This is a photo from Africa. I got a young woman to help show me how to load the photo and voila, here's the Rhinos I saw. Has nothing to do with Sri Lanka but by time I got to Sri Lanka, my camera wasn't really working anymore. I have two photos from Sri Lanka and I'll try to upload them another time. I'm lazy, but I'm retired and I'm allowed to be lazy! So on with my blog...
Where am? At a hostel in Colombo, Sri Lanka
How am I? Wonderful. I get my visa tomorrow, and I’m back in India on Friday, 23rd August.
This has been a whirlwind trip. I can start by saying I didn’t like Colombo but from all the Guide Books I have looked at, all three of them, no one says great things about Colombo. It’s just where the airport is. I hooked up with a British woman the first night I got here, at the same hostel I’m at right now, and we went out together to see a Temple, had dinner two nights, and walked on the beach. I think I got a touch of too much sun when I went to the consulate and she was there to help me which was very nice. She walked to the local store and bought me what I needed. She’s a nurse who quit her job to travel for a year. She went to India and found it too hard to handle. She also didn’t dress Indian style and she is going to try an experiment I have been wanting to try. I had an Indian pants outfit that really needed to be altered because it was too long for me and I gave it to her. When she goes back to India, she is going to wear it and see if the men treat her differently. It will be interesting if it has any effect because she actually counted how many times men exposed themselves to her. She is younger than me, tall and blond and she was traveling in the north of India, not where I am. I felt sorry for her because she was really disturbed by it.
So I’m back at that hostel and no one is here, it’s very quiet. I like it because I just got back from a 6 hour bus ride which was exhausting. The hotel owner at the place I stayed at in Haputale last night recommended that I get off the bus headed to Colombo at Nugegoda and take a rickshaw ride from there to my hostel instead of going all the way to Colombo and taking a rickshaw from there. It saved me time and money but it was chancy because I had no idea where I was. But it all worked out fine. Tomorrow I will take a bus to the Consulate, hand my passport over before 10:00 a.m., and then go back to pick it up with the new Visa before 5:00 p.m.
This is where I stopped typing this entry so let me tell you what happened after that. I didn’t get out of the Visa Office until after 6:00 p.m. We were a captive audience, around 40 of us, waiting for our passports to show up that the Visa Office is separate from the consulate and the passports had still not been delivered from the Consulate. But we did get them and I made it back to India, no problem. I actually had a lovely day that I didn’t want to hang around the hostel so I found things to do in Colombo. I window shopped, went to the Tourism Office. I didn’t know there was one and I even asked the Srilankan Airlines and they didn’t know to tell me where it was. I walked by a hotel with a sign that said it was run by students and I stepped in because I wanted to see if they had a restaurant that I love going to places run by students. They didn’t have a restaurant but they knew where the Tourism Office was, right next door to their building. Then they told me where to go for vegetarian food and I had lunch. I tried to see a movie but there wasn’t any English language movies that I wanted to see. Then I went to a 5 Star Hotel for a cup of tea and it was time to go back for my passport. I truly hope I don’t have to go back to Sri Lanka again, kind of like Qatar. I had enough of it.
The only two highlights:
1. The Perahera Festival in Kandy that was amazing. I couldn’t believe I was experiencing this centuries old ritual with elephants dressed up with electric lights, and thousands of Sri Lankans in costumes, dancing and playing drums and twirling fire tipped batons and
2. Staying at a Buddhist Ashram that was silent. It was beautiful but three days was enough for me because it had no electricity. I’d like to try it again in the USA and see how it goes.
I'm actually back in India so let me post this and I will try to get up-to-date since you haven't heard from me in a while.
Love,
Marie
No comments:
Post a Comment