Habitually Good

I was traveling in Scandinavia in the past week, and couldn’t help but share a a few things that jumped out at me during the travels. A couple of these are things that I didn’t know and discovered for the first time.

Good old Schipol

I used to travel by KLM a lot a few years ago, but then switched to Lufthansa (largely because of the number of trips I had to make to Germany for some time). And I had always remembered the airport at Amsterdam with a lot of happiness. Schipol (as it is called) is a very nice airport to have as a transit point. It has plenty of restaurants, a museum, a hotel, a casino, showers, a place where you could get an aqua and a chair massage, business centers, meditation room, and a lot of places in corners where you could nap undisturbed in very comfortable chairs.

However, on this visit I discovered something that wasn’t there a few years ago. Schipol now has a full-fledged Spa. You can get your nails done, get facial treatments, get a foot massage, even get a complete body massage. Nice I think.

The cost of peeing

Yes, you read that right. I was visiting a mall in Sweden called the Galleria (which is in a town called Kista). It turns out that if you need to use the rest room there, you need to pay 5 Swedish Kronas (roughly Rs. 35) to get access to the rest room. And it’s just like the rest rooms that we have in malls here.

In India, I can get a nice burger in McDonalds for that amount of money. It found this very funny.

The Swedes love Indian food

Yes, that is true. There are Indian restaurants all over the place. And in the mall that I visited, the food court had no less than 3 Indian joints (I could buy a jalebi in Sweden if I wanted). Yes this is the same mall where it takes Rs. 35 to go and pee. In that much money, I can buy loads of Jalebi in India.

Why they give you that sucky seat on the plane even when it is empty

Ever wonder why you get on the plane sometimes and get a seat all the way in the back even when there are tons of empty seats all throughout the plane. Not only that, sometimes they won’t even let you change your seat after getting on board. Well, I always used to curse the booking system, whenever I got that. This time though I found out there is logic to it.

I noticed that this used to happen more when I was flying on smaller planes. It turns out that the seats are assigned so that weight is evenly distributed throughout the plane. No kidding. And here I was thinking that the people who designed these systems must be nuts.

That’s all folks.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.