Guests of Microsoft Research India stay at Urban Oasis.




We get air-conditioned double rooms (I share with Guy) with private bathrooms,






and the hotel provides bottled water, next-day laundry service, 24-hour security,

and breakfast.

The white things are idli and they're made from rice and de-husked black lentils. The thing that looks like a donut is the same batter as the idli, fried like a donut. The soup is sambar, a lentil-tomato, the juice is mango, and the coffee is sweet with milk. Sometimes there's chutney, but not today.

The staff knocked on our door the first few days to ask us if we wanted breakfast. There are other breakfast options, but we didn't know what to order (there's no printed menu), and the staff don't speak English, so we've been getting the default breakfast. Today we thought we might try ordering dosas, but they showed up with the default breakfast rather than coming once to take an order and returning with the food. It's pretty good. I especially like the soup, even though I wouldn't normally think of lentil soup for breakfast. What's really sweet is that MSRI has a buffet lunch every weekday. More on that another day.

I think they gave us the only key to our room that they have because if we want our room cleaned while we're at work, we have to leave the key at the front desk when we leave. They do a nice job of cleaning the room without messing up our stuff, and they take whatever laundry is in the bin and return it the next day. So far, no matter how I put my underwear in the bin, it always comes back inside out. So maybe Indian underwear is made with the tag on the outside. I don't know.

We have a TV in our room that gets a fair number of channels. About half the channels are in English and half are something else. Probably Hindi. Usually in the morning there's a cricket match, a Bollywood film, an entertainment news show, and a financial news show, among other things.

For some reason, the room reminds me of the room Martin Sheen is in at the beginning of Apocalypse Now, but that's just an aesthetic coincidence, not a knock against the hotel, which is quite nice.