Fond Farewells......?

So we have finally left Sri Lanka! I think leaving was almost as draining as arriving. I was weeping tears of frustration on many occasions, not to mention wailing and gnashing my teeth........

On our final Saturday I spent 6 1/2 hrs in Colombo mainly waiting, for all the things I had been promised would be ready, but in fact, despite giving a month’s notice in most cases, they got left till the last few days. Out of the 6 1/2 hrs, 4 ½ were spent just waiting (I had nothing better to do than tot it up as I trailed disconsolately round the city) At the tailor’s I arrived a day later than I said I would, but still sat, refusing to move for 1 1/4 hrs whilst, most of my daughter’s fancy dress outfit was sewn together in front of me, and the bit which had been finished, unpicked because, despite taking measurements, it was completely the wrong size. So actually it was good I was there with my daughter and they could give her a ‘fitting’.

I always knew Sri Lanka would have the last laugh. And that wasn’t just with the dengue. There I was thinking I was being organized checking how much notice I needed to give to fill in the inevitable paperwork, hand in my sim card in order to reclaim my $100 deposit, return our water dispenser in order to reclaim a $75 dollar deposit, (20 phone calls, and about as many promises before we gave up counting) close our bank account, collect photos, have some clothes made at a tailor’s etc; but somehow the information I was given kept changing, usually when it involved having a deposit returned. Returns, exchanges, refunds are entirely alien concepts in Sri Lanka, in our experience. In the end, getting our cash deposit back for my phone defeated us, so we gave all the paper work to our house helper, put it all in her name, and she kept badgering them. She finally got it a month later. A real coup I thought. Bu then you don’t mess with Maheswary, our ‘house’ rats knew that to their cost, and this guy at Dialog seemed to share the same DNA as them……

Then our packers mutinied. The estimate for our shipment had been 9 cubic metres, I think. It turned out to be wrong. The packers packed and stacked all our boxes on top of each other to ‘measure’ them and downed tools, saying they had done their allotted metreage. After some hard negotiating, lots of sweet tea, and profuse apologies, amidst insistence that all our stuff WAS coming with us, so it had to be packed, we finally managed to get them to pack up the last ‘3 metres’, and waved them off with a generous tip for each of them. I prefer to call it a tip, not a bribe, as it was given at this point not at the point when they downed tools………

For some reason this always happened to us when we move, movers underestimate our stuff. Don’t know why, I really don’t hide it…..