Dude, where's my hemisphere?

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2010-06-09T05:11:00.001-07:00

It's in to town. . .

2008-09-22T14:32:00.000-07:00

. . to get the necessary pieces. First to a gents' clothing store, where stock and style have been frozen since the invention of polyester. We pick out some fine inflammable slacks and wide-collared dusty dress shirts. Then, it's next door to the shoe store for the cheapest pair of black slip-ons rupees can buy, the price actually dyed into the shoe sole. We're almost there, but glancing at each others faces, we realize we still look like unkempt bushmen. Wandering around looking for the final touch, we end up talking with someone who introduces themselves as a private jeep driver and touring railway station master. After a short round of bargaining, he promises us an escorted day trip the next morning up to the top of Adam's Peak (allegedly holding Adam or Buddha's terrestrial footprint) and guaranteed first class tickets for the sold-out train tomorrow. Serendipity! How nuts is that? He offers to drive us home for free, but we ask him to point us in the direction of a good barber, and ten minutes later there is a straight razor at my foamy jugular.

It's my first time getting a classic barber shave, and I am trying not to give off the stench of petrification, as barbers can smell fear. Now I know it's widely spoken that a classic shave is one of man's great pleasures, but the knife wielder can't be over 16, there's no running water, and I have a beard so complicated with whorls and cowlicks it looks like a meteorological map. It doesn't help that the only barber scenes I can envision while this is happening either involve
grisly mafia assassinations or the Three Stooges ("Excuse me sir, were you wearing a red bowtie? No? Well, here's your ear back. Nyuk Nyuk"). I get through 95% of the shave and all that remains is to rid me of a strip of mustache, when Barnaby starts making jokes. This is deadly serious, because I'm fucking hopeless at keeping a straight face in a serious situation when there's something funny in my brain. Come to think of it, I believe that's why the debating team I joined in high school for a semester was expunged from the city finals. Anyhow, if my pubescent caretaker had slower reflexes, I might currently have a harelip wicked enough to guarantee casting in the next batman movie, but I walk out with the supple, floral skin of a baby and nary a nick. Success. So, walking coiffed and cologned out of our hotel to the Hill Club, we finally look the part, but maybe also a little like extras from a 70's commercial for fondue. We have a dinner reservation, of course, and plan on taking them up on their free loan of jacket and tie for members. We're welcomed in by the maitre d' and led to the motherload: a witch-and-the-wardrobe sized armoire of mind-bendingly bad jackets, blazers, sport coats, ties and cravates. It takes way too long to choose, as we keep on finding more and more synergetically terrible combinations. I'm in tears and basically holding my crotch not to pee my pants looking at us in the mirror. AT has found a thick blue velvet coat with jutting shoulder pads and sports a tie he's just purchased with the club's emblem on it. Barnaby has squeezed into a hounds tooth maroon number and short, wide tie in psychedelic paisley. I change about a dozen times, but settle on a slim, grey Pee Wee Herman suit jacket and long, slender red woolen tie. Barnaby is the Texas oil Baron on a world trip, AT a young and industrious tea plantation owner, and I'm a reclusive sci-fi author looking for peace in which to complete my next novel about moon travel. We saunter into the bar for cocktails where a career Bartender is more than pleased to whip us together every antiquated drink we can think of under the cross-eyed, demented growl of a mounted mountain lion head. A Rusty Nail please! Brandy Alexander for me! We try Russians black and white, whiskey sours, a martini, and more, none of the drinks costing more than a dollar. But let's not fill ourselves up; It's time for dinner.

The menu is awesome, in an old-world, Joy of Cooking fashion. We have shrimp toasts and a plate of paté extruded into repulsive rosettes. For mains, the boys elect for racks of New Zealand Lamb, but i gravitate to the steak and when it arrives, it's the size of a softball and perfectly cooked. Even the french fries are incredible! You can taste the stubborn pickiness of thousands of frumpy diners in these recipes, and we kill a couple of bottles of red wine to help them along, finishing 4 hours later with the giant room to ourselves. We can't leave without seeing the eccentric gift shop, where AT picks up a powder blue cravat for a friend, and I'm lured by a bone china tea set stained with the club's logo. Beautiful. We stumble back to the hotel laughing at the absurdity and perfection of the night, and pack it in. There is a jeep picking us up at 5am. A very uncomfortable jeep.

We wake. . .

2008-09-22T13:20:00.000-07:00

. .and head a short distance into town (village?) to catch the morning train west to Nuwara Eliya. The train system is a purposeful single line colonial-era project of British tea merchants and investors, an artery leading to and from the healthy heart of the country. The train station is scale-model quaint and looks unchanged since its construction over a century ago. Gorgeous hand painted signs announce track times and a manpowered rail cart clacks past like a cartoon. The heavy coal-bellowing engine pulls in and we take a seat in second class.

We chug out of the station and begin one of the most memorable, heart-hurtingly beautiful trips I've had. The weather is perfect, and time dilates looking out on a pretty fair definition of paradise. Undulating hills are pocked with low tea shrubs, each one a slightly different green. Creamy lozenges of clouds filter dappling yellow light down on distant miniature farms. We punch through a mountain in a dark minute, the kids on board hooting out to hear their echoes ricochet back. Rail-side houses empty to wave the approaching train, their corrugated roofs laid with the colours of the day's drying laundry. Mammoth trees remind me of childhood dinosaur books, bone coloured trunks blurring by like a monstrous picket fence. There are clackety bridges crossing bouldery ravines and wide leaved banana trees ripe with fruit.

