Sunday afternoon I ended up in Tromso for a 24 hour stop. The city is also known as "Paris of the North". It is located at almost 70 degrees North. It is the same height as Victoria Island in Canada - or North of Fort Yukon in Alaska. The snow had already arrived there.
The hour before pickup I spent in the hotels sauna. It is located at the top of the hotel and has a nice panorama view of the city and mountains. It had a temperature above 105C / 221F so walking out into the cold air just a few minutes later was just a relief.
Last Friday I changed to winter-tires. It showed out to be a wise move. This weekend the first snow arrived where I live as well. It is actually still snowing as I write this. I am off to work in a couple of hours and can't actually say that I look forward to todays delays whith deicing and slippery aprons and runways. On top of it all Air Traffic Control is short manned and this as well leads to delays and cancellations.
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
National Gallery, London
The National Gallery (Picture: atpm.com)
Saturday I had the day off in London. I went to the National Gallery and had a look at their collection. My favorite painter is Pierre Auguste Renoir. It is strange, but whenever I stand in front of one of his paintings I get tears in my eyes. My favorite at the gallery is La Premiere Sortie. (The First Outing) (Below).
I had a nice walk back to the hotel again through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. There still were some roses along the path and it smelled lovely. Lots of squirrels were running around trying to fill their winter storages.
Later at evening I went out with some of the crew and had a nice meal at an Italian restaurant close by the hotel. We had an early pickup Sunday morning so it turned out a nice and quiet evening.
Saturday, October 15, 2005
Hell Hotel
"Entrance" Taken with my cell phone.
Hell Hotel
Literally. I spend 2 nights at work there last week.
In SAS we - the pilots and CA - earlier have been so lucky as to get rather nice stops in interesting cities all over Europe. We had them often, they were reasonably long and we got to explore the cities. In some cities we had airport hotels which we used when we had short layovers (less than 14 hours).This to cut down on the transportation time.
Since 9-11 the story has been quite different. The stops have been dramatically cut. Understandable. We have to save money.
The pilot union agreed, among lots of other things, to extend the limit for short layovers to 16 hours. Not good, but understandable.
Since then things have gotten worse and even more worse. The “management” (I want to add mis-“) seems to have gotten it in for us. Maybe they want us to quit voluntarily instead of having to fire us? Just one of many things; since we now have agreed to work almost indefinitely every day, they have started to schedule us with a two/three hour break before we fly the last leg of the day. This to get us below the 16 hour stop limit so that we have to stay at a remote hotel somewhere in no mans land. Quite frustrating. You work 12-14 hour days and then you are stuck at an industrial area for the next 16 hours. Then a new long day at work.
Well, back to Hell Hotel.
In Trondheim, Norway, we have been lucky with the airport hotel. Only a 5 minute drive away from the airport there is a small community named Stjordal. It is a typically nice little Norwegian town, with a mall, theatre and several restaurants. We had it ok there. Management probably discovered that we enjoyed this layover, so now they have found us a new hotel a four minute drive in the opposite direction - in the middle of nowhere. It is to top it all named Hell Hotel. I guess management threw a party among themselves after doing this. It all reminds me of the Dilbert comic strips where this little “devil dog” does its worst to make life a living hell for the employees.
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Flying Spaghetti Monster
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