wealth gap

I love this vista of Kandy - poor slummish houses extending to government buildings, extending to rich mansions on the hill - Sri Lanka in a nutshell...

land of rice...

of many different kinds....

one of them in the Kandy market... the other on our way from Polonnaruwa, by the road side...

Universal Health Care

Sri Lanka has this - which means everyone gets treated (even if you are a foreigner, I saw a couple actually) and you even get basic medicine for free (!!!!!!) but there are looooong lines... But both my parents are teachers and Kandy is small enough that they know quite a few people... so we get to cut lines... Now, before you scream scandal, my teacher parents also got paid crap all their lives, so.... Imagine my surprise as I pulled out my wallet to pay for the pain killers and my brother said "what are you doing?"... it was free... I guess I had forgotten... or had never had to deal with this... Oh, don't now get me wrong, I was a sick kid, but I guess my parents took care of it all...

This was at the Peradeniya teaching hospital, where I went to remove my birth mark on my back... In summer when I wear tank tops and it is visible, my friends would say, "why don't you get it removed"... and I would ignore them... but this time my Mom said this... you know something is really ugly, when your Mom says so...

The other photo is from the boiling/disinfecting room for surgical apparatus... You might think it is primitive, but it really is very clean...

It was my first ever surgery in life... it would leave a scar that after 3 months is still very visible...

Children's Park

My dad used to take us here when we were kids... It was nice to go back to revive some memories... Of course it was now infested with lovers... But actually now that I think of it, this might not be the Children's park; this might be just the Wales Park (for a long time I used to think it was Wase Park... and that really doesn't sound good in Sinhalese - it sounds like the word for prostitute, so is a swear word - I personally don't think prostitution is bad, for the record!!)....

Anyway, for the nth time an entrance official questioned my nationality (they charge more from foreigners; which makes sense... even in North America non-residents have to pay more for tuition, yes?)... I showed her my stained finger from voting...

drummer

even presidential award wining drummers sometimes drop their stick... to which one of my disgruntled-with-SL-politics facebook friend commented, 'so why can't the president himself miss his step?"

Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic of Lord Buddha - Kandy, Sri Lanka

My GodMother

also my favourite aunt (which is not a feat so hard to achieve, I don't quite like my other aunts too much)... the woman who, when I was little took out this amazingly beautiful dress out and asked her own younger daughter "what do you think? shall we give it to her - she will return it to you once she outgrows it"... I didn't think of it much at that time, but as a grown up well aware of the "I-me-and-myself" mantra of the world that we call ours, I look back in amazement at this wonderful act of selflessness...

the woman who, as I made non-traditional changes to my life and began to live on my own, understood that such lifestyles are also so full of wonder... My parents didn't throw a fit at my divorce, my dad even wrote me saying "I am very proud of you for being able to make such a decision out of the norm", and my mom was very nice in her own way too... but up until this time I visited them, I never felt that my mom really ever came to peace with it... Long time before that this my aunt said "you are loving it living by your own... I can hear the freedom in your voice"...

For a woman, who lived all her married life under my uncle with control issues (I don't think he ever beat her, but I wouldn't put up with 1% of the crap that he gives her) she is amazingly open-minded... and progressive... Progressive... a trait I think many Sri Lankans lack... really lack...

rain in Kandy

Kandy is a town big on rain... I think of rain most times I think of Kandy... Here's what the town looked like (and still looks like) from my home when it rains. and the roof would leak, so we would run about putting buckets and an assortment of containers to collect the water... oh and when it rains in Kandy, it thunderstorms... so we would close up all the windows... unlike in Colombo where it rains veritcally down, Kandy rains at a 45 degree angle... And then we would huddle under the sheets... cos a lot of times the rain would be accompanied by power failures...

It still rained at 45 degress... But this time, there was no power failure... and the roof doesn't leak anymore... and we didn't huddle under the sheets...

Dogs...

So everyone looooves smokey, but Pulun is irritating... So of course my oh-poor-down-trodden self kicked in and I looooved Pulun.... and he and I got along very well... Of course it is easy to do this, when you are just a visitor, and don't have to put up with whatever for years at the end...

Months later, Pulun would be the reason my dad would call me up "he misses you... I think he still thinks of you", my dad would say... :)

my people

I am repeating my blog entry titles, ain't I?

Anyway, here's an assortment of Sri Lankan people... now before you go around making mental notes that this what all Sri Lankans look like, lemme say, this is only a subset...