The hypnotic sway of the coach is lulling, but I'm startled by a hollering voice outside our window. I look out to see a wild eyed man the size of a jockey swinging from the steps of our car, holding on casually with one hand and shouting through a few missing teeth. Now with an audience, he starts to make more of a show, but is silenced when a thick sapling whips him audibly in the face and he almost falls from the train. He comes in and sits with us, not speaking a word of english, but loquacious nonetheless. Actually, he's mostly repeating something that sounds like "HORSE" and making the gesture of what I think is a waterfall. He talks for about an hour and a half, and in honest appraisal, we think it was mostly about an old horse he owned with 4 penises. I'm serious! I'm not even being crass; you would have gotten the exact same thing out of the conversation. His breath is atrocious, however, and there's a very real fermented-milk-product smell in our area by the time he changes seats.

The trip is suddenly over, and we disembark to walk to our hotel, stopping at a fruit market to be royally ripped off by duplicitous vendors offering samples to eat, and eat and eat, and then to be charged an arm and a leg for. Lesson learned: I will never eat fruit again. We check into our hotel, it's bizarre but fun. By the looks of the overdressed English bar, they went back in time, hired a prominent saloon architect/interior design firm from the wild west, then brought them to the future and fed them acid until they came up with the drawings. We unpack and then walk up the street to explore a previous hotel candidate, the austere Ceylon Hill Club. The Hill club was constructed in the late 18th century, a towering stone gentleman's retreat to offer displaced English dandies a taste of home. It's off-season and rather empty, smacking ominously of scenes from the Shining. Conforming to club doctrine, we purchase a temporary day membership each, signing in under pseudonyms, though the most flowery name I can muster is Ted Theodore Logan, Esquire. Not sure what that says about me. As expected, the place is so surreal that it's hard to keep a straight face in front of our dry, white gloved tour guide. Pretty much every wall panel supports a brain-damaged taxidermy animal bust of some sort, coated with at least a half inch of yellowing shellac. We walk under drooling mongoloid bears and squishy faced fawn lobotomies, past weathered area maps, inscrutable cartoons about polo and fox hunting trophies presented to someone named "Old Scrubby". There is a "mixed" lounge where ladies are allowed, and a billiard room for the good old boys. Next over, a long dining room fans outward from a vast fireplace, windows facing a grand topiary garden and manicured lawn. We collect ourselves, peruse the menu, smile at each other, and formulate a plan for the night. This will take some finessing.

Music: Helios: Coalescence

.

Over the next few hours

2008-09-22T13:06:00.000-07:00

we climb steadily in altitude, greenery returning, the thin, mountain-hugging road studded with bleachy, paper skinned eucalyptus. Sticking my head out the window, I look down over the vertiginous, van-exploding cliff that edges the road and faint a little. We stretch our legs at the base of a waterfall sluicing through a high cliff face and trade foreign coins for flashy chunks of agate and mica gathered by entrepreneurs from the riverbed.

Ever-connected AT has furnished us with a house at a childhood friend's resort in the tiny mountain town of Ella. We arrive and lug our luggage up a steep, rocky road, rewarded with a funky collection of Miami coloured houses and a magical 360ˆ view over the breathing, vapoury jungle. We settle in, are served tea and I take a picture of a turquoise bee the size of my fist. The rooms are neat and comfortable. The bathroom is crowned by a hyper intelligent japanese shower pod like something out of a William Gibson short story on bathing. The Japanese are light years ahead in washroom tech, aren't they? This thing has at least six modes, a light, nozzles everywhere, an LED screen, radio, fan and a mysterious hair curler hose box that I think you clamp over your feet. The shower loses all its cache however, when I learn shriekingly that there is no hot water service and I am locked for a good 30 seconds in what is now a slippery, frigid HAL 9000 torture box.

We're the only guests there, and the young superintendent prepares us a dinner of three top notch curries, one with crisp red beets and another of crunchy snake beans, garlic and shallots. We drink beer and retire with open balcony doors welcoming in the forest air, exhaled by the uncountable tea plants of the plantation bordering the house. It's a great sleep.

Music- Brian Eno: An Ending (Ascent)

We have booked a driver and van

2008-09-22T12:56:00.001-07:00

to take us 8 hours through the south east of Sri Lanka, north into the jungly, tea-dotted hills of the high country. We are up at 6 for a 7am pickup, and AT and I are packed and in decent condition. But Barnaby? Barnaby is dead. Something has happened overnight, and from his peaceful position in bed, he has silently migrated to being half-draped over a small ivory loveseat and soaked in gallons of water. His condition and the source of the liquid remain a Poiroit - scale mystery to this day. We manage a hard-fought victory to get him back to the bed, but the couch is ruined, two geranium coloured stains bleeding out from the throw pillows like stab wounds. Barnaby is a writeoff in the way that a car that has fallen off a bridge into a ravine is lost. He is doing his masters thesis in being poisoned. After 40 minutes of cajoling, encouragement and light threats, the best we can coax from his drooling, pillow-stuffed mouth is a carefully chosen "go.... f@&k..... yourself." We are now an hour late for our departure, and the trip is in actual jeopardy. Our waiting driver sports a large silver watch and neat, thin moustache. He has been patient and professional, but there is an air of severity to him and something military about his physique and movements. This not someone to keep waiting. At this point, we've bribed Barnaby with money and even offered to carry him fireman-style to the van, but he is catatonic and inexorable. We are deciding whether to call the whole thing off or leave our foul-mouthed death-rower for the weekend, when, like a grey-eyed ghost, Barnaby shambles bravely past us, suitcase in hand, and passes out in the back of the van.

