Previously, I had commented on the eager fleet of room service people here at the Hotel Timor. After 2 weeks, time for a rethink.

The rooms have tiled floors with a couple of woven mats on the floor in the main traffic areas. And yes, they do come in with a mop and swab the entire visible tiled surface, but the mats have remained untouched and are slowly becoming quiet unclean. They don’t always wipe the tables and don’t always clean the 2 coffee cups in the room.

Two weeks of hotel breakfasts has now revealed a pattern. The morning offering is exactly the same every day, only varied by the absence of yogurt over the last week. It seems that food is brought out at around 7am and we have seen the job finished at 7:30am. Breakfast seems be available until 11am. So thats 3.5 hours of food sitting out on a buffet table. The hot food in trays sitting over small heating flames.

Its only now that I realise that in some cases, these trays are recycled for use next day. And it has now dawned on me that after 8 days of daily gut trouble, skipping breakfast yesterday led to a quite quick recovery. It now makes sense.

There can not be many people in the hotel. On arrival, we might see 4 or 5 other people at breakfast, but as Christmas approached, this has dropped to 1 other and sometimes only us. Evening meals appear little different. This suggests a throughput issue.

We have eaten evening meals about 3 times in the hotel and on each occasion, I have been very unimpressed. I noted that it would have been impossible to create the chosen meal in the time given, without some components being pre-prepared.

So yes, it really was the Sri Lankan restaurant food that started all this but I suspect the hotel food has been fuelling whatever nasties are in my system.

I have noticed quite a number of expats comment to us about the structural integrity of the hotel. I have tended to ignore it until today when I was told that a structural engineering report (done by the US govt. I believe) has deemed the structure to be fundamentally unsafe and as a result, the US Embassy (and the Australian embassy) do not permit visiting staff to stay there. Apparently, the building was a burnt-out shell 3 years ago and re-built in quick time without any additional structural strengthening and a mild earthquake (not uncommon here) of the right frequency and direction, will more than likely lead to structural failure.

So we are on the hunt for alternative accommodation again.

But after a week of gut problems and these structural issues, they still pale into insignificance against the pain I experienced last night on HBO. I watched the movie of the Thunderbirds. They butchered it … lifelong memories trashed … Ben Kingsley, how could you ?