Every once in a while when travelling, I find something so weird that I feel compelled to type. In over a million miles of air travel and four years' worth of "postcards", this is my first time writing from inside a phone booth. Most hotels in Europe have really crummy phone systems, so you can't use voicemail or a modem from your room. You get to go down to the lobby and do battle with their incomprehensibly complicated public phones. Or in the grandest hotels, you go to their business center and ask them to use their phone box at a mere 1000 lira per minute for a local call. When you go to the business center asking for a modem connection, the receptionist looks at you with the warmth reserved for pederasts because they just don't see pederasts or laptop users all that often in Italian luxury hotels. In this little adventure, I'm staying at a palatial hotel in Milan called Il Principe de Savoie. It is unbelievably elegant, and it costs over a half-million a day, which is a lot even in though it's just lira. There is marble and crystal everywhere, even in the bathrooms and the pool. Their phone booths are equally elegant, with a fine living room chair, mahogany walls, bevelled glass mirrors, and crystal chandeliers. With all this luxury, it makes perfect sense that they are very concerned with saving energy. If the chandelier were on for an extra minute or two, it might just waste a lira or two. As you'd expect in this modern hotel, the energy saving system is quite fancy, using motion detection to turn the lights on and off. Opening the door or making the slightest motion tells the energy management system you're still in there, and the lights are kept on. To make sure they don't waste any energy at all, the energy system has been set with a 10 second threshold because they know that no caller could not possibly go more than 10 seconds without waving his hands around. This is Italy. So any non-Italian sits in the dark when making calls. Of course, my whole reason for using their business center is to hook up the computer, and it's hard to get much done if you can't see the keyboard. So, every few seconds I have to move a leg or my head madly around to get the lights on while keeping hands a-keyboard. After a few minutes of my being hunched over the keyboard with the spastic interludes, the receptionist came in to check whether she should call an ambulance. Given the language barrier it was kind of hard to explain what the problem was. At any rate, I now have a crick in my neck and will have to avail myself of the hotel's wonderful spa therapy to recover. I'll see if I can charge this one off to business. Dave