Today was a long day of errands

in Galle, assembling the ingredients for a dinner AT and I are cooking for two friends of the family. We come to the city early, having learned that the first match of the national cricket playoffs is happening the next day in the new Galle stadium: India vs Sri Lanka. Tickets are to begin selling at 9. Neither of us know sweet FA about the sport, but it sounds like a jolly-good diversion for two young sprouts, and we get there on time with the intention of furnishing ourselves with a fine pair. Everyone we speak to at the stadium is clueless, and we are sent between cricket ticket wickets to interact with a litany of characters, each more medically-grade moronic than the last. We finally suss out that tickets are not there yet, but will arrive at 10. Shrugging our shoulders, we grocery shop for an hour. Back to the stadium. Tickets are now supposed to arrive at 11. Slightly annoyed, we shop some more. To the stadium! Tickets? Oh! Tickets! Tickets will now most certainly arrive at 12. Oh, Sri Lanka, you crazy country, you. We spend some time at the studio of a jeweler-friend of the family, looking at gems and ingenious rings and a raven-feeding papaya holder on the studio sill. By noon, surprise of surprises: no tickets. Screw this. We sort out someone to pick us up a pair later in the day and go home to cook.

Dinner works out great; we start with an oyster mushroom tapenade with manchego cheese on toasted olive bread and a dip of pureed roasted peppers and herbs. Next are shrimp and chive dumplings in hand made wrappers with a soy and miso sauce, then baked oysters we snagged from the bay. Renate serves a light avocado soup with hot pepper sauce. Mains are oven-roasted fillet of local fish on a rough potato mash with black olive and balsamic topped with a salsa verde of coriander, parsley, anchovy, garlic and olive oil. Dessert is a cold papaya soup with jellied passion fruit and tea.

Beyond the food, guests Ian and Brian are fantastic company and there's lots of laughter, travel tips and anecdotal stories about the things that pets have eaten. I pack it in, exhausted, but have a miserable time sleeping. Jet lag is an ugly lady. At some point in the night, I spend a long time with my head out the bay window and wake up druggedly at 5 AM with a hot laptop on my belly and this on the screen:

My brain feels small tonight.
Its baleen scope, trawling through and filtering billions of swimming details from the shifting landscape, is full. The uncountable plankton of smell, sight, taste and touch familiar and foreign have filled my head to bursting and I need to sieve through them and digest. It is a memorable moment growing up when your mind first comes against the formidable wall that is the size of the universe and in it our atomic scale. It's also for most of us an infrequent grapple: something internally settled unfathomable and put aside for the constant preoccupations of living and being. What has suddenly and unexpectedly confounded me just the same is the equally infinite detail, in not the scale of our world, but every city, village, jungle and alley in it. It's a newer, much more difficult confrontation to escape. Unable to sleep, looking out the window at the acne wash of the Milky Way and dizzying stars of a tropical sky, the constellations of winking fireflies and galactic hum of cicadas mirroring it below seem just as intangible. I'm suddenly back to square one, twelve years old in a snowsuit, lying on my back on a frozen river at night and staring a hole into the sky.

I'm still trying to grade how cheesy that all is, but I think the gist of it still true: the world is hard to fathom with a human brain.

Music: Goldmund: Door of Our Home

**many thanks to Adam for hosting these files inadvertently**