Colombo bomb blast Al Jazeera news report 6 June 2008

Monsoon-scape

The monsoon season has started, and has spilled its theatrics across the landscape of our lives.

It has been bucketing down pretty much non-stop for at least 5 days. Floods have killed 3 people around the country already and many homes are flooded and have even been washed away. 100,000 people are displaced! It is the heaviest rain I think I have ever seen, sometimes falling in what appears to be a solid air-shaped chunk rather than in individual droplets.

Thunder and lightning is choreographed across the sky. Sometimes the thunder rolls ontop of thunder, ontop of thunder. Rolling like waves of heavy swelling sound, blanketing the city in bass and rumbling hair, stomach, bones and toes. The lightning, flashes of sharp white against the backdrop of dark grey clouds, momentarily reminds you of the sun you used to know, and then disappears. Peripheral zaps leave static tingles and metallic tastes.

Umbrella-less Sri Lankan men walk through the rain with hankerchieves or plastic bags perfectly covering their scalp, so as not to get a single strand of hair wet, despite their face and clothing being soaked through.

Tuk tuk drivers convince themselves that the inconvenience of driving in the rain warrants a 30% increase in the price for any journey and argue vehemently against any protest.

The bird bath on our balcony is still frequently occupied by pairs of Wag-tails, Sparrows, Houseswifts, Indian Minors and Areoles, ignoring the fact that they are already soaked through and studiously carry on business as usual. Skwarking mobs of crows patrol the now emptier skies, congregating on power lines and amassing upon rooftops as flocks of smaller birds huddle on mango tree branches, out of sight.

And so I hibernate, dreaming of the butternut sunny skies, cocoa skin and refreshing swims in turquiose seas.

Peace xx

All sorts

This pretty postcard shot is of traditional Sri Lankan fishing boats in Negombo Harbour (about 1 hour north of Colombo on the coast)

One close up..

Beautiful Negombo Beach and Jase doing his Jet Star ad..

Jase chatting with a local guy about fishing..

We witnessed a traditional Sri Lankan drumming ritual in a little town called Wadduwa about 40 mins south of Colombo on the coast. The ritual went all night! It hadn't been held since the 1960s, until now, when Jim (second from the right- a PhD student studying traditional drumming of the central South region of Sri Lanka), organised a grant which allowed the ritual to be performed for the first time in 40 years.

Obviously, this guy is the elder and he was amazingly good. He is still pretty energetic for a guy in his 80s!


The ritual was held on the grounds of a Buddhist temple in the heart of the Sri Lankan jungle..

It was a very mythical setting.

And here are some streetscapes from around Colombo:

Here is our local holy cow, who thinks he is a Pizza hut delivery bike (photo taken at the end of our street).. This crazy cow is in there often. We can't figure out why!

This is the local fish man. He walks down our street every morning shouting "MALU! MALU!" (Malu obviously mean fish). Here he is chatting with our next door neighbour with a nice big hunk of Seer fish..

Our girls, Ranjana and Sunanda..

A typical streetscape in Colombo - policeman with AK47 and a street dog asleep on the side of the road. They are pretty daring with where they fall asleep. We call them Colombo's dead dogs - they will sleep in the middle of a busy road, cars zooming around them, with no qualms at all..

Colombo has been getting some pretty gnarly storms lately. This is the view from our balcony looking northwest.

I love this photo. I pass this newstand everyday. Its so Sri Lankan.. News you COULD trust. not News you CAN trust. Its like the slogan shold read "News you could trust ...But..."

December

Colombo lately has been winding down to the end of the year, and its been a mixed bag of emotions.

Work is slow, the weather is getting hotter, the cicadas have started humming, mangoes are back in season. Yipee! But then also a lot of friends have finished their work contracts here and are returning home or continuing their travels.. : (

At least there have been a lot of changes in our lives to distract us from this - my job is coming to an end at the end of December so have been going for job interviews, and Jason has started a new position as General Manager of Eco Fisheries in Negombo. We had to move out of our apartment for a month (because the owners came back for Christmas) so are now temporarily living in a great apartment around the corner from our old house, with another friend, Otto just until we leave to go home to Australia for Christmas. Packing, cleaning, cleaning, unpacking. It has been a welcome distraction.

Many of our Australian friends have already left to go back home or onto other travelling adventures. So we have been really quite miserable with so many friends leaving, even though there have been many farewell parties:

Apart from parties, the weather is not the only thing that has been hotting up here. In the last few days of November, there were 2 bombs in Colombo on the same day, and many more undetonated ones found around the city on buses, on the footpath, etc. It was really scary.

The first was targeting the Minister for Social Services. At 9am, a woman walked into the Ministry building (it was "Meet the Public Day") and blew herself up when she got to the counter, killing the Minister's Public Relations Aide, and injuring many more.

At 5pm, peak hour traffic, a person walked into the No Limits department store, full of people, and blew themself up, killing 19 people and injuring scores more.

