We're up,

and the suspense of how the crab trap fared is killing us. How many can fit in there? how many can we possibly eat? It's our last day at the house; we'll be heading up to Colombo to the boys' new apartment tonight, so this is our only chance to take plunder of the lagoon.

The trap is marked with a piece of styrofoam bobbing 200 meters out. The night before we had seen the evening's fishermen in long, skinny boats near our buoy, waving burning palm fronds to dazzle their catch. I wonder if there's a fisherman's code where you don't mess with other people's lines and traps.

We zip out and haul up our trap. and...And...AND..... No crabs. Flopping insultingly inside though, is the ugliest fish I have ever seen. It is some obese pokemon-conjuring creature that looks like a cross between a deflated blowfish and a grey sock filled with lard. Sigh. Not entirely disheartened, we continue out to the opposite end of the large lagoon to try our hand at some oyster gathering near the gates of a military base. With two eagles circling overhead and a nearby sign that says "people fishing here will be shot on sight" in Sinhalese, we take turns leaning out the boat with blue rubber gloves and a metal pick, chipping giant, monstrous, supernaturally massive oysters off the submerged rock and tossing them into a laundry hamper. We get, like, a billion. We come back to the trap, let the little abomination free, and head back more or less victorious to eat juffles (grilled sandwich of homemade wheat nut bread, melted cheese, shallots and chili), pancakes, fruit, mango juice, and tambali (king coconut) juice.

After a good afternoon of freelance work, we are off to visit a local tea plantation. Their most precious tea (pure white tea) uses only the tiny topmost sprout of the tea plant, and is untouched by human hands, harvested by virgins (!) with golden scissors and being caught in a golden bowl. Before we get too impressed, our guide informs us that the scissors ad bowl are only GOLD PLATED. Charlatans! A 15 minute walk up to the processing building takes past rubber trees, papaya, mango, saffron, hibiscus, cinnamon and fresh green pepper. Seriously, how insultingly fertile is this area of the earth? The whole setup is allegedly organic, relying on fluorescent wild parrots to the pest work (virgin fluorescent wild parrots?). We take a quick tour of the processing plant, full of 18th century scales, conveyor belts and lots of whirring, toothy, open-faced machinery which has no doubt mangled uncountable limbs in its lifetime. We taste over 25 kinds of tea, slurping from a long row of teacups with a tiny spoon. Mysteriously, all of them tasted exactly like tea. I bought some tea.

Later at home I work wincingly on some more web stuff, my ginger, polar-white back now lobster-red from a morning at sea. Suddenly, there is a cry from AT in the yard. I run out in my bare feet and simultaneously experience the sight of a band of grey monkeys whipping around the treetops of the leafy yard and the sensation of a scorpion stabbing the shit out of one of my toes. Ok, well I didn't exactly see the scorpion, so it might have just been a really aggressive ant or one-toothed viper, but I am now wearing sandals at all times. We trail the moneys around as they make crazy leaps from palm to palm, but I am warned to not stand directly under them, as they are purportedly active pissers with amazing face-aim. Before heading in, AT hacks a limb off a prehistoric sized aloe plant, and my back is quickly repaired.

We have a drum jam with AT's parents.

Our last dinner consists of predictably fresh, giant prawns crusted with garlic, sesame and green onion, a nice salad, homemade bread toasts, and of course, our oysters, again served raw and broiled topped with chili, shallot and parmesan. I think of the legendary hospitality of my friend Eric, who always treats me to fresh oysters when I visit, and wish I could teleport him a plate of these self-caught behemoths in reciprocation. One is seriously bigger than my entire palm, and Barnaby finds not one, but two small pearls in the ones on his pate. What is going on here!!!!!!??????

Alas, all 5 star resort-ish things must come to an end, and it's time to head back to Colombo. It's a bumpy, 40% chance of death nighttime ride, so we elect to stop halfway and have a beach-side lager under patio lights with the ocean lapping happily to our left. I'm looking forward to describing the boys' place and the bustling, mind melting craziness that is Colombo, but it'll have to wait for the next installment. Gooood niiiiiight.

