Flashback – this was 2010 and I somehow had found myself relocated to Hyderabad in India for 3 months. The city is known as Hi-Tech City because of all the Western Technology companies who had opened offices there.

While I was there Facebook moved in and Google opened an office next to the apartment block where I had been given a room for the first two weeks of my stay.

I spent time in my room, trying to stay cool, typing away into my ipod touch, random thoughts of books and ideas.

A couple of weeks ago I found that ipod in the bottom of a drawer and started to read those thoughts

I wasn’t even a foodie at this point, I liked eating and I liked food but the quest I found myself with was just to get something to eat and drink that didn’t make me ill. I had heard horror stories of bad stomachs that had lasted for days, one colleague had apparently had the trots so bad that he was hospitalised. I was just going to take this really easy.

Day 1

I must have been having a bad day, I recall being quite jet lagged and there was no food in the apartment and I had no rupees or knowledge of where to find them. I lay on the bed as I wrote the opening words of my electronic journal

                   How not to be a miserable grumpy traveller.
1. Be poor
2. Have very low expectations
3. Stay at home you miserable twat

Over the next couple of days I ate some pretty awful meals looking for something familiar to eat. I honestly don’t know why I didn’t just go for some sort of Curry.

I think that the main reason was that it wasn’t Indian food like you get in England.

I should have been more adventurous but initially those early days I was just looking for comfort.

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The next significant entry was entitled;

“Jackass dining /gambling on multicuisine”

“Number one so far is the spaghetti Bolognese in the Kasani GR bunnies restaurant. Ok so it did have spaghetti in it so that is probably worth 40 out of 100, but -10 for it being sticky, the sauce? Mmm now This  is where it gets interesting. As a guess on ingredients I never expected cinnamon, carrot? Well ok in some regions of Italy I can see that as a rustic component, mutton? yes ok, but gravy? and gravy that was pretty close to lumpy bisto and some non-descript spice mixture?

Did I eat it? Of course I can take a challenge, would I eat it again? Only to prove it is my number one worst meal thus far.

I was so tempted to get the chef a jar of dolmio from the supermarket and teach him how to stir it into some mince. but that was while being in grumpy mode. Now I salute him for his attempt to produce this dish, I mean he must have so many specialities honed through years of training in India’s finest traditional restaurants and here he is presented with a request for spag bol from the pasty faced Westerner in the dining room.

70/100 for a kick ass jackass dining experience!”