The Electric Chair

Well, this is long overdue... but somehow I just cant find the motivation to blog... my yahoo messenger lists me as one of my contacts.. so I had the following conversation
me: hi
me: hi
me: kya chal raha hai
me: kya chal raha hai
me: gaand mara
me: gaand mara
such was my inertia. Having exhausted all possible avenues of postponement, having checked all my mails, orkut, blog, messergers etc and still not wanting to go to sleep, I am but forced to blog.

I had to go to the US from London.... I had the option of spending the weekend in London or NY... not being the one to do touristy things alone, it doesnt make much of a difference and I left London on a saturday. I almost missed the flight as my alarm did not go off.. luckily I had also asked the reception for a wake up call.. then i figured that my blackberry has an option that alarm is off on the weekends...phew! Well I reached NY and took the taxi to my hotel and guess what... i left my BB in the cab! my other phone is not on roaming so i am practically cut off. I call seema from the hotel and she helps me figure out contacts etc... The place I was put up was quite a shocking place... literally... the doorknobs and lift buttons gave out a small electric shocked... I was anyways shocked at the loss of my phone, so such small shocks did not matter much. This was not really a business hotel.. more of a hotel frequented by the fashion industry.. tho did not see any models. The hotel had just one restaurant.. a japanese restaurant called Koi which was quite good. This country works only on tips and poeple almost demand it - there is nothing gratituous about it... I also know now that there is no competition for Indian hotels... service culture just doesnt exist elsewhere as it does in India. I just slept off the weekend in my room btw.

On Monday and Tuesday I had meetings in NY - the days were pretty light with just 3-4 meetings a day. On Wed I had to go to Boston where i had a decent 5 meetings. There was a twist in the tale however, with Chicago (which was not in the inital plan) also getting included... for just one meeting... I was like what the hell lets get this cancelled... but all my efforts at doing this were at naught and I was really wanting to get back home by then. Boston was good.... liked the place a lot... the hotel they put me in was great and the city is good too.

Flew to chicago on Wed night and they put me up in a really shitty place... u cud make out the moment u alighted outiside the hotel from the cab. The main dinner stops by 9.45 and the night menu did not start till 10.45.. i waited for an hour to get one sandwich.. plus several other things... I ended up having 2 meetings on Thurs in Chicago and went to meet a family friend in the afternoon in Elmhurst one of chicago's suburbs. In the evening I had a flight to Mumbai via Munich. A buxom blond girl came to sit next to me but was with another girl who was sitting somehere else and went to join her, sending a professor in Russian studies who had a flight to St Petersburg in her lieu next to me. I have absolutely no luck on airline flights... or for that matter anywhere else. Crap!

Anyways was very glad to get back home after almost 2 weeks... had a horrible jet lag afterwards for 4-5 days... still dont seem to have recovered fully althought its been more than a week.

# posted by A Chrysanthemum by any other name... : 11:40 AM