It's just a hut trip...

I love to spend winter weekends climbing a few thousand feet on tele skis to stay in a 10th Mountain division hut above treeline. The huts are quite rustic with outhouses, wood stoves, and no running water. Yet they feel extremely plush after a hard day's climb into the wilderness. It turns out that many of the "deprivations" of hut living feel quite luxurious in the context of a back county adventure. And so it goes for foreign travel. I got through many a night by saying, "Just think of it as a hut trip." When the heat became oppressive because the villagers closed in too tight during a focus group in Bangladesh, it was just a hut trip. When the hotel in Chennai, India had dirty sheets and hard mattresses, it was just a hut trip. When the hot water disappeared on Thursday morning, and was not back on by Monday night as promised in Almaty, Kazakhstan, it was just a hut trip. It seems that setting your expectations low leads to a might higher degree of satisfaction with those things that are going well.