During this trip I must say I re-discovered my people... For some reason, I used to think of Sri Lankan people as, well... let's just say, not the sort of people I'd like too much... But I had very pleasant experiences at the passport office, at the airport (albeit my camera was missing... but it could've been stolen in any number of places including NYC, and Doha...). Sri Lankans, can and will definitely think outside the box - a little bit of bending of the rules is not uncommon, if you look innocent enough... I know what you are thinking - who looks innocent? But to my own surprise one of the officials at the airport called up another and referred to me as an innocent girl and he was not intending pun!!!! But such flexibility of rules is also what makes corruption such a normal thing, coming to think of it... In the West, a rule is a rule - people will not and can not think outside the box and as a by product, there's also less corruption... But anyway, it wasn't just those two places, but everywhere I went I felt Sri Lankans were not as bad as I thought...

It reminds me-
*it is good to have low expectations
*upon my return from China I was raving about how nice the Chinese people are, to which my Chinese friend said, "yeah they are nice as long as you are tourist; if you try to get a job there, it's a different story"

home... I used to call it that

I went to SL with such trepidation this time... Someone in SL had expressed their desire to not see me... Until a few days before I left I thought I had lost a friendship in Montreal... And suddenly I had the feeling of being in the plane, in the sky, leaving a place where no one was waiting for me, to a place where no one was waiting for me... Only the great big sky, its clouds my home... I cried...

But, it turned out, I didn't lose the friendship in Montreal; we made up. And as I will decide on the day I come back from SL, it was one of the best vacations I have ever had - the person who was not looking forward to seeing me, eventually warmed up... and I left SL with a feeling I had always dreamed of... the daughter of two proud parents who thought the world of me, not only because I had gotten my PhD, not only because I had bought a condo, but also because I "brought life (in the form of noise, albeit) to their house", according to my Mom...

This picture, looking down the main road in Kandy, from the Kandy lake, filled with so many memories... of school days, tuition for AL's, friends, some boyfriends, some would-have-been-my-boyfriends... I know it sounds weird to say boyfriends in plural like that, but...

You're going to meet the most extraordinary men, the sexiest, brightest, funniest men, and you're going to fall in love with so many of them, and you won't know until the end of your life who your greatest friends were or your greatest love was.
- Harvey Milk, in Milk, 2008

We are what we are, because of the people we met, like I've always said... Thank you to just not my family and friends, but all those people who touched my life... Just going around that lake, taking pictures like that, in solitude, I couldn't help but think I have had a good life...

Voted...

in an election that was very peaceful for a change... but I am not sure of other methods that were used to rig the vote... The puppet UN panel, did declare it a fair election... yeah right...

Oh and they put this unwashable ink on your finger to prevent you from voting again... I guess it is done so now more out of tradition than to actually prevent vote rigging... Exactly 3 months later on June 8th, would I finally get rid of the whole ink stain from nail growth... Is that normal? Or do I have calcium deficiency?

This was my voting post...

transport in Sri Lanka

choices...

My brother... my longest lasting best friend yet... All these years later, we still enjoy each others' company... and he played such an instrumental role in making this trip such a fun place...

He took me to this cool down to earth restaurant, Pagoda in Colombo, for Lamprais... yum yum... but also it reminded me how SL is blessed with such natural beauty... and having 365 days of nice weather permits such beautiful outdoor patios... We have those in summer in Montreal, but really they don't even come close to the beauty of these in SL... And I thought again why I had left and continue to stay away from such a beautiful country... I guess we weigh in the pros and cons and chose where we want to live in... I love developed countries for they allow me to pursue my passion, physics... I love North America, because they are least prone to nationalism... I love Montreal for its ethnic vibrancy, for its open-mindedness, for their cosmopolitan but laid-backness, for their French Quebecois (who are really very different from French people from France) and their festivals... Adult life is all about making choices...

plane trouble

in a journey that was marred by many setbacks: delayed planes, stranded in airports, mechanical problems in planes... on my way to Sri Lanka...

In the second act of these incidents, in Doha, Qatar, our plane was delayed because of mechanical problems. We were put in the plane and then after waiting for about an hour were taken to another plane. While on the bus, I saw al these mechanics at work with our plane, so I snapped... a picture or two that is... and the security guards snapped back - you can not take any pictures of such things... because mechanical problems in planes is such an unusual thing, right? and to have detected one, is a shame on the airlines, right? To their credit, the west and the rest of the world, is not the most forgiving when these things happen in the middleeast...

breath freshners and condoms

in the Montreal International airport bathroom - the ladies one nevertheless.... it's best to take action than to be in denial...