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...