Airport lounge design #101

If you get access to an airline lounge it’s because you are flying first class, business class, or you have a lot of points on your frequent flyer card so they give you access to the lounge – even if you are in economy.

In general though, most people flying business class are in that class because they are on business – time is important and having a place to work is important, so take a look at the lounge in São Paulo’s international airport.

Lots of soft chairs, free food, free drinks, and free Internet too. That’s all nice, but there are no power supplies anywhere!

Almost everyone in here is trying to recharge their phone or laptop, and get some work done. There is a steady stream of people circling the room looking for some power, somewhere, anywhere.

The only power is at a workbench, specifically placed there for laptop users and with about 8 places in total… EVERYONE IS USING A LAPTOP IN HERE GUYS!

I guess I won’t have any power left on the plane now, so at least I can enjoy the movies instead of working on board my flight.

Taxing my drums

I’ve got a Yamaha DTxpress III drum kit. It’s a really nice electronic kit that is great for practicing because you can play the kit wearing headphones, or plug it into an amp if you want to hear the real ‘noise’.

I shipped my kit over from London and during the journey, the computer (or brain), ended up broken. I checked with Yamaha in Brazil and they don’t stock the III computer anymore because the present version of this kit is the IV and the IV computer won’t work with the rest of the kit I have so I scouted around back in the UK for the right computer.

I found a supplier in London who could send me a second-hand computer – £200 for the computer, I bought an extra cymbal for another £40 and then the courier cost was £75.

It’s a pain to shell out so much cash because of a breakage in transit, but I needed the computer for my kit to work again so I paid out and waited for DHL to arrive.

When the courier arrived with my box of equipment, he wanted just under £300 in taxes to be paid, in cash or with a cheque, before he would give me the box. I tried protesting that the taxes are more than the value of the items I bought, but of course the courier couldn’t do a thing – the charges had been applied by the customs people.

I checked with DHL and it turned out I was getting charged a tax for importing electronic products – even though these were second-hand pieces of equipment for my personal use and not to be sold. Unfortunately, there was no way out of the situation.

So now it looks like DHL will send the box all the way back to London, to the company that sent me the equipment. The only saving grace being that they offered to send it on to my parent’s address once it does get back there… leaving me waiting for my drum computer until the next time I visit the UK!

Buses in São Paulo – where am I going?

OK, so the photo is from Diadema, just outside São Paulo city centre, but it gives an indication of what a bus stop looks like here. It’s just a marker for where the bus will stop.

There is no information on which buses go past this stop, or where they go, or how frequently they run. Just a marker that says ‘this is a bus stop’.

I’m used to the spider map system in London, which is just great. You can get onto a bus you are not familiar with and know exactly where it will go because the stylised maps depict the entire route of the bus. People in London still complain that the spider maps for buses don’t integrate well enough into the tube and rail maps, but at least there is an excellent mapping system for every bus that runs through London.

I spoke to someone about this a few days ago, another foreigner who has made São Paulo his home, though he has been here since the 1980s. He said that it’s because only poor people use the buses and they will mostly know which bus they are taking so have no need for maps, and if they wanted to complain then they have less of a voice and less knowledge of how to organise an effective campaign to improve matters.

Well here in Brazil, I’m supposed to be one of the class A – the elite members of society – and yet I use the bus almost every day. I would really appreciate some way of knowing where the bus goes. It’s fine for me to go from home to a central point like Paulista Avenue, but the moment I want to figure out how to get to somewhere new, like Brooklin, I have no way of planning a route or checking where buses go. I just have to aim north, south, east, west on a bus I don’t know and hope for the best.

Surely it’s time to give the people of São Paulo some more information on the 1,000 or so bus routes here, and secondly, wouldn’t it encourage some more of the middle classes to use the bus if they knew where it was going?

Google Translate and The Beatles

When The Beatles changed their name from The Quarrymen, it was an amusing play on the words beetle… something dark scurrying around late at night, and beat.

Beatle was never a word in the English language until coined by Lennon and McCartney, so I’m a bit confused by something I noticed on Google Translate.

I went to see the Brazilian rock band Os Paralamas do Sucesso at the weekend. Their name is also something that the band members created just as a laugh – ‘the mudguards of success’.

But try putting that band into Google Translate – if you translate it from Portuguese to English, the band name is translated into The Beatles. Try it – you might need to shorten it to ‘Os Paralamas’ for it to work, but that should still read as the mudguards.

So, were the Beatles known in Portuguese as Os Paralamas or is there an Easter egg within the Google Translate system because someone is a Beatles or Paralamas fan?