- On Heat and Bedding
- March 28, 2010 Filed under: Travel, Trivia
I enjoy Sri Lanka immensely. The beaches, the mountains, the wildlife and birds, the smiles that come from everywhere. Still, I have a couple of complaints. Forgive me or the rant, but are you listening?
The country is effing hot. The heat and humidity never end. I think Southeast Asian cultures eat a lot of chilies simply to make sweating more efficient. I’m sweating constantly. Every day I seem women wearing black burkas walking around under the noon sun and wonder how they don’t consider their religious clothing requirement torture.
I used to say places like Florida and Hawaii were so humid that one has to take a bath five minutes after getting out of the shower. In Sri Lanka, one has to take another shower WHILE IN the shower.
Ceiling fans, which are common here, provide some relief from the mozzies and the heat. But from room to room, I find there are two settings–slow and prepare for take-off. The latter speed provides some relief from the heat but the mechanism holding the fan to the ceiling–a small metal rod with a base and a couple of screws directly above the bed–is precarious to say the least. It jostles and shakes and looks so flimsy it’s hard to sleep for fear the thing will lose its hold and, well, you get the picture.
This leads me to my second complaint. The whole of Sri Lanka needs to discover mattresses. No matter where one goes, often even to the best hotels, mattresses comprise little more than a five- or six-inch thick “pad” stuffed with, I don’t know, something hard. Marbles maybe. Wing nuts. I imagine there’s a great opportunity for a mattress revolution here. I suppose I can add that to the list of other conflicts.
I most certainly am craving my own mattress. A little California weather. A meal that does NOT include either rice OR curry. Some relief from the heat for chrissakes! Sri Lanka, I love you, but as an outsider sometimes you can be a grind!
Image : Aníbal Pees
