Sinhalese Names, English and Bobbleheads

I have had the worst time trying to remember my Sri Lankan coworkers names, for that matter trying to pronounce their names has become a chore. It's not like Uruguay where everyone pretty much had a name that could matched up to your usual Bible names but here it's a different story.

To make matters that much more confusing for me is that I am coming from a place where letter pronunciation is different, "j's", "g's" all of that. I have to get all of that out of my head when I see a name and remember the "j's" are J's and the "g's" are G's etc.

The good thing about being here in Sri Lanka is that it was a former British colony and just about everyone speaks some level English. Now whether or not you will understand them or they you is a different story.

One more odd thing they do here is how they acknowledge something, they "wag" their head from side to side, it looks close to shaking their heads NO, but they're not. Think bobblehead. It can be a little confusing when you see it and think is this guy saying yes or no?

Holiday

Nice long 3 day weekend. I have most of the boxes emptied, most, not all. Have a handful of round-tuit projects to conquer.

The kitchen has been the real problem area. There's a good amount of cabinets, but they are either to high and they are very deep. Pretty much anything in the top cabinets are out of mind. For that matter anything I put in the back of cabinet is hard to reach. This will be a ongoing puzzle to solve.

I told my housekeeper Friday that she didn't have to come to work today and that I would still pay her. I forgot that it didn't necessarily mean that the guy across from me told her the same thing and chances are he didn't. I just figured it's my day off I didn't want her here cleaning and such. Well sure enough I see her in the foyer because she went to work to her other part time job at at the apartment across from me.

Less blogging more projects!

The TV Dilemna

I was on a mission to setup our 32" television and hook it up the the satellite cable here and see if I could view any channels. See our television purchaed in the U.S.A. is of the NTSC format and here in Sri Lanka the television and DVD format is PAL. I believe NTSC format is only for North America, well lets go to Wikipedia and find out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC (Korea, Taiwan and Japan as well)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL (Pretty much everywhere else!)

This is why we purchased a dual format (NTSC/PAL) DVD player, only to find out Uruguay had its own version of PAL (PAL-N).

Our entertainment center is not large enough to accommodate a 32" television so I had to sit it on top. I threaded a coax cable through the one of the back panels and down to the VCR (Where the satellite cable is connected). I thought this should be easy, unplug one cable and replace with another only to find out that even the PAL television cables were different:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_connectors (Look at first picture).

It might be a moot point anyway as I might not be able to view any channels. I know in Uruguay when we used DirectTV we were able to watch satellite channels and no local channels, was hoping for the same here.

My next mission is to see if I can buy a PAL to NTSC converter connector, we'll see!