We're off, Barnaby stuttering sweaty vowels in the back while throwing up in a bag, with AT and I on sharp lookout for the nearest pharmacy. 20 minutes later we have our friend subdued like a circus tiger with a single cream cracker, high-powered anti-nausea pill and a pair of diazepam. Our driver is awesome, and we make great time, only slightly delayed by a transport truck that has fallen into a deep gully. The landscape quickly turns flat and arid. And dry. And lacking water. Trees give way to spiny shrubs and roadside huts look like hastily-assembled target practise for the nearest wolf to blow down. We're stopped and briskly questioned at a very serious military installation bordering the Katawalua national park. We pass muster and speed into the preserve. The road is serpentine and potholed, sandwiched by a hundred meters of clearcut forest on either side, a measure against Tamil Tiger ambushes. It's obviously an area of tight military importance, and every half kilometer is marked by the blue sandbags and barbed wire of just-erected sniper dugouts. We coast through the park without incident, noting electric fence fringed moats keeping wild elephants wild.

Our only stop on the way north is a famous multi-denominational pilgrimage site. Hindus and Bhuddists trek monthly to the grounds to camp out in the thousands and present offerings of lotus flowers, fruit and oil. It's a scorchingly hot day, really, hotter that you're imagining right now, and we make our way near a river to jealously witness two elephants bathing. I can't remember the last one I've seen in person - maybe a drugged one from my childhood in a traveling circus in my home town - the ones always announced by a parade of go-karting shriners in Fez caps. Can I stop for a moment to say I never understood that connection? Do the shriners own those karts? When do they practise? - so it's a mesmerizing sight until one of the lazy, half-submerged pachyderms takes a loud, elephant-sized dump in the water. I look downstream to the people happily swimming, washing their hair and rinsing out their mouths in the stream and we turn to leave. Nature, I guess!

We wander through the assembled shrines: blinking, carnival-lit dioramas of hogwild decor and cascading neon that look like they've just paid out some extreme spiritual jackpot. Over and again we obey custom by removing our shoes and skirting the temples barefoot and clockwise, a total pain in the neck with the begrudgingly-purchased snap-fastened mandals I'm wearing (I am historically of the opinion that male toes have no right being shown in public anywhere that does not offer swimming). I am also going on record to say I have truly never stepped on a hotter or more coarse surface than that gravel-impregnated sand, and the black tarmac around one rainbow-striped temple leaves our soles stinging for a half hour afterwards. Sweat-drenched, we retreat for the aspartame A/C of our coach, stopping to marvel at greyhound-sized razor-toothed monkeys and trees inexplicably dressed in license plates. The world is peculiar, eh?

Music: Jessie G: That's Hot!

So where were we?

2008-09-22T12:45:00.000-07:00

Right, we were on our way to the craziest house in Sri Lanka.
Smiling politely in the least crumpled of our clothing, we arrive at Brian and Ian's house (actually called The Fortress. Like, actually, in writing) for drinks and a tour. A smiling young manservant, one of several hand-picked from across the country for their trim physique (and I assume propensity to pull off the uniform of an open-fronted transparent mesh shirt and silky Aladdin pants) leads us through the foyer. The house is retarded. An open-concept jaw-dropper fashioned of poured concrete, brushed aluminum and tsunami-rated bullet proof glass, it sits on a white strip of coconut-framed beach on Sri Lanka's southernmost coast. So many questions: How the hell am I here? Is that a storey-tall mural of a topless Mr Universe etched in glass framing the front door? Is that an infinity pool with fluorescent koi in it? And really, just what do I place as my drink order? Questions dissolve as I'm handed one of history's greatest gin and tonics from a silver tray and led outside, passing under the cellular bulges of a hovering commissioned lamp from a spanish designer I should probably recognise, lashed a story above with nautical cord. We toast, talk and eat some great prawns and blackened cashews, the setting sun reflected flatteringly in the surface of a tiled wading pool.

Cut to three hours later AT, Barnaby and I are standing amidst hundreds of people and thousands of watts of heavy house music, lasers and strobes cutting out to the ocean like a hallucinogenic lighthouse. The night's taken us to a beach-side club called the Happy Banana (sigh), elevated stages set on the sand as improv dance floors. I suggest we head inside as I'm feeling rain, but for better or worse, it's actually someone throwing up on my arm from overhead. Right. We drink terrible, terrible beer, avoid a brawl with an arm-wrestling fisherman and end up talking with three Irish girls. One is indecipherable, one is cute but sand-headed and one tells me bluntly I look like Hitler ("did that sound insulting?"). SHE seems someone who has been the brunt of a life of insults, so I leave the conversation magnanimously without letting her know she looks like something an illegal japanese trawler with a harpoon gun might take interest in. She repeats her observation to her cute friend who winks at me and actually says "I always thought Hitler was kind of hot." It's time to go. A blurry tuk tuk ride back to the house sees Barnaby, who has had a full conversation with a stray 3-legged dog and managed to walk out of the club with his last drink, pour an entire vodka collins on our heads. Home, we slink into bed, not entirely worse for wear, but one of us unwittingly pregnant with the Worst Hangover in the Universe.

