I always enjoy staying in hotels in Asia. Great food, good service, and generally speaking, beautiful décor.

I sent my laundry out yesterday. Like the last time I was in Bangkok, it all came back individually shrink-wrapped, with neat little cardboard bowties attached to each of my shirts.

Hotel laundry, shrink-wrapped and complete with cardboard bowties

I have given up trying to be ecologically-friendly in Asia. There’s no way I can change an entire continent. They like their packaging, they like their plastic, they don’t recycle anything (at least, not that I can tell) – hey, that’s just part of life here.

I also managed to have some great room service. After God knows how many disappoint $25 hamburgers I’ve eaten in my travels across the US and Europe, having a tray of really delicious food sent up is a real treat.

Room service, Asian-style. Beats a soggy, greasy burger any day.

My virtual golf was not an overwhelming success. It’s tougher work than it looks, and my performance on the course suggests that I might want to reduce my handicap a little before they’ll let me onto the real Old Course.

I’m off to Calcutta this evening – and a new adventure begins!

Few things suck quite as much as being sick when you’re on the road. I managed to catch a cold in Istanbul, and it’s managed to reach that really unpleasant stage where my nose runs constantly. I must have really looked poorly, because even my slave-driver of a client suggested that I should probably take myself home and get an early night (mind you, it was already 7:30pm, so it’s not like I was working a half-day or anything). I figure giving him my cold will be a sort of parting gift…

Drugged up to the gills!

I’m using up the remains of the cold medicine I bought in Turkey. It seems effective enough, but I suspect it’s actual a combination of horse tranquillisers and morphine, because it leaves me high as a kite. So each morning you’ve got to make that fateful judgement call: do I suffer and sniffle all day with a clear head but a blocked nose, or do I take another sachet of the Turkish cold medicine and struggle through the day with a clear nose but a foggy head?

Not quite Mom’s chicken soup. (Who are we kidding — even she’d admit that she used to heat up a can of Campbell’s!) The closest thing I could find to chicken soup came in a coconut. A bloody coconut.

The second challenge with getting sick on the road is actually tucking yourself up in bed. It’s bad enough that there’s no one nearby to whinge to (in a last-ditch attempt for sympathy, I was even tempted to pour out my heart to the woman at room service, but was thwarted when she misunderstood my lamenting for “one prawn cocktail starter”). No, worse still is the fact that it’s awfully hard to find comfort food when you’re a long way from home. So you either have to drag yourself out someplace (not fun, especially when it’s pouring with rain outside) or you have to settle for what’s on offer at the hotel.

Another day, another room service meal. This time, a seafood bouillabaisse.

For the record, bouillabaisse is an incredibly difficult word to spell, as I’ve just discovered as I tried to type it for this blog.

Bouillabaisse

Hats off to the chef. Room service or not, it’s one of the best bouillabaisses I’ve ever had, and it’s loaded with no fewer than three lobster tails. Mmmm. (Although I secretly fear that there are three lobsters out there in little lobster wheelchairs, having given up their tails for my dinner.)

It was a bloody long day today — we’ve got a workshop on Weds/Thu/Fri this week and so we’re all working away feverishly to get everything ready in time for all the bigwigs to fly in on Friday and pass their verdict. Not helped by the fact that I decided to watch “The Good Shepherd” last night, not realising that it’s about 4,000 hours long. So my ‘early night’ turned into a reasonably late night… Not the best way to start the week.

My client is full of a cold and spluttering everywhere. My colleague has already succombed. It’s only a matter of time before I catch it…

I couldn’t face going out tonight, so I let the hotel bring dinner to me. One of the nicer room service meals I’ve had…

Much nicer than hawker food…