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Festivals and Pizza Hut

September 21st, 2011 cnjenk13

It has been about 4 weeks of me here in Sri Lanka. Already a lot has happened! On the first week I dived into learning Sinhala from both my host family as well as long six day a week three hour sessions of Colloquial Sinhala. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it could be though getting up early when still getting used to the time different zone was a bit difficult. I began also exploring slowly into Kandy and Kiribathkumbre. Being able to say even the simple little things in Sinhala was pretty useful though pointing and nodding seem to work too. The culture here is so much different than I am used to back in MA or even CT and to tell you the truth some of them I still don’t understand. Showing your knees or just any part of the leg higher than that is just a no-no. You wear skirts on a normal tight is out of the question. It different but it something I kind of expected. As far as food, NEVER thought I could get tired of rice. I figured rice and curry, two of my favorite foods, I can get used to this. Boy was I wrong. Three meals of rice and curry get a bit redundant. After almost week or two of just Sinhala class and constant rice I broke and had pizza. It is crazy how happy Pizza Hut made me and how much it made me miss home! You get variety in the states I never seem to appreciate that now I get when I bit into a oozy piece of cheese pizza. On that same day we saw a possession which we were saw Hindu devotional acts of self mortification, hooks dug into their backs, and some even hanging from frames of the same hooks. That is something you don’t see every day. Given that Sri Lanka is a fairly Buddhist country and Hinduism isn’t always welcomed with open arms. I also saw a Buddhist procession, called Pereahera which is almost like a parade to celebrate a temple that held the sacred tooth relic (one of Sri Lanka’s claims to fame). It was a great day!

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