mini-vacation

The lack of recent updates has been due to my recent travels in Lanka and India. Mom and Dad came last week and we embarked on Sri Lankan taster trip. The trip was very short and one needs much more time to see Sri Lanka but we had fun.

When they arrived at 6am from Bombay I was waiting at the airport with the car and driver, Mr. Sarat. We then proceeded to drive to Kandy on the Colombo-Kandy road where we stopped to see the elephants at the Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage. There had just been lots of babies and it was very adorable to see them get fed and try to swim. The elephants were out in an open field and we could walk right up to them. It was quite different from the DC zoo where the elephants are far away and separated by cement walls and a moat.

We napped in the car as Sarat drove us to Villa Rosa, our hotel in Kandy where we relaxed a bit and had tea. The villa had an amazing view of the Mahavehli River, and its remote location was worth the breathtaking view which reminded me of the Amazon. We then got back in the car and went to explore the city. In Kandy we drove to various lookout points to better see the “Switzerland of the East” as the city is sometimes called. Mom kept referring to the place as a “quaint town” which is funny considering it’s the second largest city in Sri Lanka.

We then proceeded to watch a Kandyan Dance performance, saw the famous temple of the tooth, and enjoyed a candlelight dinner at the villa. The next morning my parents woke me up freakishly early as always and we headed off on the long, long drive to Bentota. We left Kandy at 10am and made a quick stop at the national botanical gardens along the way. We then drove straight to Bentota and the trip ended up being around 6 hours.

We were so tired once we got to Bentota we had energy only for a quick walk on the beach before dinner. We then left the Taj and went to a little hotel café where we tasted the best prawns curry I have ever had. The next morning we got up early again and went to Galle for the morning. We walked around the fort and marveled at the clearness of the ocean. We then went back to Bentota with a quick stop at a sea turtle sanctuary where we got to touch baby sea turtles. Two different kinds of baby animals in one trip! The weather was unpleasant so we went out for lobster dinner, saw another dance performance and went to bed.

The next day we got lucky and the sun came out so we stayed in the Taj longer and swam in the ocean until 2. We then headed to Colombo for a little shopping in Odel and had my awesome birthday dinner at gallery cafe. My parents stayed in my guesthouse, forgoing the luxury of the past three days for a night in my humble, mosquito-ridden home.

The next day went in hectic Colombo errands. We went to the madhouse that is House of Fashions, a giant clearinghouse for surplus Western garments. Name brand shirts at HoF cost something like $2 usd per shirt. Pants for $3. The crowds were ridiculous as it is close to Christmas but we emerged triumphant with bagfuls of clothing. We then stopped at the mall, the supermarket, my office, and the Paradise Road store before staggering home. Finally we moved my stuff from the mildew room I was living in, into a much smaller, less mildew ridden room in the same guesthouse. The rest of my birthday was spent sharing some wine with dad and getting on the flight to Bombay!

the gunya

I have been out the last five days with the infamous chikungunya disease. Most of you probably haven’t heard of it but its currently an epidemic in South India and Sri Lanka. Like Malaria, it all starts with a simple mosquito bite. In a few hours you start to feel muscle pains, usually in your back. Then comes a pounding headache, a sense of fatigue, and dizziness. So, you innocently go to sleep thinking that everything will be fine in the morning and then BAM, you have a 102 degree fever, you can’t walk and all of your muscles are frozen in crippling pain. The good news is that it isn’t fatal and that it usually runs its course in 5-7 days. I got lucky and it only took 3 days of suffering and two days of feeling so-so. Last night was my first c-gunya-free night and it was fantastic.

While afflicted one of my aunties (family friends) took pity on me and had me stay at her place for a night so I could recover. I felt bad because all I really had the strength to do was sleep and eat. I went to sleep in her spare room under the auspices of some sleeping pills and was happily passed out when I heard a noise in the room. Who do I see but the faces of two Sri Lankan army officers peering down on me. This just goes to show what a bad state this country is in. Because of the terrorists and the stupid war, the cops can actually come into your house, into your bedroom, and make sure you are doing what you are supposed to be doing. If the Fairfax county police ever came into my bedroom and were watching me sleep I think that would make some kind of national news. Anyways, these police just took pity on a poor feverish girl and left without demanding ID.

On Sunday I was feeling a bit better so I decided that the perfect thing to do after I had been sick for a while was to go to a carnival. Sri Lankan carnivals are just as weird and awesome as carnivals everywhere. The blasting Hindi music, the cheap ice cream, what could be better? To top it off there was a haunted house called “Terror House” which was one of those very weird structures where many rooms of a building are turned into various scary rooms staffed by people in monster masks. These people wait for people like me to walk by and then they jump out and wave their hands in front of them and say “ooga booga” or something to that extent. Then, people like me, because we are generally afraid of all moving things (and some stationary ones too) run around screaming. Good times.

expats

I am starting to see many Bombay-Colombo parallels. I've only been here a month but I already run into people when I go out. It seems that like Bombay, there are a handful of people who frequent the same restaurants and nightclubs. Just as before I could be confident that a trip to Indigo Deli would mean running into someone I know, here I am certain that any Friday night out, the same few hundred people are going to be a club and that the same crowd will be at Cricket Club or Inn on the Green for drinks beforehand. Its like a tiny amount of Bombay drama, right here in Sri Lanka.