Both bomb blasts were within 3km radius of my house, I heard the sirens. The bomb set the street dogs barking, and they didn't stop for hours. The wailing of the sirens, the dogs, the blanket of low humid cloud, it was very eerie.

Its sort of weird how accustomed you get to this sort of thing. I wouldn't say de-sensitised, because everytime it happens it is still terrifying, but life doesn't stop because of it. You get up the next day, walk down to get a 3-wheeler, go to work, go shopping in the supermarket, go about your business. What else can you do?

Its a crazy world.

Peace xx

Out and about in Colombo - August 2007

This is the view from our balcony at sunset.. Suprisingly its an abandoned building, but its so lovely from the outside (from afar)..

This is a scene along the side of the road, fruit sellers selling fruit. This scene goes along for at least 1 km. They are selling rambutans (the red ones, are the cousin of the lychee), durians (the big green ones, taste sweet but smell like a rotting corpse), and mangotsteens (the browny-purple ones, that taste like a cross between a strawberry and a mandarin, lush)..

These are brass things that at the beginning of conferences, meetings, etc, they decorate the structure with frangipani 'leis' and fill the little dishes with oil and set them alight. Its mean to be symbolic for lighting the awareness in your mind and promote pure thought..

This is also symbolic, with the war here and all.. (See below to the last picture for context)

This is around the corner from our house. We live in a tri-religious area - muslim mosques, a christian sect church, a buddist temple and a hindu temple, all within the same 2 blocks. So this what we call "Hindi Lane" and this is the entrance to it. There is a massive Hindi festival on this week and this thing lights up at night. Its pretty cool..

This guy is the coolest tuk tuk driver in Colombo. He is so old and so sweet you feel bad if you barter with him for the fare, so you just don't. He's gotta be pushing 90, and he drives the most pimpin' ride in the country. Check out his watch and the hanging hawaiian chick hanging over the dash.. Sweeeeet!

This is on the roundabout at the end of our street. Its designated Buddist land because the tree that you can see is a Bo tree. Buddha sat under a Bo tree for 6 years before he became enlightened, so now anywhere that a Bo tree is found becomes designated Buddhist land. Even if you own a house, if a Bo tree starts growing on the land, the Buddhist monks will reclaim it and there is nothing you can do and you are forced to move out.. no compensation, nothing, it just automatically becomes religious land and you are not allowed to live on it. So this roundabout has a Bo tree growing on it, but because its in the tri-religious area, there are Hindu holy cows that sleep underneath. Its kinda cool.

So the following is the prize photo - notice the guy with the AK47 in the back. This photo is taken literally at the end of my street. These army guys holding massive guns are all over Colombo (some of them look like they are 16 years old, and probably are), they are all over Sri Lanka, and if they see you taking a photo they will come and delete your memory card. I didn't even know he was in the shot when I took it, but notice him staring me down in the background. Eeek!..

Peace xx

Humidity and Propaganda

Today is a Thursday.

Time keeps tread-milling along here. Get up, shower, get dressed, drink a coffee, get a tuk tuk to work, sit at my desk for 8 hours, work out at the gym, come home, make dinner, shower, watch a DVD and sleep. Again and again and again. Jason picks me up everyday in The Red Baron. The security guards at my office refer to it at "your Cadillac" - even the local tuk tuk drivers wave now when they see it:

We have the occasional night out to dinner or whatever, but the days sort of melt into eachother and before you know it - it's the 5th of July!! Don't get me wrong, we are ecstatically happy and totally enjoying our time here. Its just that the days are slipping by and I can't believe its already July!!

I think the fact that the weather stays pretty much hot (30-35 degrees) and bloody humid, day in day out, its harder to distinguish the passing months. Its not like home where you have a change in seasons. Here, its either really hot and humid or really hot, raining, and humid. All the time.

Jason had an awesome mozzie net made up, and constructed the frame for it all by himself. Its awesome!!

On a sombre note, today is the anniversary of the major riot in colombo in 1983 that brought the civil war here to a head. The Sri Lankans call it "Black July", and we were all anticipating some kind of bomb or air raid or something happening in Colombo today. Luckily none of that happened, and the day sort of slipped past. Something probably happened in the north of the country though. it seems that attacks on various towns like Vavuinya, Trincomalee or Muttur, happen on a daily basis these days. The government claims that it has killed X amount of Tamil Tigers, and the Tamil Tigers totally deny that an attack even occurred. So you never really know what is truth and what is propaganda.

The tamil population has its own website called Tamilnet (http://www.tamilnet.com/) which provides counter-news to the Sri Lankan Government news portal (http://www.news.lk/). Apparently Tamilnet was temporarily disabled today. No one knows why, but its pretty obvious. No one really discusses it, not in the office or at home or amongst the neighbours. It just happens and nothing is mentioned.

I guess propaganda is not worth discussing after a while anyway, its kinda like talking about the weather..