Music: Magnetic Fields: Young and Insane

Lyrics: in this town there is nothing at all
but a brown school and a dead shopping mall
the record store is execrable
we sit around blowing bubbles

'cause we're young and insane
and we're running away for the summer
we're deprived and depraved
and we won't get away with it
young and insane

when you're free in an antique car
for a week you will know who you are
in uninhabitable we go out to jump in puddles

This post is mostly about barfing.

2008-08-26T00:30:00.000-07:00

Hello all! From my limited exposure to travel diaries out there, there always seems to be a pattern. It begins with frequent writing and good intentions, is followed by a steady decline in entries with diminishing detail and is finally ended on some anticlimactic note to the effect of "Wow! hard to believe it's been November since we've written. Where to start!? Last week a monkey took Dan's glasses while we were at a temple and broke them! Tomorrow, we are taking a break from our week of fire juggling classes here and going to the local hot springs." And in their defense, I can now see the pitfalls clearly. Either you find yourself falling behind a day, then two, and suddenly the chocolates are coming so fast down the conveyor belt that you're just stuffing them in your mouth to keep things from falling apart, or you start wondering how much time you have to reflect on things as they're happening and filter them down to a series of grammatically acceptable entries on a computer whose cord never seems to fit in the socket on the wall. By my abacus, it takes about 10% of the trip. But in truth, neither of those are my excuses.

Apologies in the lapse to [both of] you reading the journal, but in all honesty, I've actually been out of commission, seeing a neat line of evil-doing viral, bacterial and electromagnetic guests take categorical plunder of my tender frame. Let me start by saying it had been a long while since I literally projectile vomited. Maybe some fuzzy pubescent experiment mixing gin and raspberry cider? I can't say. But after a cyclone of severe food poisoning whirled through our apartment, I can tell you it's almost comically vulgar. Regular puking I am totally OK with. I've long stood by a chinese/roman policy which decrees that if your body doesn't want something in it anymore, don't argue; be discreet, get it out of there and then get back on the horse. But those rules of composure went out the window like a defenestrating stream of stomach bile.
As a defensive preamble, after about a month here, I can safely say that Sri Lanka kind of puts out the welcoming mat for food contamination. If it would please the jury to examine exhibits "A" through "F": Not a ton of refrigeration; a hand-to-mouth meal delivery method; a profusion of luke-warm milk products; a field guide of origin-questionable meats; a country-wide extinction of public hand soap, and a huge question mark sitting with its head between its knees where toilet hygiene should be. All in all, I really shouldn't have been surprised to have been watering our hedge mid-sentence with a firetrucksworth of leaf-withering stomach acid, but there I was. It probably just looked like I paused to search for the right word, maybe a little confused; pensive, my eyes rolling back and lips tight, then, like a regurgitory express train from Sicksville, USA- HuUUUUUURRRRRGGGGGGAAAAAAgggGGHHHHHPphhhhlll. We're talking official Ghostbusters (TM) arc of radioactive throwup. This surprise party continued in my guts for about 60 hours. I was the last to go. AT ralphed first in the house, and Barnaby was hit mid-business meeting, managing to excuse himself in time to a rubbish bin in a hallway. Me, I was the Magellan of retching: I tossed up in our alley in the shrubbery, spewed out of a moving tuk tuk, hurled up and down a resort-laden beachside and totally lost it on the sand floor of an outdoor chinese restaurant.

So I was food poisoned for a good 3 days, which crippled my immune system, which opened me up for 3 days of old fashioned stomach flu, which shapeshifted into a further 5 days of bronchial/sinus misery, during the second of which I fell asleep alone in the sun on cold medication for 4 hours, which led to the worst sunburn I've ever experienced, which prevented me from walking normally for a week, and which, 10 days from conception still looks like someone painted my thighs with cadmium red acrylic. So that's where I've been! How are you? Trust that I'm feeling better and have barrels of photos and stories, so I'll get back to posting post-haste. Talk soon.

ANIMAL MORNING!

2008-08-06T03:26:00.001-07:00

Welcome, one and all, to ANIMAL MORNING at Koggala bay! A wake-up rap on the door from AT comes with a promise to see a ton of monkeys, so I'm dressed and outside in a flash. The golden furred criminals have been antagonizing the dogs for an hour already: chattering at them, shaking nuts from the branches on their heads and throwing down coconut husks. We follow them around the yard for a good while until the nimble gang slips away up the electrical lines at the edge of the property, stopping to pee on the guesthouse in defiance. Cheeky!

Out to the water, we check the second drop of the crab trap, and pulling up the cage find a tenacious specimen clinging to the outside. It's not of the size to cut a sailor's legs and head away from his body and smash a lifeboat to bits, but it's a crab! We toss him back into the water to let him grow to hotel-razing proportions and live another day.

Not an hour later, another exclamatory call from AT. Somehow a falcon has gotten into his room. Ha ha! Im serious. It's an actual, taloned, face-pecking, absolutely-dangerous-looking red-eyed capitol-f FALCON. And it's screeching, taking turns perching on the bed canopy and smashing into the bay window, getting exponentially more and drunk and dangerous each time. We feel terrible, and take brave turns running in to open the tall windows and running out again, hands covering our heads. It's not until Shiva (named for the Hindu god of destruction?) comes to the rescue and manages to shoo the wyvern out of the room with an Oskar broom, first try. Hail Shiva!

