I can’t afford my own hotel

My $18/day per diem should be plenty for India, but not if I keep eating at the hotel. Food here is very reasonably priced outside of a 5-star hotel environment. The past several days, I’ve eaten hotel breakfasts (complimentary), Indian lunches at the client cafeterias, and hotel dinners in Western style restaurants. The lunch at the client cafes is very inexpensive. One meal is the equivalent of about 50 cents. But even a reasonable “budget” dinner, such as one entrée and a local beer (Kingfisher), can run $15, which is a little high for my budget. I need to find some new dinner options, but it’s complicated by the fact that I haven’t left work before 9pm, which means I’m back to the hotel around 10pm, starving, tired, and not in the mood to venture back out in the monsoon rains.

This weekend, Sunday will also be laundry day. As opposed to meaning that I’ll be doing my own laundry on Sunday, I will instead be searching out an external laundry service. My teammates have found a reasonably priced laundry option outside the hotel (again, hotel prices being too high), so I’ll experiment with that. All the clothes I brought with me are clean, but do need to be ironed, and my first night, the front desk told me that they don’t offer irons and ironing boards to guests. I found this a bit bizarre, but considering I had only been in India for about 2 hours, I wasn’t going to make my first enemy at the hotel by having a fit. Instead, I wore the only shirt that didn’t have to be ironed on my first day, and then sent 3 shirts out for pressing (each costing about $1.40).

At work, I confirmed with my coworkers that not offering an ironing board was ridiculous, I complained to the front desk, and one was sent up immediately. I didn’t actually use it that night, because I was just requesting it so that I’d have it to use at my leisure. Well, when housekeeping tidied up the next day, they took it away, and this morning I had to ask for it again, and emphasize that I want it to stay in my room. We’ll see. I think I’ll be hiding it in my closet from now on. Ridiculous. On the plus side, I do like the way they arrange my shampoos and such every day in the shower. It’s very orderly. :)