Saturday evening was the mini fair of the Ladies College of Colombo. Since my two kids are students of LC I had no choice but to be their chauffer on a fine Saturday evening which I would rather have spent chilling out at home watching a nice movie. Well but at least it did lead to an interesting post.
Now one would expect that when there is a mini fair you could walk up to the entrance and purchase the entrance tickets without much hassle. Well that’s where you would be wrong. In this particular case you could NOT buy the tickets at the entrance. It was presold! Why would you go to such great lengths to pre-sell tickets would be the obvious question begging to be asked. Well it seems that they wanted to keep the riff raff out. Trust me obtaining the tickets were no easy task. The children had to buy the tickets from their class teacher. The parents had to buy tickets from the school office. Now if you were a non working parent with a driver then this would be an easy task. But if you were not it would create a logistical night mare which would mean making a special trip to the school purely to purchase tickets.
Now I must stress that I am not critical of the steps taken by the school admin. In fact I think it is a good thing that they try to limit entry. As you know a carnival of a girls school seems to attract hordes of boys of all shapes and sizes like flies to shit. And some of them are quite unsavory characters. And it becomes kind of crazy when you have little kids around them.
Anyway what is quite intriguing is there was a specific instance which led to these systems being put into place. And it does make for some interesting reading. This happened last year at the same event.
Apparently the principle has been at the gate making sure everything was going smoothly when she heard a young boy near her talking over the phone. He was telling the person on the other end that he had come to a really nice place and it was pure heaven and that the listener should come and join him at the event as well and then he turns around and asks the principal “akke mehe koheda?” (sis where is this place)
I could not help but laugh my fat butt off when I heard this. Anyway as they say the best laid plans of mice and men sometimes go astray. And even with all the restrictions there were enough and more of what you would call unwanted people. Anyway there were hundreds more outside clamoring to get in and some quite tubby parents guarding the gates pretending to be bouncers and trying to look menacing.
Boy it was packed. I heard over 4000 tickets had been sold and that was everything which was printed. And they had to issue a few more hand written tickets because they could not refuse some of the parents who had walked in.
The youngsters were having fun and it was fun to see the fair morph into an impromptu discotheque. Actually the music was excellent and it was wonderful to see all the hands going up and bodies in motion raising their arms in the air and bodies gyrating to the beat of the music. Except for the smell. Boy it seems most teenagers today have no real understanding of personal hygiene. And I don’t mean only boys. There were many girls who were dressed very prettily and smartly but emanating very strong body odor.
He he guess it was the odor of the day!
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