Weekend Away, the Creation of Friendships, Tourist Traps, Fuck the Dutch. (Part 2)

So we arrive at our hotel after some convincing losing of money, and I find myself sleeping in the same room as Jenni and Juliette, but as is the way of things being put in the single bed that was hastily set up that is as hard as fucking granite. Realising I'd be getting no sleep I go upstairs to find myself some beer to make sleeping easier. Gishan meets me half way and tells me to "rush upstairs because the girls are very eager to meet the only boy volunteer" And I then meet the dutch.

All friendly enough, they yell and scream in a manner that really made me wish I'd just gone straight to bed. I grab a beer and push it down my throat as fast as possible so that I don't have to suffer these screamed pidgin english conversations longer than necessary. Whether or not they were attempting to impress me or they were always this boisterous I may never know. I sit there for a while listening to them prattling on, I head downstairs quick as possible, leaving the ever eager Gishan to entertain them. Jenni meets me at the door. "so what are they like?"
"Full of themselves. And the bar still didn't have a scotch"
"Maybe tommorow."
Tucking myself in to a fitful few hours sleep, the foreboding laughter of 6 loud young dutch girls haunts me as a sign of things to come.

The rest of the next day is hardly worth mentioning. Driving, boredom, heat. That night though at the new hotel, beer and arrak are flowing steadily, I talk to the staff there a bit. We begin talking about Buddhism. He mentions the five rules he must follow. "whats the last one again?" I ask.

"Abstaining from alchohol" he says, grinning, as he takes another swig of his Arrak and cola.

The rest of the trip was uneventful and tourist trappy. Me Juliette and Jenni head to the Blue Water hotel, a little bio-dome of Western sensibilities for those that want to go to Sri Lanka without the inconvenience of seeing the country, for a drink. "Scotch?" I ask the bartender. "Double, sir. On the rocks"
"I could kiss you. How much?"
"1000 Rupee"

Western place, Western prices. Sometimes though, it's good to feel like a tourist.

Music of the Now is Everyday by Jamiroquai.

Weekend Away, the Creation of Friendships, Tourist Traps, Fuck the Dutch. (Part 1)

This weekend I shed my protective volunteer coating and left the strip of road between my home and the IT centre and headed to Kandy Mountain, a trip organised by my host father, Charley. Yes, I did think this situation sounded somewhat familiar. In this car were some great people that were soon to become my main friendship group. Juliette, a cute Swiss girl working in an orphanage not all that far from me, Jennie, a young lady escaping the grind of her homeland, the UK, to work in a tsunami camp, Sonia, an intrepid explorer from France who's been in more countries than my entire family put together who works at the IT centre with me, and Julia, a nurse from germany who came to work in a womans hospital here.

This group had all the makings of a hilarious multicultural sitcom, with me wishing I was more Polish than Australian so I could make a vague Nazi joke to get Julia to laugh so that I could eye her in an intensely angry way. All very talkative at the start, two hours into the car ride the novelty wore off, as did the chatting. Five hours of driving in and we were just about ready to throw ourselves out an open window for the brief reprieve of rushing air before our skin was stolen by the poorly maintained asphalt below.

We arrived in Kandy (Mountain) to find it was nothing more than the usual tourist trap. Our young at heart thirty something guide, Gishan rushed us into a "cultural dance experience" where some people who looked like they had just learnt the dance five minutes before they went on stage after a few too many shots of arrack attempted to entertain us with what for all I knew or cared for was just an attempt at my wallet. Sure enough, ten minutes in two smiling female dancers came down from the stage with two large boxes displaying "TIP" in front, winking at some of the older westerners in an attempt to garner more cash from their sex starved beady eyed patrons.

Side note here. Before this little dance experience or whatever these people call a scam nowadays, I had not seen a single westerner that wasn't a volunteer. all of a sudden, I was surrounded by all sides with about twenty of them, even if that dancers didn't completely suck, i would just have been too busy being amazed at the sudden influx of tourists! I admit I'm not exactly staying in a tourist spot, volunteers don't generally find work in grand hotels, but it made no sense to me whatsoever.

It was like they had all come out of the woodwork, straying from their little resort bubbles to come and attempt to mingle with the locals in their polo shirts with their poorly pronounced Sinhalese, pretending that they even give a toss about the culture here, viewing the entire world through their camera lense so that they too can prove to their friends back home that they are "worldly" and "well-traveled". Meanwhile I couldn't stand the place and wanted nothing more than to head back home for a proper meal and for a street full of locals that smiled at me as i walked down the familiar path to the IT centre.