Music: Outrunners: Blazing Speed and Neon Lights with You

3rd Eye on Snacking: Savoury Junk in Sri Lanka

As anyone who has spent a fair amount of time with me will readily attest, I have a savoury tooth. Throw all that belgian chocolate, turkish delight and sugar-dusted truffle into the ocean for all I care. To the possible detriment of my heart and future blood pressure, I love to snack on all things salty. I might be half deer. I can wake up and eat a bowl of popcorn and skip dessert for the rest of the year without a flinch. In that, visiting foreign cities and being exposed to a full and wonderful spectrum of crisps, chips, nuts, noodles, rolls and packages makes me feel like a kid in a candy store that has thrown out all its candy. Not being a wild shopper or proper slave to fashion, much of my disposable income (what a funny term) goes towards food. Join me now as we start a new "column" of this blog entitled 3rd Eye on Snacking: Savoury Junk in Sri Lanka, where I will attempt to sample and review all manner of packaged nosh.

Product: Tipi Tip Cheesy Balls Extruded Snack
Brand: Uswatte
Motto: If you're happy with this snack, tell your friends. If not, tell us.
Ingredients: Maize grit, vegetable oil, natural cheese flavouring.

Mmm, when "grit" is one of the listed ingredients, you know you're in for a special experience. God, this package is hard to open. Is this a child-safety issue? The bag smells not unlike an old pot of kraft dinner. These are your typical hyper-processed packing foam style snacks. The taste I would describe being somewhere between my memory of Corn Pops breakfast cereal and permanent marker.Verdict: Meh. Maybe if they washed up on the shore of my desert island, but I'd probably do some grub hunting instead. 4/10

Product: Mr. Bitz: Bitz Tops
Brand: CHITO
Motto: Lifes pretty straight without. . . .
Ingredients: Corn and Rice meal, Oil, Cheese powder, lactic acid, permitted flavours and flavour enhancer.

Mr Bitz has a worryingly seasick expression, green hair and rouge on his cheeks. There is something slightly ominous about "permitted flavours" on the ingredients list, as though they're pushing the boundaries but still JUST inside legal limits of chemical additives. On tasting, they're again your average extruded cheese spheres, about the size of a chickpea. However, they smell less like cheese and rice meal and more like the feet of a hippie triathlete. I am not sure if I will permit more than 3 of these in my mouth in my lifetime. 3/10

Product: Devilled Cashew Nuts
Brand: Liyona Cashew
Ingredients: not listed. I'm going to hazard a guess by saying Cashews, Vegetable Oil and Chili

Sri Lanka is one of the world's top cashew producers and exporters. Street stalls and supermarkets sell the freakishly large legumes roasted plain or "devilled," dusted with red chili. These particular vacuum-packed little wonders are crunchy, with a creamy nut meat and nice creeping heat that lasts for a solid minute. Aftertaste is faintly stale, but compared to the processed dross i've been sampling, these are a winner. Sri Lanka, I love your nuts and I want to put them in my mouth. 8/10

Product: Snack and Nuts Makanan Ringan
Brand: Ken Kee
Ingredients: Broadbean, Palm Oil, Salt, Egg, Sugar, MSG, Flour, Colouring

A happy, hydrocephalic cow in bowling shoes is giving these the thumbs up. Let's give them a shot. . .These smell exactly like a dusty, abandoned wig factory. After a fire. Gak! Ugg! It feels like I'm eating someone else's tooth. It's like little, dusty chunks of what was left over from making the benches at JFK airport. I can't even tell if they're stale. These might not even be a food item and I'm missing something in translation. I bet they're plant fertilizer or something. 2/10
Product: Corntos: BBQ Flavour (New Formula)
Brand: Double Decker
Motto: Once you've tasted Corntos, there's no going back. It reveals a new pleasure you never would've thought possible. Corntos. Try it, you'll see the light.
Ingredients: Corn, Rice Oil, BBQ Powder, Spices, Soy Sauce Powder, Sugar, Salt

