A few months back I went to Sri Lanka to look at some potential locations for Rethink Retreats, my shiny new training company. Sri Lanka is wonderful and I really want to bring clients there – not only is it beautiful and well run, but it’s very like India… except, and forgive me for this India, Sri Lanka actually works. Things are clean and reasonably efficient, and you tend not to have to bribe people as a starting point. Plus the Sri Lankans are so super polite they make even the lndians seem a little brusque. And that takes some doing.
Anyway, I went for a long weekend over my birthday to Bentota to see a particularly posh hotel I’ve got my eye on. There’s a late flight from Bangalore and as it’s only an hour, we landed about 10pm. Then we drove the three hours down the coast – no traffic and the delights of such treats as working street lighting, tarmac and even, get this, traffic lights with the recommended number of lanes of traffic. You don’t get that in Bangalore I can tell you – six deep at every turning. And that’s outside of rush hour.
So, with all this, obviously it was pretty late by the time I checked in. The place was beautiful; lovely welcome, helpful staff and the room was stunning. The chap who was showing me around, began to extol its virtues – the two sinks, the huge bath, the enormous built in wardrobes with lots of freebies and extras. And that’s where we began to get unstuck. One of the things provided by the hotel was a local style lunghi instead of a dressing gown. That’s a tube of long material, like a sarong sewn along the short hem. They’d helpfully labelled them ‘his’ and ‘hers’ – and here my smiling guide was pointing at the ‘hers’ and saying ‘for internal use, madam’
Hmm, thinks I – I’m obviously missing something. That appears to be a lunghi, just what exactly is he expecting me to do with that? So we run backwards and forwards round the idea for a while – ‘internally?’ – ‘yes madam, only internally’, big beaming smile. Now do bear in mind that at this point it had been a very long day, I’d been up for what seemed forever and I’d only been in the country a few hours. So it took me a lot longer to get to the fact, you probably worked out some time ago… what this delightful man was trying to communicate to me was that this lunghi was only to be worn inside the hotel (internally to the compound) and not out into the wide world. No traipsing around the local area in their precious lunghi.
Considerably easier to comply with than what had been running through my head… that’s well over 2 metres of fabric after all…
Well it had been a very long day.
-:–:-
This post is one of my favourites – and is on the best of the blog page. Why not hop over and check out some more foolishness there?
Or go straight to the good stuff here:
You know you’ve acclimatised when…
And please do add your own tales of hotel confusion in the comments below. I love to know I’m not alone…
Facebook
Twitter
Share
Great article! Will take note of that so when I got the chance to visit Sri Lanka and encountered such words then I will not be surprised or confused.(laugh)
But seriously, the way the man use the word internally did not sink in to my mind immediately!
Nor me… I was most confused and very dark and unpleasant images ran through my head…
Well, you did mention you had a very long day, so you got a bit of a good excuse there.
Honestly, though, I don’t think “internal” does not sound so wrong in this case. I always thought this word has a ring of “official” in it, so associating with something that was on your mind never occurred to me. Well, what was in your mind, anyway? Hehe
By the way, where else in the world do you find those kind of traffic lights you mentioned? I certainly have only heard of such kind in here.
Hey there – do you mean traffic lights where people obey the traffic rules? Or ones where it’s just a free-for-all, like in India?
And internal in standard English would always mean internal to the body. Except in the use of internal to the institution in terms of ‘internal mail’ or ‘internal meeting’. I can see how they were trying to use the second internal use for wearing a sarong… but it just didn’t translate…
I meant this bit:
“no traffic and the delights of such treats as working street lighting, tarmac and even, get this, traffic lights with the recommended number of lanes of traffic”
Or did I misunderstand that part now? :/
And well, you can try visit them again on another time — only you are in much much better condition (you know, not from a “very long day”) — and see if it will have the same effect. They’ll probably going to say the same for sarong. Although how exactly you’re going to make yourself feel like you’ve never heard them say it before, I’m not sure.
I guess I’m still not quite following you. I’m talking about traffic lights that have, say, three lanes of traffic drawn on the road – and in Sri Lanka, there will only be three lanes of traffic as a result of that. In India you’ll have maybe 6 lanes of traffic – everyone ignores the lane markings. And indeed often which side of hte road to drive on. Sometimes it canbe a right free for all…
Oh, my. I’m quite happy I’m not working in the traffic department (I might caused multiple traffic problems by now) because I honestly did not follow that either. :/
Well, we can just both agree Sri Lanka just has a really good traffic system, whatever the reason may be. There. ^^,
Quite!
I’ll try and explain it one more time. If there are two lanes of traffic on a road. at a traffic light there will be two lanes marked on the road – so four across the whole road. One for straight ahead in each direction and one for turning. Four cars waiting abreast of each other at the most. yes?
However in India (and to be honest in most of Africa too), you will see many more cars than that. Not obeying the marking on road, and cramming up against each other so there are perhaps four on one side and three on the other (so seven cars rahter than a maximum of four). And everyone’s trying to cut the corner, over take or push in ahead of each other.
does that make more sense?
Yes, it does.
It’s a pity, too, because I didn’t have to imagine that scene — I have seen it in person a LOT of times, for reasons I bet you can surmise very easily.
Comes to mind all those tedious rush hour trips I had to go through back in college — crazy traffic. :<
Howdy. I truly required to actually place a short commentary and also inform you grasp that I’ve been following your personal website for quite some time. Keep up the very remarkable efforts and I am going to be looking again much more quickly.
Thanks for sharing, it truly is a really informative publish and very helpful for some kind of businesses like mine. I like when I’m looking the world wide web and i come across a site with valuable points like this. Thanks lots for the research, We’ve noted a number of them here so I can use them in a future. Kudos for you and keep up the good blogging perform.
Interesting – you obviously have no idea what I’m on about… a link building exercise low cholesterol recipes? Yes I think so!
Touchdown! That’s a really cool way of putntig it!
Only internally… it just sounds so, so, wrong. Still, enjoy those fluffy slippers. And lets hope we end up in Sri Lanka training people soon!
If you wrote an article about life we’d all reach eniglthenment.
Looks fab,great scouting – word of warning, don’t read those medication labels after a long flight………………… I shall be taking my fluffy slippers only internally this Christmas
This is a test comment – as they were switched off for a while. But they’re back now…
How do we look?