In to Galle, we pick up our cricket tickets and after some time find our seats in the 1st class section. 1st class in this case being identified by tattered red upholstered chairs, loosely arranged on a rough cement bleacher facing the field. For a newly constructed stadium hosting an international match of the national sport, there is a lot more broken glass and rubble around than I expect, and the preferential washroom looks like a set from a documentary about dysentery. Luckily we've been informed of the long, lazy, four-day pace of a game, and come outfitted with a backpack of beer and snacks. As cricket is a confusing sport with many rules, I'll endeavour to go over the details of our game:

We arrive during what looks like a short intermission performance of fancy dressed men running and throwing a small ball at some sticks, many of them standing completely still for the duration. It's tearfully dull, but it only lasts a good ten minutes before a "tea break" commences and the game begins. As you may know, cricket is always played in the rain, and with dark clouds gathering on the horizon, we are set to begin! By rough estimate, there are abut 80 players on each team, clad in uniforms of shorts and a simple white shirt. The players race onto the field in ordered lines, placing themselves at intervals along the outer edge. A signal is given, and each team must race to pull their tarpaulins towards the centre, covering as much of the field as possible as it begins to rain. It's a sport which requires much teamwork and endurance, and after a drenching 30 minutes, the teams look tired and have only covered half the field. Now my favourite part: each team rolls heavy tires onto the field to secure the tarps. Who will collect the most rain?! The suspense and drama of sport! It's really heating up now as the rain turns torrential and the last of the field is covered. Ah- but short minutes later, an upset: the rain has stopped. Now the teams hold ends of the tarps and in careful synchronicity wave the water to wards the edge of the field. It looks like the team on the far edge of the field is catching up here! Over the next 45 minutes, the tarps are gathered up and the field is back to being empty. End of first inning! By good fortune, we don't have to wait long for round two, as a new downpour suddenly begins and the process starts anew! These men are athletes, and it shows!

The second half of the game sees the addition of a sort of steam roller which each side guides over the sodden, boggy grass, sopping up every drop they can, then racing to fire the diphtheria - conjuring soup into the bleachers. I LOVE THIS GAME! After 4 hours of this excitement, AT and I are drained. What a sport; it's great to learn about such a foreign game, and I'll be trying to get together a cricket beer league back in montreal, as soon as I can source enough tarps.

We head back to the house by Tuk Tuk, sundrained and a little tipsy, (black and white pics snapped during the ride) and have a massage from a local Ayurvedic (?) practitioner, a thank you from AT's mom for our long day of cooking. Well marinated with therapeutic oils, we have a quick dinner and say goodbye to AT, who's heading up to Colombo to retrieve Barnaby after a couple of morning meetings. I stick around for the night and afternoon to soak in some tranquility and write, absently poking my nose into a copy of "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" by someone I have already willfully forgotten the name of, a blind purchase by AT at our local used bookstore. It is the most insipid, maudlin, treacly sort of fiction money can buy, and I am totally not in the mood for it. I'd really only endorse it to be used page by page to clean up the public washroom at Galle cricket stadium.

The boys return the next day and I have completely decompressed after a great sleep and afternoon on the veranda looking out at the rippling lagoon and nodding palms. Renate says if you spend a whole day looking at the view, you can feel an eternity go by. I can easily accept that. Tonight, it's out to visit Ian and Brian for a drink at their villa, then a party on Unawatuna beach, and finally an early start to a weekend of unmitigated adventure taking us into the dark green crotch of the high country.

3rd Eye on Snacking: 2nd Edition

2008-08-05T05:04:00.000-07:00

Product: Sour Marbels
Brand: Fruit-tella
Ingredients: Sugar, etc.

Straying from our general theme of savoury bites, here we have a tiny 5 rupee (about 3 cents) package of sours. Small, hard-shelled cylinders, I can make a quick parallel to north america's Sour Starburst candies, to which my friend Adam was once addicted on such a scale that if I caught him napping on the couch, I had honest suspicions that he had developed diabetes during the week and was in a coma. Taste-wise, nothing shocking on the sour-scale. These are boring, but I'm not sure 5 rupees goes a long way. As you were. 6/10

Product: Kara Chew
Brand: M.C.M. Sweets
Ingredients: Gram flour, salt, vegetable oil, cumin seeds, omam, gingelly, chillies, curry leaf, curry powder.

Representing a new initiative to stick with local brands after the unmitigated crap-show imported processed snacks have been, here we have something called Kara Chew. Neither the title, appearance nor ingredients list (gingelly? are those like jello shooters?) gives any hint as to what these might be like. Orange, twisty, irregular worms spotted with black seeds. Let's have a try. Wow. These actually smell delicious. Like an Indian Nan bakery. I am eating one of the snakes. . . Ouch! Oh my god. Ok, after the Makanan Ringan, and now these, is there something about the fortitude of Sri Lankan teeth that I'm unaware? These are tantamount to eating raw pasta. I'm not sure you could even describe them as crunchy. When does "crunchy" become "molar-shatteringly dense?" * cut to Sri Lankan denture adhesive commercial* "Now, with maximum strength Mantoothident, you can again enjoy your favourite foods, like corn on the cob, deep fried horse beans, and now, even Kara Chew." After managing to masticate a couple of these, they're actually not half bad. There's a nice paprika heat that lingers on your lips. I recommend finding someone cute with strong teeth, sharing a bag of these, and then having a radical makeout session. 6.5/10

Product: Casava Crisps
Brand: Black & Gold
Ingredients: Manioc, Chillies, Salt fried in veg oil.

