Day 2

I woke too early, and had used up all the coffee and milk the day before, so went downstairs and bought a tub of fruit and a yoghourt. The fruit was excellent, the yoghourt was not good (labelled "Danonn" but nothing like Danone). On the way down I saw the cleaner doing the next room... when I came back my room still hadn't been done.

J and K phoned to ask if I wanted to come to lunch. Of course! Not for the food (having pigged out on half a litre of strawberries, pineapple and melon), but for the company. Passing a cleaner near the lifts, I tried asking when my room would be cleaned. He smiled and nodded to every question and I realised he didn't speak English (or American). I have only one word of Hindi and no Urdu so that didn't work. I wasn't at all bothered about having the bed made, and there were plenty of clean towels, but no milk! They put only two milks in each room, with enough coffee for 8 cups, and because my room hadn't been cleaned at all the previous day I was fed up with black coffee.

K wanted to go to Red Robin, so somehow we ended up at Claim Jumper. This is, unsurprisingly, a chain of restaurants with a nineteenth-century mining theme: decor of plastic rocks and a huge elk head sticking out of the wall. The portions are huge too. K had a horrible sore throat and needed Tea. I thought, ok, live dangerously, sample Usian tea. Silly me. It came as a pot of tepid water and a teabag made out of some nylon gauze stuff. I asked for hot water, which worked better, but it was still fairly ghastly. Very good ice-cream sundae, though - billed as The World's Smallest Sundae and consequently an acceptable size.

Back at the hotel, I phoned for milk and promptly half an hour later a passing cleaner arrived, as I was leaving to join the team assembled for the Company Quiz. Most of us work from home, and even the team boss lives five hours' drive from the office and only goes there for emergencies, so there were introductions all round. The quiz was much fun, with a very broad set of stretching questions and nothing on popular tv. We had to guess a couple of mountain ranges and I still haven't found out what Nephology is.

Returned to the room to prepare for the evening, and found that the cleaner had left 2 extra milks :)

The party started with drinks dispensed by an extemely friendly barman who became even friendlier as the evening wore on, though he didn't appear to be sampling his wares. There were many people with whom to chat, and I ended up at a table with people from another part of the company. One of them offered to take me to see Seattle on Sunday, and another arranged to meet for lunch on Monday. Time planned now :) They told me not to visit the Science Fiction Museum and a few other tourist traps ("expensive and nothing much to see"), but apparently the Space Needle is a must for a visitor.

In the speeches section of dinner, $Big_Boss regretted that the offshore group from India weren't present, welcomed the other offshore group from Vancouver Island (that was a joke, in case you're not sure of the local geography), and was well chuffed to have people in from England and France (J and me).

Unfortunately there were mushrooms hidden in the sauce so I went upstairs to puke a little. Quickly recovered and back down to chat some more, and so to bed at about 1am.

Oh, and we won the quiz.