I also don't quite know how to handle the Sri Lankan friendliness. Or, because I don't speak the language, I can't tell the friendliness from pick-up lines. In Bombay I don't think I would ever say hello to a random guy on the street unless he was under the age of 10 or over the age of 70. For that matter, I try to avoid talking to men in DC as well. Sri Lanka is weird though because I think people are actually friendly and the natural formation of a face is a smile. I'm also not so ignorant as to not know pick-up lines, in what ever language. So sometimes I can tell but the majority of the time I have to err on the side of being the rude girl who is just going to ignore someone to their face. I wouldn't want to let the Sri Lankans make me into a friendly person.

The expat community here is very different. Sri Lanka seems to attract married white people in their late 30s, sometimes with kids. India attracts backpackers. I kind of miss going to the beach in Goa and seeing stoned Israelis wandering about and playing frisbee. There is nothing like travelling through Rajasthan and meeting the yogis, druggies, and adventure seekers that the West deposits on India. India is tough. The people who come to India know that India is tough and they embrace it. You embrace that fact every time you do something like shove your body into a packed suburban train car or drink a sugarcane juice off the road. You throw caution to the wind and you know that if you were back home that what you are doing now would be so unthinkable and that thought alone pumps your body with enough adrenaline to go through with it. Bombay especially makes people a little rough around the edges. When people mess with me now, I almost want them to argue with me. Once you have lived in Bombay long enough you get that crazy kind of look in your eye that makes it so you ignore trash filled streets but the min someone tries to cheat you out of even one rupee, you jump all over them.

Sri Lanka is soft. It lacks the grittiness of India so rather than the culturally curious, spirit-seeking partiers that India draws, Sri Lanka gets those people twenty years later. Once they are married, have kids and have grown soft, that's when people come to Sri Lanka. I agree; its a nice place to live. Its almost a third-world version of Alexandria, VA. The standard of living is higher, people tend to be more inward and less confrontational, and its hardly ever crowded. People from here tell me that they can't ever imagine living in India and I believe them. It would be total craziness.

checkpoints

One of the most annoying things about this ongoing war in Sri Lanka is the innumerable checkpoints all over the city. Everywhere you go there are checkpoints where cars are randomly searched for weapons, or, more commonly, people are searched for ID. As a non-Sri Lankan, things are very frustrating as I constantly have to carry around my passport and show it to guards who then ask me tons of questions about who I am and where I came from. These checkpoints also make traveling anywhere very inconvenient and going for a simple drive can mean being stopped 3 times and asked the same things. I wonder if there isn’t a better system of doing this than simply checking every single car driving by. I hate that we live in a world where terrorism has become so commonplace.

The terrorists already won the war against moisture because thanks to them people can’t carry chapstick or moisturizer on planes. Now they have to go and win the war on Alisha eating ice cream at night. Wherever they are, I hope they are happy in making everyone’s lives extremely inconvenient.

settling in

I have finally fallen into a routine here. I have a few reliable friends who I can call up whenever I get too lonely or if I want to explore the city, and I have figured out a few places I like going to for food, coffee, and atmosphere. My job is working out well although the system of negotiating for a rickshaw still annoys me and I try to take the bus whenever I can.

I’m actually surprised at how interesting ICT is. There is great potential in modernizing a group of people or a country using ICT. However, it’s also somewhat of a neutral force. Unless it’s explicitly used to empower people, technology is only going to reinforce the status quo. A good example of this is internet kiosks. When internet kiosks were initially being introduced they were privatized so that local entrepreneurs were helped somewhat by the government but ultimately owned their kiosk. This put the internet into the hands of many. Unfortunately, this excluded women. Women lacked the start up capital to become kiosk owners and the ICT knowledge to be internet users. For real societal change to take place women need to be taken along and the same strategies can’t be applied across economic groups or genders.

Interestingly enough when the kiosks were un-privatized, many of them were placed in or near religious places of worship like temples. This caused additional problems as people who go to places of worship are predominately men. Young women rarely go alone. The kiosks are sometimes placed in areas such as the monks’ quarters where women are outright prohibited from going.

It’s interesting for me to work in ICT because of these kinds of issues. Working for women’s organizations is a bit easier because everything the organization does is devoted to feminism. Here these problems are not primary but are still very important to the goals of the organization and the project.

Books I’ve read in the past two weeks: “The Human Stain” by Philip Roth, “Zorro” by Isabel Allende, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” by Dave Eggers, “Lucy” by Jamaica Kinkaid, and “Colpetty People” by Ashok Ferrey

I experienced my first Sri Lankan bomb blast on Friday when a suicide bomber targeted the Defense Secretary (I think). Some of his guards were wounded by nobody else. It happened close to my house but so far nobody seems to be alarmed. I suppose this is a common experience here. I am somewhat used to bomb blasts after September 11th and Mumbai, its going to take a lot more to freak me out.