It sounds like an ideal life, living in a hotel with a pool, a couple of restaurants, gym, room service, daily cleaning service etc. It was nice for a couple of days but the novelty wears off pretty quick. Perhaps if you were extremely wealthy it would be more fun, you could just relax and enjoy it all (I fear that too would get boring but I’ll probably never know). Without a job to go to I had nowhere to be and not much that I really had to accomplish on a daily basis. Things I did to pass the time:

• Visa application was priority one, got that sent off in the first few days.

• Not too much point in job hunting without a visa so that’s on the back burner, updated my CV so I would be ready to go though.

• Vaguely looked at some houses online but didn’t want to commit until I knew where my work would be.

• Figured out where a local laundromat was to avoid extreme hotel laundry bills, an hour each way to do our washing each week and a great chance to skype the family while I waited for the tumbler to finish.

• Went to the gym pretty regimentedly each day, enjoyed the weird looks from other gym goers as I didn’t use any machines, but did Crossfit style workouts using dumbells.

• Spent way too long googling how to make food in a hotel room with only a kettle, ended up trying to make quinoa in Tupperware, in a plastic bag, in a hot bath (fail).

• Spent way too long googling houses that were never going to be available by the time we wanted one.

• Made some genius no cook meals in the end by just adding a chopping board, knife and some tupperware to the provided hotel kettle and cups. For future reference my successful hotel meals were:

  • Tuna Salad (tuna, lettuce, can of corn drained, cherry tomatoes chopped, mozzarella chopped, sunflower seeds, all mixed together with some balsamic dressing, bread on the side)

  • Tofu rice paper wraps (rice paper wraps soaked for 30sec in hot water filled with: sprouts, carrots thinly sliced, red onion thinly sliced, tofu sprinkled with soy sauce and sliced, Rice noodles soaked for a few mins in boiled water)

  • Nacho salad (can of corn + can of black or kidney beans rinsed and drained, finely diced red onion, halved cherry tomatoes, all mixed together in a big Tupperware/bowl if you’re that fancy. In the hotel provided coffee cup add a couple of teaspoons of butter to taco mix then put the cup inside a bigger container with boiling water in the big container to melt the butter, mix the “sauce” up and add salt and pepper. Mix into the salad ingredients and leave in your tiny hotel fridge for a little while to let the flavours absorb. Remove from fridge add chopped avo and serve with corn chips)

  • Quinoa salad: turns out you can only cook small amounts at a time, my most effective quinoa was the smallest size of Tupperware, half filled with quinoa and half filled with boiling water and sealed then put inside a bowl also filled with boiling water, then all wrapped in a couple of towels and the hotel provided bathrobe on top and left it for 4 hours. (Cook quinoa, add chopped olives, sundried tomato, feta, and salami)

• Decided that actually, I would like to hurry up and have a job please so started spending a bit more time and effort applying for jobs.

• Realised we needed somewhere to live after our hotel stay so spent a painful couple of days battling combinations of serviced apartments and Airbnb to find our next months accommodation.

• Got some useful life admin done (sim cards, bank accounts, HK ID card collection)

• Did little bits of shopping for some essentials (backpack, wireless headphones, work shirts for R, sports shoes for both of us)

• Read my kindle by the pool. Before I arrived, in the midst of all the chaos of finishing up work and missioning around the country saying goodbyes, I imagined myself doing this for hours each day and was really looking forward to it. In the end, I did it 3 times in 30 days at the hotel. There were some overcast days where it was less appealing and quite a few intensely rainy days. Plus if it was nice, it was school holidays for almost our whole stay so the pool was full of kids and not the relaxing oasis I had imagined!

• Did my best impression of a tourist (see other posts), these were my favourite days!

If you ever find yourself in a hotel room for 30 days and you are not explicitly in town to be a tourist my recommendations are to have something routine (it was the gym for me) so you always have one thing to accomplish, scout more cleverly to see the times of day the pool will be quietest (breakfast and lunchtime in the hotel restaurant are probably good bets), find somewhere else to do your laundry (no one wants to pay a hundred bucks for their washing to be done), go be a tourist anyway.