These look like some oily kindergarden project of tiny cellophane stained glass windows with red glitter on top. I am beginning to see the ingredient trends in snacks here. Smells like. . . oil. Lots of oil. And they taste liiiiiiiike. . . . . cut up business cards soaked in oil and chili. Failing grade! I'm not sure what advantages slicing a Casava has over using the humble potato, as they're not a rarity here. My hands are totally greasy from eating two of these. This bag is a total fire hazard. I wish I had these around when our hibachi wouldn't light and we ended up using wood scraps from the alley and a whole bottle of fire starter and our chicken tasted like it had been basted in lamp oil. Miserable. 3/10

Product: Peanuts
Brand: Some kids in Galle with a cart
Ingredients: Guessing peanuts, curry leaves, salt, chili powder

I bought these from a cadre of young ruffians manning a snack cart in the main intersection of Galle fort. The pygmy nuts came inside a carefully constructed bag, made, without question, from someone's algebra homework from 2006 and glue. The optional addition of salt and and a teaspoonful of orange chili powder were added at request. Now if we assume y in this case represents deliciousness, and the assumed factor of charming was >100, this snack deserved better than it's owner's bright red C-minus.Tastes like math, but not the kind you drop out of in grade 10 because your teacher Mrs Andrews was an asshole. Delicious math. 9/10

Today was a long day of errands

2008-08-05T04:31:00.000-07:00

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**

Change in Plans

2008-08-05T04:09:00.000-07:00

Part way through the week, Barnaby leaves for business to Thailand. AT and I sort out long term travel options, and my trip is reconfigured to include Thailand with Barnaby, but skip China, as geographically I've bitten off slightly more than I can chew in the time remaining, and AT heads back to London late August. With shifting travel plans, it's now necessary to extend my 2 week tourist visa; I'll be in Sri Lanka till near the third week of August, whereupon I'll be heading to Thailand, or, as the Thai's call it, "Land:," then perhaps Laos, and perhaps Vietnam. Who knows!? That's how I cartographically roll, G!

The immi-emigration centre is squished into 5 stories of a nondescript brown building, the ground floor occupied by a heavy - smelling food court, photocopy center and women's footwear liquidation outlet. Though we're there early, there are roughly 800 people more on the ball than we, and the wave of body heat on entering the 2nd floor where near a thousand people are queuing for something hits us in the face like two sacks full of old laundry and quarters.

For all the madness one would assume commensurate with a city like Colombo, people here seem fairly unflappable. Taxi drivers coolly handle the kamikaze onslaught of wrong-way traffic, street hawkers are largely polite and inquisitive, and there is an almost Jamaican air of easiness in a countryside where every fourth person is in fatigues and holding an AK-47. This general disposition of calm and warmth makes the perpetual conflict alarm and heavy military pressure all the more sad and surreal.
Thanking the magical Baby Jesus that our business is actually on the third floor, we pass a clerk calmly handling a dozen exasperated applicants waving pink forms in is face, and find the visa extension office, marked obvious by a glittering "MERRY CHRISTMAS HAPPY NEW YEAR" banner.

In bureaucratic fashion, the process is a five-person, forty-five minute, two-office scavenger hunt. Why is it that it only takes one sleepy person with a rubber stamp at the airport to do this crap? To our disbelief, the answer appears, etched in formal white government serif on a blue board above the woman taking my processing fee. Hanging in equal importance to other official signage in the office are the following words:
"The secret to success is hard work. That is why it is still a secret."

Um, read that again. AT and I are in hysterics trying to parse what possible reassurance such a message has in a place where your potential deportation lies in the hands of a treasurer who doesn't have change for a twenty. We kill thirty minutes in the food court over a lunch of cold rice, a tiny scoop of dhal curry and chicken part that I could not identify on a detailed map of a chicken. I don't touch it. We get our passports back.

We head by bus back down to the family house for the weekend, looking forward to less bustle and smog, and packed with the selections from our wine budget for a dinner we're cooking for company. The trip back to Koggala bay is uneventful if cramped. I emplore you to show me a bus on this planet that the lower half of my body is compatible with. I burn through the worn entirety of my used bookstore score, a pulpy 60's novella called "Killer Crabs," slightly surprised at the amount of explicit sex. I mean, I know you're a nymphomaniac billionaire widow on a secluded Australian island and the threat of a nocturnal attack of horse-sized crustaceans is inevitable, but boning every disfigured sailor, convict and big-game hunter visiting your hotel lounge is only going to have you re-cast in Killer Crabs 2: VD Clinic.

Colombo

2008-08-05T02:36:00.000-07:00

Barnaby and AT's apartment in Colombo is nice. Like, palatially nice. 3 bedrooms, 3 washrooms, huge kitchen, living room with 25 foot ceilings, terrace garden and second rooftop patio. Black granite floors, no prior tenants, and the ocean is an empty-tambili's throw away. As it's sparsely furnished and only two weeks old, we assemble some makeshift lighting from a sack of electrical parts and chicken wire left from the crab trap. I manage to put together a handsome blue floor lamp with a tarpaulin, but not before stabbing a piece of thick wire into the bone of my left hand, sending a ninja-movie-sized arterial spray of blood across the room. Newsflash: I'm clumsy!

