Late Arrival in Colombo, Sri Lanka

DECEMBER 31, 2012

Better late than never.  Asia.  Sri Lanka.  Here I am.

I bet he makes $.10 per hour. Seriously.

The airport is a sprawling modern complex.  The second you leave it, you’re in a whole new world.  It was all fascinating to me, though I cannot say I ever felt overwhelmed.  To get the full experience, I hired a tuk tuk (three-wheeled little vehicle) to take me the 90 minutes into Colombo where I hoped I still had a room reserved. 

The chaos on the street was unlike any U.S. city.  Vehicles zipped in and out of lanes.  The air was thick with exhaust.  The road was lined with tumble down shacks.

After checking into my guest house, I headed out for food.  It doesn’t matter how many people you talk to or how hard you study the Culture Shock guide book, there’s just going to be some things that are a mystery to foreign travelers.  Like how to order food.  In proper Sri Lankan restaurants there is a guy next to the door taking orders, another guy off to the other side taking money, and then a couple other guys behind the glass case of food preparing everything.  In two days, I ate out three times and only once was successfully seated at a table.  The other two times I was given carry out. 

Once seated, the whole experience became a bigger mystery.  No menu.  Limited English (it’s an official language, though Singhalese is predominant and the English comes with such an accent it took me a week to pick up on it).  They brought me out a tray with rice in the middle and a couple curry-like things on the side.  Then another shoeless guy brings out dal (lentil stew) in a bucket that holds at least 3 gallons of the stuff.  The people seated at my table – oh, yeah! I was seated with other people who couldn’t get enough of the weird white guy -  served themselves from the dal bucket.  I did the same.  A couple times it left our table and went to another and came back again.  On top of all this food, a plate of 7 different baked and fried bread goods get set next to me.  No silverware.  I’m eating rice and curry with my bare hand.  In Europe I was told that you have to eat everything delivered to you or it is incredibly rude.  I have 3,000 calories in front of me.  There’s no way.  From watching around the room I gather that you take what you want from the bread plate and leave what you don’t want.  That helped.  After eating everyone gets up and washes their hand (hands?) at a sink in the back of the restaurant.  When you sit back down they hand you two small squares of newspaper to dry your hands.  I dig it.  Everything was spicy.  I survived the local dining experience and spent the equivalent of $1.20 on the huge meal.  Victory.