After this little cultural endeavor we headed to the fabled "temple of the tooth" which was an amazing site of cultural and religious significance, now filled with fat tourists and crying babies that push and shove and yell around the very few actual followers that vainly try to pray in peace. Not to mention the huge military force that seems to have entrenched themselves there for "our security". The temple itself was as amazing as I had hoped, and on occasion when things lined up right and enough spoilt brats stopped bitching for ice cream at one moment, you really caught the serene magnificence of the area.

I would honestly love to keep writing but I haven't felt this tired since my little foray into Kuala Lumpur

Teaching without Speaking and Lessons of My Own.

Just came back from my the first half of my first day as a volunteer at the projects abroad IT learning centre in Wadduwa, Sri Lanka, a quaint little couple of rooms with computers of varying quality watched over by the permanent teacher, a friendly lady in her 30's that can almost understand what I'm saying. The IT I'm teaching is very basic, word formatting, microsoft office, etc etc intertwined with the very constant challenges of communication, old unreliable technology and power that is about as stable as this country's political climate.

For instance, I am called upon by a student having trouble with a "disk". I walk over to see something in her hand that takes me a second to recognise. a floppy disk. I haven't seen one of those things for a decade. I was about to suggest that she ask another teacher when it suddenly didn't matter because the power suddenly went out, meaning I didn't have to answer, but my download of avast anti virus was sadly killed in transit to the lab's only internet ready computer.

What have I learnt about Sri Lanka so far? A lot of things.

1. Do not talk about the government
2. DO NOT talk about the government
3. Watch out for stray dogs
4. Watch out of stray cows
5. Watch out for stray policemen
6. You can get out of trouble with the police by being rich.
   
   this particular rule was hilariously made clear to me by my taxi driver. I asked him "Are the police any good?" and he replied "Good? They're great! Pay them and you get out of anything!"
7. Smile at everyone
8. Don't leave your passport in your taxi
9. Accept that you look and act odd to everyone else, and that so long as you follow rule 7 no one will really care
10. make sure you have water at every meal unless you enjoy your mouth burning like the cook used sulphuric acid as a garnish
11. Drink arrack, not toddy. arrack is refined toddy, toddy is rancid and makes you horribly sick. luckily I didn't have to learn this one from experience.

and that, my friends, is all for now, I'm off to teach people to not suck at computers.

Music of the Now is Morning Glory by Jamiroquai.

Fear and Loathing in Colombo, Chasing the 19th, the Only White Guy in the World

I have reached my destination after a 10 hour wait at Kuala Lumpur Airport, after ordering so many drinks that nearing the end of my stay all I had to do was sit down and the bartender would pour me a scotch. My destination being a lovely little place called Sri Lanka that I feel after a week I'll will quite comfortably call home. The previously mentioned culture shock hit hard though, the moment I got on my second plane and realised that atleast a quarter of the women were wearing bhurkas and the rest bar maybe 2 were covering their heads. Not to mention that I was an oddity here, the lone westerner. The white menace, possibly. As soon as the seat belt sign was turned off, Kids started running about taking peaks at me and running away giggling, then half way through the flight becoming game enough to ask my name and where I was from.

Upon saying that i was Australian, everyone, quite literally, within earshot looked up and smiled at me. When asked what drink I wanted, I opted for a local liquor, Arrack, my father's signature drink when he travelled to Sri Lanka, and the hostess got into a conversation about how I should have it and what else I should try and do, whilst the kids continued to smile and wave at me. I got on this plane alienated and scared, and came off it feeling like a celebrity. also, I generally hate kids, but Sri Lankan kids are absolutely adorable. As I type this, one of my host family's friend's young boys is sitting next to me, and waving whenever I look at him. He speaks not a word of english so this is our only form of communication.

Colombo is like a Giant shopping mall, if all the shops were open air, all the food likely to disease you, and it was patrolled by easily bribed armed policemen with a picture of the dictator of the month on every corner. The point being made here is that there is nothing to compare it to. I managed to screw up fairly badly on the first night, as luck would have it, losing my passport, bank card, and any and all confidence I had in the trip. Apparently they have been located and are being returned to me tommorow, and I learnt a valuable lesson from all this.