Another attractive detail of the apartment is that it's also half as much in rent as my half of our apartment in Montreal. Part of the rent disparity is owed to it being in Wella Watte, a Tamil neigbourhood, which locals might think of as politically unstable, but I've seen no evidence of anything but a bustling stretch of blocks coloured with the pot clatter of cheap restaurants, produce markets, tailors, speakeasy pharmacies and used book stores. Walking home down our alley each night there is invariably a game of badminton between five sisters, parents nearby in plastic chairs, two brothers racing bikes up and down the gravel, slaloming between garbage bags and stacks of dry banana leaves.

Four mornings cycle between traditional English and Sri Lankan breakfasts. I'm always woken early by the monotone songs of roaming vegetable peddlers and harmonic, distorted loops of street carts blaring snack-selling jingles. One afternoon we have some saarongs made at a tailor around the corner, their shop window holding a boy mannequin wearing a bootlegged superhero shirt, the words "SPIDER FREAK" emblazoned above a familiar red web-slinger.

A working week passes, one day is spent in Petah, an grubby industrial area of the city near Slave Island. There, wholesale barrels of Panadol, miles of piping and hundred-pound sacks of chili powder populate hundreds of stalls and makeshift warehouses. Rumbling forklifts driven by teenagers grapple with giant spools of ribbon and palettes of used cardboard. A boy straightens a pile of old nails one by one with a hammer next to a senior assembling a vast net of mini christmas lights by hand. Everything seems slanty and shanty and just-holding together. If the enduring artistic lesson of American Beauty was that discarded plastic bags were heartbreakingly lovely, you could fill a good thousand Tate Moderns with the street art here. Waiting for the boys during a legal meeting in the area, I watch as a stray goat drinks a an entire bucket of bleachy washing water from a food stall, the owner in witness but disinterested. To me, that shit is ten times more beautiful than a shopping bag in the wind.

The national food of Sri Lanka is rice and curry. Rice and curry for breakfast, for lunch curry with a side of rice, and dinner sees rice married with curry. There are different curries, and different ways of getting the curry to your mouth, but the permutations wear themselves a little thin after, ohhhhh, four days. Luckily, there's lots to hunt through at the local markets, and the boys have a decent gas range and compact barbeque. I think I'm going to have to wait till Thailand for some epiphanic food experience.

We're up,

2008-07-28T05:48:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-27T23:06:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-27T22:29:00.000-07:00

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,

2008-07-22T02:27:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-21T22:23:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-21T21:12:00.000-07:00

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.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: WELCOME TO THE FUN ZONE!

2008-07-21T20:23:00.000-07:00

For the uninitiated, the Fun Zone, is like, totally amazing. This Shangri-La is a cozy little lounge in the corner of JFK airport that has three video games and a COUCH MADE OF ROCK for the free and unlimited use of anyone whose initial flight was an hour late and thusly missed their two connecting flights and has to sleep in the god damned airport overnight ON A SLAB OF ROCK. The Fun Zone is the most comfortable spot in the parts of the airport I am currently allowed. And I have checked. This sucks it so hard it's not even funny guys.

Places that do not seem like they will be fun to spend the next 10 hours in:
A) JFK airport
Materials that said airport decided to make its lounging vessels out of:
A) Granite
Times not to change your crying son's diaper:
A) While he's standing on a chair in front of me at the JFK airport's MacDonalds.
Things that are not stimulating my appetite:
A) Your son's bare McNuggets
Perceived age at which you are too old to be wearing a diaper anyways:
A) 8 years old

For the love of God. There are so many screaming infants and crying toddlers around me I feel like I've just paid to go see a movie called The Colicking in an IMAX theatre. In 3D. These little ones be straight bawlin', son! OK, relax. I'm just going to close my eyes and imagine that I'm in a tropical jungle and it's really the jubilant peeps of exotic birds looking for mates, punctuated by the occasional cry of a holwer monkey. (15 minutes later) I am now totally fine with letting a howler monkey take one of these kids up in a tree to eat it.
Truly, being in an airport is a lot like being in a movie theatre. It's the same feeling of being in a little, indignant country that has its own stupefyingly expensive economy that you are expected to accept. But this one is run by a dictator whose brother owns a granite mine. Grrrrr! Now I want popcorn.

As I watch the power trickle from my laptop, here are things that I am considering doing for the next 600 minutes:

A) Playing Ms Pacman in the Fun Zone
B) Getting drunk and playing Ms Pacman in the Fun Zone
C) Applying for a job at the Montblanc pen store
D) Developing a bad back
E) Building a comfortable armchair out of all my clothing and a plastic stool from KFC, then charging people $20/ hour to sit in it
F) Going insane
G) All of the above

MUSIC: Missing Persons: Destination Unknown

*********

Hello! Welcome to airport town. The bars here close at 11pm. I am in the Sam Adams Restaurant and Beer Servery, trying my damndest to beat the clock and drink two pints of beer before they kick me out. Things I see:

*A dad in a ridiculous pair of navy, prescription Crocs and a corporate emblazoned polo awkwardly hugging his obviously embarrassed pubescent son. (Clarify for me just what is the exact age where utility and comfort trump looking sane, and you're content to shuffle around looking like a cross between a door prize at a golf tournament and a toddler in the rain?)
*A 7 year old Jarvis Cocker handily wheeling luggage who appears to be traveling by himself
*A hasidic jew in a heavy hat and hair looking hot and haggard. I wonder if he's sweating from something he just ate from the Kosher vending machine (Hot Nosh! 24/6) I saw?
I am being asked to leave the bar. Alright, Ms Pacman, I am asking you on a date. A twenty five cent date. I am slightly light headed and in a bit of a better mood. The howler monkey may have eaten a few of those kids. Time: 11:05 pm. Eight hours to go.

