When I was a kid, I used to think of business travel as something glamourous. Planes, hotels, taxis, sushi, bellhops, room service, and Keebler Elf sized shampoo. After getting a job that sometimes requires me to travel, the gloss has faded quite a bit. For starters, as we talked about the other day, the planes suck. The taxis tend to frighten and smell, you never know which place is safe for the sushi, bellhops have gone the way of the full serve gas station, room service menus have prices so high that only dogs can hear them, and the shampoo isn’t even worth stealing.
The only saving grace to all of this is the almost science fiction level of connectedness that came upon us so gradually that I’ve forgotten how I got by before. I used to wander streets aimlessly, get lost continuously, rely on the concierge’s taste in Chinese food, and actually read the complimentary paper they leave outside the room in the morning. Sometimes I would know someone in Randomville, but as many times as not you would get shanghaied into seeing a live performance of midgets having sex with goats on fire.
Now, my phone can tell me if a restaurant is worth going to, has maps to show me the options in the neighbourhood and how to get there, and if I still want to see the midgets I can choose a theatre and showtime based on type of goat.
How did you handle travel, getting around, getting entertained, and getting fed in the days before smartphones and the Internet?
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I still rely primarily on the locals, and on the advice of the concierge. A good hotel (like, say, the Sutton Place in Vancouver, or the Banff Springs) makes sure that they have a Concierge who listens to the guest, and makes recommendations based on their preferences and tastes. So many of the "guide" apps out there are just clogged to the brim with useless information and biased patrons that the results end up getting skewed to the point of being unusable. Rather like last year's Hooniversal Car of the Year…
An administrative assistant that prints out maps galore and knows that I prefer donkey midget porn to goat midget porn.
I spent most of the '80s and early '90s travelling from one town to another on enviro business or music gigs – sometimes being in a strange place for as much as a few months. I would get info from local associates, people I'd meet, or often just go exploring on my own.
Look for morbidly obese men with hairy palms, and ask.
If you're not going to use the tickets for the midget thing, could you hook me up?
<img src="http://hayleygallery.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/reg/photos/BadSushiUni.web_.gif">
Bad Sushi – Uni <a href="http://www.loftprints.com” target=”_blank”>www.loftprints.com
IMG from HayleyGallery.com
I have 3 of these pieces in my kitchen, including the one pictured.
When I was young, attractive, and slutty, and newly minted into the profession of defense electronics engineering in the mid-1980s, in my off time when traveling on business in a big city, I'd ask the cabbie where the nicest (or nastiest, depending on my mood) gay bars were. Once there, and mixing and mingling, I'd get the low-down on the nightlife and the eating establishments. On my more successful forays, I'd have a date for the evening already lined up by then. Even to this day, LGBT-centric venues have free 'bar rags' advertising the local nightlife, and are a valuable resource.
So you're telling me that if I head to the local Steak & Lube, they can tell me where to get a decent bowl of Pad Thai?
Well, in broad cliched demographic brush strokes, the local LGBT crowd should be abreast of the finer local eating establishments (since we have larger disposable incomes, and are well-read and well-traveled), and can point you to the ones where the breeders with squalling brats don't congregate…
Well I can scientifically reject your theory now. The queers did not lead me to the best Pad Thai in town. It was rather dry. However, my nails look FABULOUS!
Perhaps your sample size was statistically inadequate. Maybe you needed to hang out at more bars and chat up more patrons.
Please encourage that. Jeez, we've sent him to Vancouver and San Francisco, you'd think his sample size would be adequate by now!
My size is quite adequate, thank you.
In a previous life as a road warrior one of my biggest issues was trying to find even a decent place to eat. Thanks to the West Coast being on a later time-zone, in order to be at the customer's site at the start of their business day we would typically have to catch a flight after work on the evening before.
And by the time we got off work, flew across country, got a rental and checked into the hotel (usually a pretty cheap one, or at best a Holiday Inn) it was almost always late and the entire town would inevitably be closed. Some Midwestern towns would stereotypically roll up their sidewalks at 6pm. I ate more than one meal out of a stale vending machine or gas station snack-rack. If you lucked out and got to stay at a fancy hotel, the kitchen was always closed, and the concierge was always the "late-guy" that you approached with caution.
And taxi drivers? Phfshaw! Not unless you really fancied them flaming goats.
I eventually learned that if you look for the nearest college, truck-stop or bohemian bar district you can usually find cheap late food that is pretty good. And on occasion, some late night entertainment that did not end with cops being called.
Smart phones made finding your way around a strange city a lot easier, yet somehow at times I kinda miss the old sense of adventure, going in completely blind.
No, no… No flaming-goat-taxi-driver-eatery endorsements…! But a cabbie from ANY ethnicity will know where the gay bars in town are. Then query the queers for good local eateries…!