. Instead of just directly raising ticket prices (which they’ll be forced to do anyway) they are engaging in an annoying practice of adding fees on everything imaginable and sometimes unimaginable. In the words of Michael O’Leary (RyanAir boss) who says BA “is levying surcharges faster than it’s losing bags at Terminal Five“. Touché. Anyway, as a passenger, it’s somehow highly annoying having to pay extortionate prices for basic stuff like water on board, especially when you can’t even bring water along from the outside anymore.

I’m still waiting for an airline that charges more the fair way; from overweight passengers. I think it’s plain and simply unfair that people of healthy size have to pay for a few measly extra baggage kilos while some people who hop onboard with 20, 30 or 40kg extra weight strapped to their waist can get away with it for free. Kind of like the recent success of high cigarette taxation in NYC, taxing the overweight might provide an additional incentive to lose some of that.

Talking about flying, it is an awesome sight to see another airplane heading the opposite way close to your plane. You start to appreciate the speed of these things when the other plane screams by at a relative speed of 1,800km/h.. Still I’d prefer not to see any more of those any closer, thank you very much.

Finally, how come nobody – like the travel agent for example – told me that there is a frequent and relatively inexpensive helicopter shuttle between Nice airport and Monaco? Now I had to find this out from the guy sitting next to me on the way there. Sure the drive there along the coastal road – which I luckily chose over the highway thanks to a hint from that same guy – had one of the nicest sceneries there is, but compared to what a chopper ride along the same coast would’ve had? No contest.

Those helicopters would’ve been the basic transportation choice; the heliport was one busy place:

When one thinks of Monaco, the first thing that comes to mind is boats. Big boats. And there certainly were enough of those to go around. While awesome, it’s somewhat sad that they all seemed to be docked at the harbors. Now come on, the least you can do if you have a boat like that is to use it.

The villages along the way to Monaco from Nice weren’t all too bad either, as is exemplified by this view of the beach and the surrounding village.

I found that smoke amazing on many fronts – first, it’s amazing how fast one gets used to the smoking bans and the resulting clean air. Second, it’s amazing how little progress certain parts of Germany have been making in the past 10 years; whereas most civilized countries have banned smoking in restaurants, bars and public areas, Düsseldorf still felt like it was firmly stuck in the past.

As if that wasn’t a bad enough start for the trip, it turns out that Düsseldorf (where I hadn’t been before), has one of the most confusing train systems ever. Not only are there no route maps available anywhere, there are no English instructions to how to procure a ticket (except for cryptic ones on the ticket machine), you have to buy the ticket from a machine that only accepts coins and small bills (i.e. there are apparently no people selling these, at least at the airport) and there is no sign telling you which kind of ticket you need to get downtown (a “short trip” or Zone A, B or C? Turns out, after enough asking around, that it was Zone A). Finally, with a ticket in hand that I wasn’t quite certain was a correct one, I arrived downtown just some 10 minutes later. Quite a convenient trip from the airport.

But then again, I shouldn’t really complain – certain airports in the world (*ahem*, like the one in Helsinki) don’t even have a train connection to begin with and I can only imagine the difficulties foreigners have figuring out the correct bus connections from there.. A confusing train is certainly better than no train at all.

Being in central Europe, I was expecting to see a rather neat main railway station – they tend to be quite nice. So I was a bit underwhelmed and disappointed when I arrived at the Hauptbahnhof in Düsseldorf (image above left); it feels like a large version of the “asematunneli” in Helsinki. It was a vertically challenged concrete hell, and the platforms (image on the left) weren’t much better with ceiling made from 60′s corrugated sheet metal and concrete. Cute. Not.

Luckily, things improved from thereon.

For one, it turned out that Düsseldorf has some interesting buildings. While there really weren’t anything you could call a skyscraper, there was the occasional sprinkling of nice tall buildings like the one below left. Then there was the trio of strange-shaped office buildings, below middle. And the tower Rheinturm, below right, with nice views from 175m or thereabouts.

These views revealed that the river crossing the city, Rhine, separated two very different styles of urban planning. On the other side there was a river boulevard (of the collection below, photos top left and bottom right) complete with an endless supply of touristy-looking restaurants, river ships offering cruises etc docked beside it and so on.

And on the other side of the river? Sheep.

Yes, sheep. Dozens, if not hundreds of sheep. I don’t know what they were doing there, but it was an interesting contrast.

Anyhow, already in early April spring was showing some signs. The magnolia trees were blooming and the river boulevard was slowly coming to life.

The tradition whenever I visit a new city and have only a few hours to spend is to just walk around, pretty much aimlessly though aided by a map. Often I tend to gravitate towards parks, and Düsseldorf was no exception. I stumbled upon a nice small park that had some (very friendly) swans and beautiful blooming trees and all kinds of nice things:

All in all, Düsseldorf felt like a generally agreeable city with two major annoyances; the ubiquitous cigarette smoke and the confusing transportation system. I’d never travel there for vacation, but as far as business destinations go, it could be worse. Particularly the transportation from the airport is quick and easy once you get over the braindead ticketing system.

(All photos can be clicked for a bigger version – sorry for the low-ish quality, I only had my old compact digicam with me..)