October’s Funniest Thing

Tell ITN about the funniest thing that ever happened to you while traveling in a foreign country. There are no restrictions on length. (ITN prints no info on destinations in the U.S., Canada, Mexico or the Caribbean.) The ITN staff will choose each month’s winner, who will receive a free one-year subscription to ITN. Entries not chosen cannot be acknowledged.

This month’s winner is MURIEL SALOVON of Pepper Pike, OH:

We were at Lake Como, Italy, in July ’04 and it was very hot and sunny. The first thing my husband tried to do when we entered our hotel room was close the drapes, as the sun was shining through the room.

He tried to pull them together, but they didn’t move. He looked on both sides for a drawstring, but there wasn’t one. He then got on a chair and tried to manually close them from the curtain rod. Hooks came out of the rod, and the tops of the pleats were just hanging. He couldn’t get the hooks back into the rod, so we had to call the desk and tell them our problem. They said they would send a maintenance man up to fix the drapes.

Soon there was a man at our door with a ladder. He saw the problem, got on the ladder, put the hooks in the drapes and connected them to the rod. We thanked him, but before he left he showed us a button on the nightstand that opened and closed the drapes.