Sofia

For the practical half, two things genuinely work and one does not.

Works: use less soap. Much less than you are used to. In soft water a bar lathers with a fraction of what a hard-water area needs, and most of the slipperiness is simply excess. Halving the amount usually solves it outright.

Works: finish with something slightly acidic. A rinse with very dilute vinegar or a squeeze of lemon neutralises the residue immediately. Overkill for hand washing but genuinely useful for hair, which is where soft water surprises people most.

Does not work: rinsing for longer. You have already discovered this. Past a few seconds the extra water is not achieving anything, because the problem is quantity of soap, not duration of rinse.

Worth adding: in many places medical equipment and the bag carrying it is treated separately from your carry-on allowance rather than counted within it. That varies by carrier and it is worth checking your specific airline's page before you fly, because it is a much stronger position than asking for a favour.

Going in knowing the airline's own wording turns the conversation from a request into a clarification, and it is noticeably shorter.

On whether it causes problems: the honest answer is that it is a smaller problem than it looks, for reasons that are specific to the country rather than to the system.

The overwhelming majority of drivers on American roads read English well enough for a three-word sign, and the roads that carry the most international traffic — interstates, border crossings, national parks — have been steadily gaining symbols for decades. The pedestrian, cyclist, deer crossing and no-entry signs are already pictograms.

Where it does bite is rental drivers on unfamiliar rules. "Right turn on red is allowed unless a sign forbids it" is a rule most visitors do not know they need to look for, so the sign forbidding it is doing double duty: it has to teach the default and then contradict it, in a language you may not read, at a junction you are already navigating.

Small practical corollary if you care about this: booking through fewer intermediaries genuinely reduces the number of parties holding your itinerary.

Direct with the airline is one record. Through an aggregator that resells through a consolidator, it is three or four, each with its own retention policy and its own idea of what counts as a reasonable log.

The reason the page exists at all is worth understanding, because it explains why it looks over-provisioned.

A passport is read by officials in countries that have no access to the issuing country's records. Everything they can act on has to be physically in the book. So the document needs a place to carry any exception that a border officer might need to know and cannot look up.

That is a low-frequency, high-consequence requirement — the sort of thing you allocate a whole page to precisely because it is almost never needed. If it were common it would have its own structured field.

The printed "there are no official observations" line is doing real work too: it closes the space, so nothing can be added later and passed off as official.

The practical takeaway that comes up every time this is discussed: on domestic routes that pass near a border, carrying a passport costs nothing and occasionally saves you a very long day.

It does not change the group outcome, but it does change how quickly you personally get processed and whether you can be rebooked onward independently rather than waiting for the group to be cleared together.

The honest answer is that the exact product barely exists, and that there are three separate things filling the gap unevenly.

Pod-style hostels. A number of cities now have hostels built around individual enclosed bunks with a curtain or door, a light, a socket and a locker, rather than open dorm beds. This is the closest thing to a capsule and it is the category worth searching for by name rather than browsing generically.

Hostel private singles. Many hostels sell tiny private rooms alongside their dorms. Shared bathroom, no frills, and often barely more than a dorm bed in the same building.

Airport and transit capsules. Common in large airports, sold by the hour, and genuinely useful for a long layover — but not a way to stay in a city.

What is missing is a mid-market chain of capsule hotels in city centres, and that absence is structural rather than accidental.

"Never plan to use the last day" is the part I will actually change. The rest I can only handle carefully now; that one I can stop repeating.