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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hypersmurf" data-source="post: 1311028" data-attributes="member: 1656">Although when you're travelling internationally, it helps to know that you're likely to find something familiar.I was in St Petersburg in 1997 with the New Zealand Taekwon-Do Team.  Our hotel provided meals... but they were a/ not particularly appetising, and b/ not in great quantity.  We didn't want to compete hungry... but we didn't want to go around experimenting with local restaurants and risk getting sick just before the competition.When we discovered "'Carol's" (a McDonald's-style, American-looking burger chain) on Nevsky Prospekt, not too far from our hotel, it actually made quite a difference to team morale <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />In Buenos Aires in '99, we didn't have the same problem... we arrived a few days before most other teams, about a week prior to the start of competition, and found the official accommodation endorsed by the tournament organising committee.  And it was, frankly, a dump.We stayed there one night, and the next day our manager somehow talked a four-star hotel into a deal that worked out to, from memory, a total of $US100 more for two weeks' stay than we'd be paying at the officially-endorsed rats' nest.  With access to the hotel gymnasium, free internet access in the lobby, much nicer rooms, and the hotel let us use the ballroom during the day for training sessions.  And my god, the breakfasts... that morning we'd had a single medialuna (like a desscated croissant... blech!) and a pottle of orange juice provided at the rats' nest.  At the Presidente... well, I'm pretty sure we got more than our hundred dollars' worth just from two weeks of breakfasts!Our team manager was a horrible woman, and I loathe her still... but damn, she did a good deal that day!But we had quite a few meals on that trip from "Ugi's", a pizza place not far from our original accommodation.  They did one pizza - a large cheese, tomato, and basil.  Ordering was pretty simple, even for those of us who didn't speak any Spanish - there's only one thing on the menu, so just hold up the right number of fingers!  But they were good pizzas, and at $US2 for a large pizza, we could feed the whole team for about ten bucks...-Hyp.</blockquote>

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