Here’s the second part of a longer conversation with Dopplr friend and investor Esther Dyson.

Dopplr: How has the quality of commercial aviation changed in the past few years? Feel free to distinguish between US and non-US carriers…

Esther Dyson: The quality of commercial aviation has dropped sharply - but not that much out of line with its pricing until recently. It was simply hard to get good service, and at least in the US all the carriers focused on price to the exclusion of reliability and comfort. On most foreign carriers, you could get better service - but you were paying for it. But there are still some good domestic services available: I use United’s Premium Service between New York and San Francisco and LA. It’s a bit pricier, but you can work comfortably through the whole flight, and that’s definitely worth it. That is, it’s worth it in business class, especially if you book far enough ahead. First class is not worth it.

As for foreign carriers, I like Lufthansa a lot, even though they can be a bit humorless. BA’s service has become a bit careless, but they go almost everywhere I do, so I keep using them as well. Austrian, SAS and the rest of the Star Alliance carriers are also pretty good.

Dopplr: You stay in hotels that have swimming pools. Is that your sole criterion or do you have others?

The pool is a binary criterion: whether or not there is one. After that, there are nuances: What time does it open? (Once I stayed at a Doubletree with a pool that didn’t open until 10 am. I ended up sneaking into the pool of a much nicer hotel I happened to know nearby. (I’m purposely being vague here…. I haven’t done anything so “bad” in a long time; I think it’s good for the soul to feel like a real outlaw from time to time.)

And is it large, regularly shaped, not too full of other people? The worst pools have lots of fancy obstacles - stairs that stick into the water, curves and clever shapes that waste swimming space and interrupt laps. You can easily turn a three-lane pool into a single usable lane with protruding stairs and the like. The pool here in Kampala, Uganda, is lovely and long, but it has annoying curvy edges that I keep bumping into. (photos on request for all of these) Still, I’ll swim in anything rather than miss my morning wet-reboot. Last week, for example, I was at the London Hilton Metropole, where they managed to ruin the pool with two protruding steps, diagonally across from one another, so there was no good lane to swim in.

I occasionally have swimming dreams: Usually the pool is dry, or I can’t find it and wander around in angst. And then there was the actual time (not a dream) in Munich where I was attending a DLD conference at the Bayerhof, which has a lovely pool. I saw it the evening I checked in, all decked out for a party, with beautiful deep blue tiles, a nice rectangular shape (except for steps in one corner), and suitably large. The next morning, I couldn’t even find it at first. They had opened a different entrance for the party, and now I had to take some backdoor route - but finally I found it. There was a sign saying it was closed for the party, but there was no one there, so I decided to go in. However, it was now only half full. Never mind. I jumped in quickly, half expecting someone to come along to order me out, and kept hitting the bottom, because the water was quite low. To my surprise, even though I thought I was figuring out how to swim as horizontally as possible, I seemed to be getting worse rather than better at it.

Suddenly I realized that the water was still draining. As I sat on the bottom and considered my situation, the water barely came up to my waist. So I got out, took a shower and consoled myself that at least I had gotten in most of a half hour. The whole thing was like a dream, where the water gradually drains away and I wake up. This time, I *was* awake.

I went to join my brother at breakfast… and halfway through, remembered I had left my bathing cap in the shower. once more I went into the labyrinth of stairs and doors, and this time I couldn’t even find the shower. Suddenly, though, I heard it, followed the sound, and opened the women’s shower area door. There stood a pudgy little man, fortunately all covered in bubbles, scrubbing away in the very stall I had been using. We stared at each other in astonishment. “But this is for the ladies!” I said in my best German. “Enschuldigung! [Excuse me!]” he replied. Then he turned his back for a moment and turned around again, proffering my bathing cap.

Stranger than most of my dreams!