*****************

Seriously Ms Pacman? You want me to pay another quarter for our date and I've already put in 3 and haven't even played yet? You trollop! I am out of American quarters! Here I was thinking we were going to have all sorts of high scores together, eating ghosts and pretzels all night, and here you end up being just another overpriced facet of this whole ugly carnival. I hate to tell you, but you're not exactly the most modern form of entertainment. All in, you're one step up from an abacus. And you are so fat you're basically a pie chart.
And so, refused 8-bit distraction, I have spent the last 5 hours drifting in and out of sleep, sharing the germy air of the other mouth-breathing citizens of the Fun Zone, the Zone that has never heard of upholstery, splayed out on a bench whose clinical discomfort would make a church pew sinfully cushy in contrast, feeling my discs and joints slip into unnatural configurations. Thinking about fresh food and a white sand beach is making me cry a little. 4 AM has rolled around, and I head up to check into my flight. Goodbye Fun Zone! It was absolutely, categorically, 100% the very antithesis of Fun while it lasted.

I just blogged all over myself

2008-07-21T20:00:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,
As you know, Blogs have been used for thousands of years. From the early days of the American Indians (Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo-Blog), through the enlightenment and industrial revolution (Last Fortnight's Coal Mine Party) and even dating back to our most ancient ancestors who posted scintillating celeb goss' on the walls of sacred caves, blogging has never gone out of style! Since our species first developed the opposable thumb and learned to use a primitive mouse and poor resolution screen in the primordial jungle, we have always had a physical need to preoccupy ourselves from work. It is a survival instinct! So please enjoy this, my addition to the wonderful and important world of blogging!

I never liked that word. Blog. There's something onomatopoeically disgusting to me about it. I can always imagine overhearing, "...man, Denise did so many tequila shooters at Senor Frog's last night that she blogged in her purse on the cab ride home. It was horrible," -or- "Hey- do you remember when we ended up bartending that Liberal party convention with crates of free vodka, and later, everyone had to blog at the same time, but all there was for you to blog into was one of those measuring cups to fill up an iron?" I say let's just call a self-serving, non-interactive online page of mostly text a Crappy Website and be done with it.

I'd like to share my methodology for international travel. I think the best way to go on a big trip is just to make up a destination where you might know someone, pick an arbitrary date some time in the future that you don't have to worry about (let's say July 16th for example) and then just talk out loud about it whenever anyone mentions traveling. Eventually, people are convinced you are going, and they'll remind you about things you have to do before you leave, and it pretty much takes care of itself.

I almost flew Kuwait airlines to Sri Lanka. Very nearly, but didn't. You see, I was digging through fares online after my initial travel agent quote had skyrocketed in the space of a month due to "fuel surcharges" (can't they just run jet engines on something like Mountain Dew? I say that because I just learned it retails for half the cost of bottled water at the Dorval airport. It must be take less effort to get it out of the mountains) and happened upon a cheap package laying over in Kuwait. Kuwait you say? It's exotic; why not!? In my reasoning, Kuwait was one of the wealthiest countries on the planet. Desert Dew is plentiful there. The cabins would be no doubt be opulently outfitted, and only 7 veils would separate coach from business class. I was moments away from confirming when I decided to look up some personal testimony. These are the kinds of things you could not do before the internet. You could basically ask your friend if they had flown on Kuwait airlines, and then they would say "No" and that would be it. But luckily, I am now absolutely aware of what people think. People are not big fans of Kuwait Airlines. At one site, after over 200 hundred postings, it averaged a popular score of one and a half stars out of five. Most people gave it zero. The reviews were so comically atrocious that I was compelled to read every single one.

LIST OF THINGS PEOPLE HAVE SAID ABOUT KUWAIT AIRLINES AT A SITE THAT REVIEWS AIRLINES:

"...staff unpleasant to say the least and the whole interior of the plane was horrible, panels loose, seats wouldn't stay upright and were ripped in many places. . . entertainment center was broken and had wires hanging out of it."

"never again"

"Kuwait Airways is the worst airline I have flown."

"This is the worst airline I have travelled over the last 35 years. "

"When is this airline going to be scrapped?"

"The crew on the flight from KWI-FRA seemed to have a contest about who is rudest to the passengers."

"my wife tore open the plastic wrapping around a blanket and found the blanket smelling. On opening the blanket we found it had fresh vomit on it!"

"Two hours into the flight the toilets were blocked and sewage water spilled out on the plane. Passengers and crew had to suffer for the next five hours all the stench and unclean environment. The flight attendants said this is a routine affair on this flight. "

"Next time I am walking to India."

"I will avoid KU from now on and in particular the A300 whose hold, and one would assume wiring and other lower hold equipment is now soaked with 50+ gallons of olive oil."

"After reading ur reviews, I was a bit worried about traveling by kuwait airlines. But the iraq war ensured that there were hardly any passengers from london to chennai. Had a great time."

So. . . I was obviously 50/50, though, in the end, decided to fly Delta>Vigin>Sri Lankan Air. I can only pray for the general septic integrity of my planes and hope that my next 27 hours in the air do not make me feel like blogging all over my lap. Here we go!