I think that's the boldest product statement I've ever seen on anything. It sounds like they're going to make me smarter and improve my sex life. Opening the bag. . . . .
They certainly don't smell like BBQ. They smell a lot like curry and dirt. The appearance is wild, with irregular shapes ranging from matchsticks and pebbles to school eraser sized tumors. Ok, good texture; super crunchy and fairly dense. I'm not sold on the taste completely. I don't mind it, but it's not mind blowing. These would be nice in a sour cream and onion or salt and vinegar flavour, although I think they only have them in either chicken or cuttlefish. Overall, not too shabby. Debating whether I'd actually serve these to guests. 6.5/10


Product: Mister Pop Star Cheese n' Onion Snacks
Brand: Hemas Marketing Firm
Ingredients: Corn, Rice, Corn Starch, Vegetable Oil, Salt, Permitted Flavour Enhancer.

At 16 grams, these are a pretty small bag. Judging by the ingredients, I think I know what I'm in for, and i do not have my hopes up. Now, are these Mister Pop snacks, "Star" edition, or is the insane doodle figure at the bottom of the bag Mr. Pop Star? From his expression, he appears to be in the throes of a spasmodic snack-induced seizure, waving a wild warning against opening the bag. But I must! *Cough* Man, that was a nose rape. I shouldn't go back in there, but it's like an olfactory car wreck, i can't stop. Maybe if I do the scientist's waft towards my nose with my hand. GAG! I am seriously considering not eating these. They smell like I've got my face over the chimney of a crematorium that's burning mannequins. I'm eating one. Wow. These are seriously worse than styrofoam packing peanuts. They don't even merit more description. The bag came with a free tiny car to assemble out of paper, which I am not going to do. I don't pay money to have an experience like this. 2/10



Product: Bite Rings
Brand: SMK
Ingredients: Not Listed. At least not in English characters.

Man, these look crazy. The colour is way too bright for an edible foodstuff. They look pretty budget, but we've had better luck from local brands, so let's give it a shot. Ring me!
Mmm- they actually smell good. In a guilty way, maybe, like walking through the food area of a carnival. They LOOK like Carnie food, actually. Hmm. . . not terrible. They're basically little fried dough rounds with chili on them. They fall soundly into that category of something that tastes not-amazing that you end up eating all of. I'll keep these around. 6.5/10

Another early morning trip

to the beach, during which we do our best to make use of a decomposing pair of body boards. I end up being really good at that move where you get the rope tangled around your leg up to your crotch and simultaneously irrigate your sinus cavity with salt water. I forget what it's called. Later at home we insinuate ourselves into the kitchen to observe and learn while chef Shaminda handily assembles the family a traditional Sri Lankan breakfast. Shaminda has a bright face, wide eyes, and white toothy smile. He never seems annoyed by our questions and nonstop pointing/tasting, but he may also be imagining sliding a filleting knife between my ribs. We have a hellish failure trying to make the cellophane-thin rotty skins he seems to whip up in his sleep.

Breakfast starts with of a heap of "exotic" fruit (common as dirt here - not ready to get over that yet) and yoghurt. Neat, chewy cylinders of flour and red rice are steamed in a tall pipe over the stove till firm. These guys and "string hoppers," vermicelli-thin noodle cakes, are used to manhandle a stupidly delicious daal lentil curry, the pastel green colour of which could have acted as a paint sample for retouching an early 80's Oldsmobile. We everything with Pol Sambol (?? prepare yourself for me to spell everything wrong in this culture), a hot mix of just-shredded coconut, lime and chilies. I have said this before, and i will say it again 1000 times: it.is.delicious. I eat and eat and eat.

The afternoon unfolds around the construction of our crab trap. After some time consulting online brains, we scrap the advice and make a maverick design of our own. Following a few hours with chicken wire, pliers, bolt cutters, ties and rope, a vessel so fine it would likely bring a seasoned wharfman to tears has been assembled.

We fill the bait tube with ralph-worthy chum and push the family's wobbly boat into the lagoon to leave it overnight. Once almost a private pool, the lagoon has lost some of its caché for dipping since the appearance of a 6 meter (you read that right) crocodile which bit a fisherman almost in half. The monster once appeared feet from where AT's parents were swimming. (He actually ends up surfacing the next day, meters from our trap. Devil!)

