Good Idea: Immersing oneself in a local culture while on travel by daring to sample new sights, talking to new people, and trying out new kinds of food.
Bad Idea: Going to India, stuffing oneself on super spicy chicken dishes and Kingfisher beer, then returning to one’s hotel room, getting depressed about that huge rubber tire that one calls “gut,” and then guilting oneself into going down to the hotel gym and running for 45 minutes, then collapsing from pain as the spice and the beer and the sweat co-mingle into a destructive force, then going upstairs and turning on one’s computer to do critical work, only to get caught up in the 2 hour season premiere of American Idol, and then falling asleep with an empty plate lying on one’s stomach that had brandished two chocolate chip cookies courtesy of the hotel.
My week here in Bangalore is almost over. I’ve got a fantastic flight back home that will call for me to zombie out at the Singapore airport at 3:10 am in the morning for four hours before doing the six hour hop back over to Shanghai. The weather here has been gorgeous, and my field trip two days ago into the countryside to see the good work our company is doing out there was truly enlightening. I’ll be coming back often in the next few months as I try to single-handedly bridge the Sino-Indian divide, but in the meantime it’s important to do a post-mortem and avoid all those bad ideas that seem to follow me around like a pack of horny hyenas (see above).
