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October 09, 2006
jetlag dump
room 2408, itc park sheraton & towers, chennai, india. 3am. freshly arrived.
bet this is the first thing everyone says on their first trip to india, but: this country is almost entirely unpopulated.
outside the airtport i saw no one but about 5 homeless guys and one stray dog. during the 15-minute drive to the hotel, i took a census of everyone i saw: 8 rickshaws and one stray horse. at the hotel, lounges and lobbies and shops and restaurants galore, all shut, unlit. i wandered around the hotel a little bit cos it had this desolate feeling to it.. it's very odd. there was but one security guard kicking back in a recliner in the dark (when he too thought, reasonably, there was no one else around).
also, so far the whole "5 star deluxe", "best hotel in the state" thing is letting me down like a mofo. my room smells of old people, and the only food i could get after midnight in the rather run-of-the-mill 24-hour coffee shop was a chicken tikka burger, and honestly it drew a tie with the food i'd had on the plane. which by the way, frequent flyer tip #17: you never know if your german airline's steward/ess' grandparents were nazis so you should always demand a kosher meal, and then slowly pick at it and frown at them. but i digress. the ultimate test for any hotel is of course breakfast. i mean, aside from hygiene maybe, what else really matters? if i haven't caught any evil bugs yet, i will check it out tomorrow and report if there's anything interesting about it at all. but so far, i am ranking this hotel 3 units of goodness below a nice, big, well furnished krakovian hostel room (which costs 1/10 of this).
on the gastrointestinal side, my minimal background research on india recommended mortal fear of everything remotely comestible. and i do have to admit that it is gloomy to just basically wait for the inevitable first-time traveller's dysentery, malaria and, who knows, st. vitus dance maybe. if the rest of the event of the journey prove as successful as it has been — o, let it not be so — i will come back with something really exotic and uncomfortable, like a rare deadly strain of tourette's.
p.s. congratulations to the perky little folks on LH 758 from Frankfurt who partook in the impromptu World's Loudest Baby competition, you little winners you. fuckers. I hope you grow up to be tech support.
Posted by matti at October 9, 2006 03:06 AM