A day trip is undertaken to nearby Galle fort: a huge Dutch military settlement dating from the 1600's, now holding hundreds of homes, shops and hawkers. We have Ceylon tea and scones with raspberry jam and double cream on the veranda of the Galle installment of the Amal suites (check these dudes out: amalsuites.com) which Renate has supplied with stately haleconias. She is a passionate gardener, and the amount of greenery back at the house is nuts, even by Sri Lankan standards.
We spend an hour exploring the alleys, shops and palisade walls of the fort, and take a few nice pics before heading back. On the way home we stop at a roadside fish stall and buy a couple of mullet fish and some squid and watch colourful fishing trawlers pull in to shore as a storm rolls in from the sea.

Dinner:
-Indonesian fish packets of green curry, coconut milk, lemongrass and galangal
-fried squid with black pepper in red rice flour with coriander and white wine lemongrass dipping sauce.
Conversation:
The controversy of MSG. AT and I took the pro side, Bob and Renate the con, and I think Barnaby refereed.
After:
-shot into town for a beer run. Sri Lankans don't drink a lot of beer, most preferring harder stuff like Arrak, a potent liquor made out of coconut sugar, so domestic brands are usually warm and taste not dissimilar to hosewater). We come home around dusk and find AT's parents on the dock. The sky is a rich, cloudy blue, and we join them to drink our haul watching giant, dog-sized bats fly around overhead. Retarded.

Internal clock still drunk and disorderly,

I wake up before dawn and tiptoe into the boys' room hoping to catch the sunrise over the lagoon. It's still too early, so I settle back in bed, watching an industrious trail of tiny black ants lugging a dragonfly corpse and drift off to the beeps of a gecko above my head until I'm woken by AT; we're off to the beach for a morning swim. The van jostles a short distance to the coast, twin dogs patiently packed nose to nose into the back: two tan snack cakes.

The beach is wide, impeccably bare and apocalyptically empty. The sand squishes away pleasantly between my toes like an infomercial mattress, and dosily soaking in the postcard magnitude of where I am, I finally snap to the realization that I am far, far away from Montreal. It's been a very long time since I was at a beach, and the saline, foamy waves of the Indian Ocean are just absolutely fucking wonderful. Wading out into chest-high surf, it's hard not to feel like a kid, and we all play in the hard gravity of push-pulling tide until we are spent.

Music: Beach Boys: I Can Hear Music

Home to a breakfast of thin vanilla crepes, small omelettes of shallot and bird chilli and a fruit plate of midget bananas, pineapple and papaya spiked with lime.

We have had plans from the night earlier to fashion our own crab trap and try our luck for the auspicious pinchers in the lagoon. Back to town, we first stop in at the neighborhood welder, where AT and Barnaby get quoted for a custom protoype of a building material used in their new business venture. The welder's children are busy folding paper planes out of torn notebook pages, and squeal with laughter as the impressive little craft land on the roof and in a bucket of water.

We visit a hardware store for chicken wire and accompany one of the house staff to a modest covered market, a shaft of sunlight between corrugated scrap highlighting a sack of dried red chilies. We wander down the road, careful to avoid speeding buses and doubled cyclists.

Sri Lanka has no deficit of smiling faces, but before I give too rosy an impression, things are rough in this rural area for most of the people I have seen, and the contrast of absolute luxury in the frame of third world life is weighing uneasily on me at times. The small streets are full of rough-looking street dogs with pockmarked fur and visible ribs, scratching at fleas and lapping from stagnant puddles. Skeletons of rusty bikes line alleys edged with plastic trash and ruddy open ditches brim with things not fun to smell. This area of the coast suffered the worst of the tsunami, and the rubble of clobbered schools and homes and boats pushed kilometers inland accompany hard stories from AT's family of the tragedy. Renate and AT's father Bob converted a ruined post office into a village relief centre, offering aid to workers and tradespeople looking to rebuild their businesses. It is now a non-profit computer centre, giving volunteer training to people in the surrounding area. It's hard to absorb the nature of a place in a short time, and I don't feel equipped to make any conclusions, but the warm energy and easy smiles of everyone here feel sincere. Errands complete, we shuttle back to the house to eat.

