bacon == poison

I checked out of the hotel this morning, which was exciting; the hotel was very nice, but it will be even nicer to be only five minutes from the office and with all the other expats. I haven't seen my room yet, because I had a meeting this morning and so had to come straight to work, but Ishmail (the driver) is taking my stuff to the apartment so that it will be there when I leave the office tonight. I'm going to try to leave early (and by early I mean seven p.m.) so that I can unpack tonight. The difficulties of international communication are extreme, especially since the office here is about as far away as you can get, timezone-wise, from the office in California. So when it's eight a.m. in California, it's 8:30pm here, which means there are no good times to have conference calls. I stayed late last night for a call, so was in the office for ~12hrs, plus the hour total commute time to/from the hotel. I was exhausted when I got back to the hotel, but managed to mend a pair of pants before falling asleep.

India continues to be 'an experience', although I hate calling it that because I sound like such a tourist. It rained last night and is cloudy this morning, so the oppressive heat has been cut down today. However, it doesn't really affect me much, since I'm in the office all day--but I know it's hot outside, because I can feel the intense heat through the well-glazed windows and the very effective blinds when I walk past them, despite the chill in the rest of the office from the air conditioner.

Last night I 'experienced' a Subway sandwich (delivered straight from the restaurant to the office), and this morning I 'experienced' what appeared to be a bout of mild food poisoning. It didn't feel mild at the time, since I broke out into a cold sweat and thought I'd vomit all over my desk, but it only lasted five minutes (on top of the half hour that I was feeling ill at the hotel this morning), so that made it mild I guess. The sandwich was my first mistake here; I've been pretty careful, but this had a) lettuce and b) 'bacon', which here is not delicious and crispy, but rather seems like a strip of preserved pork rife with bacteria and other questionable matter. Lettuce is no good because it may be washed in dirty water, and is mostly water anyway, and I've been avoiding vegetables like the plague because of this (rather than because of my general dislike of them), but other people have ordered from Subway regularly and have never had problems. So maybe it was something else...but it would be tres ironic if the first food to take me out here was something faux-Western.

Needless to say, in my darkest moment, it felt like I was shedding a tear for the loss of the delicious turkey-bacon-guacamole sandwich that I always get at Quiznos, but it was really just the cold sweat running down my face as I avoided vomiting on my keyboard. Now I am better, and it's time to work!