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.