Two bluefin tuna caught that morning are cut into thin sashimi which disappear on my palette without chewing, they are seriously that fresh. AT and I assemble some simple maki with the rest of the fish, avocado and sesame. Steamed okra with tomatoes and herbs complete the light meal. We stay at the table late and empty a couple of bottles of wine, talking animatedly about everything from happiness to the battle of the sexes to driving 150km an hour in a disintegrating car with no seatbelts in Thailand.

A projector is set up and we are knocked out one by one watching The Scent of Green Papaya, the ambient soundtrack of jungle birds and insects continuing seamlessly long after the movie is shut off.

Music: Eric Satie: Trois Gymnopedie

Evertything has its Time

I am over the Black Sea and I can't sleep. I have no idea how long I have been traveling anymore, and my timepieces' estimates are so far from agreeing with each other that I may as well be on the moon. I still have 7 more hours of flying till i get to Columbo and I have been in the air for 5. (P.S. how cool is it that the Sri Lankans named their commercial capital after Peter Faulk?) Fingers crossed that AT received my last message and has furnished a driver with instructions to take me 3 hours south to his parents', where I can commiserate with him and Barnaby over a drink with mango in it. Hopefully I will get to pass through the village of Matlock on the way and spot a glimpse of the fabled Perry Mason atolls.

Music: Robin Guthrie & Harold Budd: Neils Theme

Flirting with consciousness for the final stretch of my long flight, we finally touch down and taxi into the humid grip of Colombo. Visa is endorsed, money is changed, and I am greeted with a personalized placard by a kind faced driver with whom I set out to the southern tip of the country.

A muted palette of hand painted advertisements, dusty concrete and sun worn pastels of once bright clothing blur past. The city is tense with the ongoing threat of civil violence, and military security is high, the slung weight of automatic weaponry commonplace. Streets are clotted with wide trucks hauling wood and brightly personalized 3 wheel tuk tuks. We push forward through the traffic in a continuous series of "holy shit is this a good idea?" and "we almost nailed that goat" overtakings. I see a family of four on a motorcycle. Fresh mango, pineapple and branches heavy with banana are everywhere, and the products of a tropical landscape are stacked roadside. Stray dogs trot unhurriedly past welders and weavers, and nests of dried coconut husks are ubiquitous. The air is full of the dopplering whines of engines and a staccato automotive language of honks and beeps. I think of my mom, who suffers from a fairly high "sensitivity to traffic" and am convinced that her head would have fallen off twice in terror by now. There is an unrelenting amount of signage here. Billboards, banners and shop facades all jockey for face time. Cows! Lizards! Shingles, flowers, iron, wood, engines, rakes, tires, sodas, meat, batteries, and, for a brief moment, ocean appears; a rising wind smashes high grey waves onto the rocks. Half way into the trip I close my eyes and drift off into active dreams, the first drops of a coming storm dot the windshield.

Waking up to a serious downpour and palm-bending winds, the driver tells me we are in the city of Galle, and the last 15 minutes of the ride plunge further and further off road into a voltage-green jungle. Finding the family house hidden down a maze of etch-a-sketchy roads swollen with pelting monsoon rainwater, a large gate swings open and we stop at the base of a gentle hill, a majestic, ceramic-shingled house sits airily on top. AT and I share a quick and excited reunion, my bag is taken by a beaming Tamil boy named Shiva, and I am given a large umbrella, which the tropical wind promptly tears apart. I pass the inspection of two giant marmadukes at the house's entrance and am floored by the dimensions and design of the space. A project of AT's parents for the last 4 years, it is a marvel, referencing japanese, middle eastern and modern european architecture in equal measure. My tired brain is uncharacteristically short on hyperbole, so Ill elaborate tomorrow with pictures, but it is incredible.