I am a retard, and should stop being a retard.

Host family is fantastic, I lucked out with a house full of Sri Lankans that have a decent grasp of the english language, and their son is also an avid techie, the mother is a great cook, and they grow coffee in their backyard. living the dream.

My work placement involves teaching basic computer literacy to people of varying ages, and it has been suggested to me I think of my own classes. I am thinking Visual Basic to get them started on programming but would love suggestions about what you guys think i should do. Anyway, this is dom, still alive and signing out.

"Barkeep, whats the drinking age in this country?" "20" "whatever, get me a beer"

So began my half awake, addled journey into true autonomy in a country that doesn't really care that I'm here, where most of the people at best can speak a broken sentence to me and an airport to get lost in the size of a small city. This is merely a pit stop on my way to Sri Lanka, the real adventure, but the culture shock starts here.

Not particularly wanting to get sloshed, I felt it best if I just had the one breakfast beer to wash away an incredibly uncomfortable, turbulent flight. Sleep, whenever it rared its deceitful head, was rudely interrupted by shakes and warnings from the captain to "not be alarmed" as I wondered maybe this time we'd lost altitude and not regain it.

My time here has shown me the meaning of alienation so far, though I imagine that once i get in contact with my host family I'll be taught what it means to be a part of something again. I hope so.

A packed airport can be a lonely place when you don't know who speaks what you consider to be the lingua franca...

Two Days to Takeoff, Bags Packed, Things in Order, Still Freaking the Fuck Out.

(Music of the Now: with each new post, I'll be adding a song to my playlist that I feel defines the mood I'm in and my trip in general, viewable by scrolling to the bottom of the blog. I apologise for the inevitable poor quality that some of these songs will be in, I'm working on it.) (EDIT: Using another provider now, let me know if anyone has any issues with it.)

So here we are, the story all the way from seeing this program and saying "hey that sounds like fun" to almost being aboard a plane heading to a place that some people can't wait to get away from fast enough, it's been a journey in and of itself. But now the cards are on the table, I'm going, and god knows what I'll even be up to in the first week, or first DAY even. Too many uncertainties. Don't like that one bit.

I'll be heading first to Kuala Lumpar Airport, staying there for 10 hours making sure that none of my shit gets stolen whilst waiting for my connecting flight to my final destination. From the time I board the plane to the time I exit the airport in Sri Lanka, I am very much alone. This period of travel is more daunting to me than the rest of the trip. For those that know me they will understand that I am far from the most organised person in the world (for those that don't know me, hello my name is Dom and I'll be your Hunter S. Thompson wannabe today.)

With luck I won't be lost, arrested, taken hostage, get too drunk at the bar and miss my flight, break anything, insult anyone too powerful or generally make too much a dick of myself. 10 hours in a country, nay, an Airport that I can't legally leave. I sure bloody hope they have an arcade.

I'm going to miss you all very much, I'll see you when i get back, please watch this blog as often as you can so that someone knows if I go missing (just kidding(maybe)) and comment so that I know that I'm not just writing this thing for myself! I'll attempt a meaningful post every Friday, but will have lots of short posts ranging from what I ate that liquefied my bowels today to asking for legal advice, so keep in touch! Until then, concerned readers, I bid thee adieu!

I'm GONE!

Travel Confirmed, Deportation Assumed, Budget Too Big to Fail

In 9 days from the time of this post, I will be on a plane heading to Kuala Lumpur on my way to the teardrop of Asia, Sri Lanka. The plan: meet up with my volunteer coordinator, who will then hack my phone so that it can be used locally. I must AT ALL TIMES suggest to airport personnel in Sri Lanka that I am not a volunteer, and am not at all attempting to help their people. Why? I don't have a god-damned clue. Regardless it scares the crap out of me.

I'll meet my host family at their humble home in a small village just outside the capital city of Colombo, and the day after I arrive, I'll be working five days a week for two months as a volunteer IT teacher. Meanwhile, I get the weekends off where I'll be finding my own way to the capital, and finding/creating new and exciting ways to waste my $2000 AUS budget that is supposed to last me two months, in two weeks.

I'll attempt to update this thing as often as I can, so long as I don't get arrested/taken hostage by the Tamal Tiger remnants. Once I find out what my net availability is like, I'll set up some kind of timetable. Until then, (comparatively) safe travelling!