Sidewalks of London

The sidewalks of London are chaos to a left-brained person. 

No one knows which side of the sidewalk to walk. Half try to walk down the left and half walk down the right. It's not a divided highway. It's two streams of fish in constant head-on collisions.

If you walk in the Tube it's evident that native Londoners instinctively walk on the left. It's the same as driving on the left side of the road. Most of the world drives and walks on the right side, but it's ingrained in the UK. It's habitual for Londoners to walk on the left.

The Tube is one thing, the streets are another. The streets are full of tourists and travelers. London is an international city. You have not just visitors from Continental Europe but from all over the world.

This is especially true in the central parts of London around the major shopping and tourist attractions where half the people instinctively, habitually, default to the right. And the other half default to the left. 

It would be one thing if everyone was engaged in the flow of traffic. But people are not engaged. They are staring at phones or walking and talking. And others move quickly, on a schedule, squeezed for time.

So imagine two people staring at their phones while walking. One person instinctively defaults to the left to move out of the way, and the other person defaults to the right. It's a collision. There is inefficiency.

There must be an urban street-skill that develops for native Londoners to glide along and instinctively move either left or right. The same way a person develops the skill of avoiding eye contact in a city. In New York you always default to the right. Everyone defaults to the right. In London it takes a certain agility to move either direction.

The best move is to stay to the extreme left or extreme right.

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Paradoxically, on escalators in the Tube, you stand on the right to let faster moving traffic around. Shouldn't you stand on the left? That would mimic the flow of traffic on UK highways where the slowest traffic stays far left, and faster traffic stays far right. 

So if you are a slow walker in the Tube, you would walk far left in the halls, but then once you reached an escalator you would stand to the right. Then at the end of the escalator, move back to the left. 

The two emotions people have inside airports

There are two emotions you are sure to feel in airports: anxiety and boredom. 

And most of the time you have the option of which one to feel. On departing flights that is almost always the case and here's how:

i.) You can show up early and be bored
ii.) You can try to time it so you don't have to wait too long and be anxious.

I choose boredom every time. Most professional travelers choose boredom.

Airports work in cycles. Planes depart around the same time. Hundreds even thousands of people depart on dozens of planes around 6am, then 8am, 10, noon, etc. Generally speaking that is true.

Therefore airports go from busy to empty every couple of hours. 

If you show up two hours and 15 minutes before your flight you are likely to find quiet short lines. If you show up one hour before your flight you will find long lines full of angry and anxious people. 

Delays happen. You will miss a connecting flight now and then. This cannot be predicted or avoided. When it does you can choose to accept it or not. 

If you do accept the fact that you are going to be delayed, you will be bored waiting.

If you choose to enter the arena of carnage that so many travelers choose ... and try to optimize your delay at the expense of everyone else, you will get angry and then anxious.

As I've said before, traveling via airports has asymmetric results. Best case, you arrive on time. Worst case, you will be delayed for hours or days. No flights suddenly arrive four hours early. They only get delayed.

Reading / Leeds

It's 7:00 AM and we pull up to Leeds Festival. The roads into and out of the festival are narrow country roads not designed for buses or trucks. The address is a field, and as you approach there are signs that direct where to go. We're looking for the Blue Lot.

We're met by a bloke standing at a fork in the road dressed in high-visibility yellow. Behind him are signs with arrows to the different stages. There are a dozen or so arrows, half point to the left and half to the right. He sends us right. After 100 yards we're met by another high-viz girl who tells us we've gone the wrong way, the bus can't make it if we continue. The roads are too narrow and muddy.

So she tells us to drive just another couple of hundred yards where we can turn around and come back. We drive a couple of hundred yards where we're met by another person in high-viz. We tell him we're looking for the Radio 1 / NME stage. There's no place to turn around but he says we're going the wrong way so he sends us further down. We go through another three or four people like this who keep telling us we're going the wrong way but there's no place to turn around. Eventually I see a sign for our stage. We've gone so far in the wrong direction that we're now on the correct path.

None of the stages are marked as we pass them, but eventually we find ours.

Our driver refuses to park on the mud and grass. Our "stage manager" is a 20-year-old girl with a ring in her nose getting paid minimum wage. She made sure to tell our driver several times as he berated her that she's getting paid minimum wage. But he's letting her have it at 8:00 AM. Lovely way to start the day, but we're at our stage.

We've been driving for two days straight to make it here. We were in Milan on Wednesday night and now it's Friday morning. That's 1000 miles in 36 hours, which is quite difficult in Europe with the regulation of driver's hours even though we had two drivers trading off.

So I return to stage to find out that Queens of the Stone Age is playing a secret set on our stage ... directly after us. And all the stagehands that would normally help us are unloading their truck. So now we have three bands fighting for space on the same stage at the same time.

We start humping our gear onto stage and real estate is tight. It's chaos actually, unmitigated. As far as load ins go, it's chaos. It's 9:00 AM.

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Reading / Leeds is a difficult festival to navigate if it's your first time. But why shouldn't it be?

It's the rugged and hostile environments that teach us.

Why shouldn't you be tired at the end of the day? If you aren't you're probably doing something wrong.

Why do you deserve breakfast? or parking on something that isn't mud and grass? or a proper map or directions to the stage? or a ramp or loading dock access?
 
You can complain but that's a disease that spreads to everyone it touches. Just remember, it's not funny today but one day it will be funny.