Yesterday morning was supposed to be my first halfway decent night of sleep in about a week. So I was a bit groggy when the clerk at the hotel knocked on my door at 7 AM. He told me that someone was here for me. Seeing as only one person here knows that I'm in town, the clerk ruled him out as my visitor when the clerk told me that it was a girl. I was too groggy to explain that it must be a mistake.
I made my way toward the desk and saw a white girl in the parking lot. I was pretty sure I knew where this was going. I'm the only white person at the hotel, so when they couldn't understand what she was saying, they just assumed that she was looking for me.
The girl was explaining to the clerk that he had found the wrong person. But the clerk didn't actually speak English. So she tried to help him by speaking more slowly, raising her voice and waving her arms like a crazy person. You might find this hard to believe, but it didn't help the clerk to understand them.
I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and started translating. Apparently, the girl and her husband had asked the clerk on duty the previous night about buses to a place called Chitemba and he told them that his brother was a driver and now this morning, they couldn't find their bus. They were trying to find the night clerk, but he was already gone. Not much any of us could do to help them.
I knew that I couldn't do much about their rudeness, but the simple fact of the matter is that most of the time when I meet Tanzanians, they associate me with people like those tourists. I just wish tourists didn't cultivate such a negative impression foreigners.
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1 comment:
They are hard to like...
Non English speaking tourists in the US - tend to stick with tour guides. Most tourist do this here as well. . Which means they have money.
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