blergh

Did your parents ever tell you that 'only boring people get bored'?

Well right now I must be the most paint dryingly boring person in the whole Northern Hemisphere (yes I learnt after last trip that Vietnam is actually not in the Southern Hemisphere. So Bridgett Jones of me).

Bored. bored. fucking bored.

Last night I ate pizza in the relative gloom of my half lit room after some exciting globe blowing action in a lamp seems to have thrown half the room's lights into a tizz making them go out in sympathy. I watched Zoolander on the inhouse movie channel (which features what must be pirate dvds as they have this eery tendancy to go all big square pixelated and have no sound in key points in the drama. Not that there is drama in Zoolander). I laughed out loud in such a way that I'm sure it scared my neighbours.

"HA HA HA Merman!"

"HAHAHAHA he thinks the model is the actual school"

"BHAHAHA he said eulogogies - EULOGOGIES!"

Was I on drugs? No. Just bored out of my brain and obviously overdue for a good laugh. The other evidence for this conclusion is that yesterday in a meeting with a colleague I laughed so much I had tears coming out when he told me that after watching a Nick Cage film in his room (gone in 15 seconds? Car movie?) he found himself imitating this strange pistol getsure in the air, wiggly hand thing that Nicholas Cage's character does to psych himself up, to psych himself up. AND that he did it in the mirror (as in my colleague did it in the mirror). I knew, and he knew, that this was just about as close to admitting that he was starting to dress up as Napolean and command small armies of room service canapes as is possible, which somehow made it even funnier. See - we are both clearly bored out of our minds, maybe literally.

I know that it seems incredibly ungracious, and unadventurous, and un-everything else to admit to being bored while overseas for work. But I am. I feel like I am stuck on some strange desert island where everyone else has an actual life, and friends, and family and a reason to be here, and I am just being humoured by polite serving staff and having to talk in the language we have in common, which is mine, because I've been too butt lazy to learn theirs, and as a result all we can talk about is things off the menu or have these ridiculous Faulty Towers style conversations where I have no idea what it is they think I've said because their responses are so seemingly unrelated that I am tempted to just laugh. And I'm sure they all think I'm my older workmate's secretary, or 'travelling companion' which irritates me, and then irritates me that I care. AND (oh, you've heard enough - finding this boring? well welcome to my world) I can't even just fuck off and go exploring and meet new people and see new things because I am bound to this hotel and this desk, to be efficient and in contact and be writing stuff and to be ready for meetings and such like.

I am so sick of room service I have started dreaming of toasted cheese and tomato sandwiches on dark rye.

I realise that being bored because you are stranded in a strange world of artificial opulance in a developing country is the equivilent of being on a life raft in the titanic and complaining that there's no in-boat entertainment and that the seats are too hard. BUT I CAN'T HELP IT.

I have actually started to feel empathy for all those horrible bloated expats who seem to shag and drink their way through stints overseas, because I'm thinking that maybe it's a legitimate(or at least understandable) response to boredom.

I have literally started to count down the days until I get home.

Funny that the last time I was speaking to someone who I know also wasn't enjoying their work trip OS was my housemate who was in an incredibly dangerous country where she has to stay in very simple and restricted accomodation and be accompanied by armed guards when in the city. It sounds like a physically and materially very different experience, but somehow the emotional landscape is similar.