After a brief tour where I am shown my quarters, dinner is served in a vaulted dining room. We eat warm olive foccacia from the house pastry chef, a cold avocado veloutte with chili, raw and baked oysters hand-harvested by AT and Barnaby hours before from the lagoon outside, and a salad of garden frisée and black sesame, toasting a dry German Riesling. Dessert is a transportive housemade passion fruit preserve in cream, easily one of the top 5 foods I have ever put in my mouth. The night edges in around candlelit conversation with a cooling breeze blowing in mist from outside, toothpicks fragrant with cinnamon oil from an island 500 meters away and my first taste of king coconut juice, drunk straight from the fruit. Fireflies pulse in the dim kitchen.

AT's mom Renate recounts that during her tenure as Karl Lagerfeld's interior designer, he once chose a Latin phrase from his mother's gravestone to be engraved above his front door: "Everything has its time." Later, drifting off under mosquito netting to the static of distant waves and million croaks of invisible frogs, I can't imagine a better aphorism for the trip.

Music: Cocteau Twins: Lazy Calm

A few notes about Skymall

There is something amazing about the raw amount of earnest inventors' wares and categorically disposable bric-a-brac that packs the pages of the complementary Skymall catalogue. For me, it really beats out any kind of entertainment I could have thought to bring onboard a plane.
Look! An automatic mini-donut machine shares a page with an unwieldy vintage popcorn cart for your den. There! A hand-painted Sasquatch Garden Sentry rubs shoulders with Successories(tm) motivational workplace posters.The Marshmallow Shooter (TM). The Backyard Dog Agility Course. A perplexing masthead "The Greatest Gift: is to help others help themselves" precedes "CHIA PET meets PET ROCK meets LAVA LAMP. . .meets SURF ANTS!" And yes please, I WOULD like to know "Why You Need a Watch Winder!"

Tools to pamper your dog to within an embarrassing inch of its vest-wearing life. Tools to ultrasonically drive away other people's vest-wearing dogs.
I don't know if there's something about the brain being under cabin pressure that makes it lose all consumer reasoning. Do people actually make the leap and purchase an LED nose hair trimmer (bulb good for over 14,000 trimmings) at 35000 feet? Part of me likes to think they do. And even though I abhor the deleterious environmental ruin that all this yard sale fodder eventually causes, I am delighted beyond measure to read about the existence of a personalized monogram-shaped steak-brander or the Civilized Butler Awakening Device ("This alarm clock wakes you first with the sound of gentle birdsong, then a discreet cough and comforting words "Good morning, Sir" (or Madam)").

Why don't we have a closer look at some of the Hollywood tie-ins in this issue:

The BATARANG(tm) Money Clip
Measures 4 inches open. Die cast with magnetic folding mechanism. $39.00

If you are a grown person with enough personal income to require a money clip and a credit card to purchase said device, you had better pray to Thor that there is a superhero in proximity to rescue you from the uncountable beatings you will inevitably receive when using this in public.

...and from the Treasures Inspired by the World of Harry Potter page:

HARRY POTTER's Wand
Wand measures 14 inches in length. Collector box included. $35.00

Nothing more accurately says "I'm not having intimate relationships" than this withered metaphor in its generously sized display case. I believe the name of the first spell you are going to learn to cast with it is Level 4 Loneliness.

If we can endeavour to form some sort of profile on the average Skymall shopper, we would have to conclude that they have an unmanageable amount of pets & portable music devices, own an inground pool and, above all, suffer from a debilitating array of malaise and allergy. Identifying symptoms likely include, but are not limited to: tired feet, cracked heels, fallen arches, insomnia, snoring, dark eye circles, male pattern baldness, forgetfulness, body odor, misaligned spine, skin infections, unwanted moustache, poor circulation, back bulges, inability to remember the day of the week, and a hypersensitivity to electromagnetic radiation whilst playing golf. If all this is true, maybe the real Skymall shopper is on their deathbed, scrambling to spend every cent of their life savings, finding occasional solace in the patch of scrubby garden visible from their cot, now lorded over by a handsome die-cast Yeti.