A Few More Photos of Colombo

Now this is rush hour in Colombo (Thursday evening, 1730).

And this.

The reach of Bollywood celebrities - Aamir Khan sells mobiles here. (A passerby stared curiously at me, wondering what the heck I saw worth clicking in a roadside poster.)

And Aamir Khan isn't the only one. Priyanka Chopra and Shilpa Shetty stared haughtily down at me from the cosmetics aisle of the Arpico supermarket.


I snagged my bag on a protruding screw inside this autorickshaw. I realised that this sort of workmanship is perfectly acceptable in India and Sri Lanka, but Australians would probably make an OH&S (Occupational Health and Safety) issue out of it.


There's a beautiful Buddha shrine on my street (Park Street), just a couple of minutes' walk from the hotel.


I murmured a 'thank you' to him. This trip has been pure magic.

Evening Walk in Downtown Colombo

The evening was cooler and a lot less sultry, so it was quite pleasant to walk. By the way, this is the sign at the end of my street. The Sri Lankans seem to have mastered the Three Language Formula :-).

I went to a nearby KFC where I found to my pleasant surprise that veggie burgers were available. KFC in Australia doesn't serve veggie burgers but KFC in Dubai did when I was there in 1995-98. It says something about demographics and consumer demand, but I'm not sure what. The burger cost LKR 255, and the counter guy asked if I wanted cheese. I said yes, and the price then came to LKR 285. The burger was only half the size of the Hungry Jack's veggie burger in Sydney, so the PPP equation really holds. For the price of a single veggie burger in Sydney, you can get two half-size ones in Colombo. Hats off to The Economist!

I've been seeing another amusing sight on the roads - buses with the name "Lanka Ashok Leyland" on them. This is amusing because I grew up seeing "Ashok Leyland" buses in India, and I learnt only much later that this was a joint undertaking between Ashok Motors and British Leyland. Now as the model has travelled further, the name has been further localised by prefixing "Lanka" to it.



Looks like the long arm of the Internet equalises the whole world. Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, they're everywhere!


A petrol bunk. Nothing special about it. It's just slightly different from anything I've seen before.


This sign caught my attention for a reason. Long ago, when on a tourist bus in Singapore with my parents, my father pointed to a sign on a ministry building and remarked about the difference between the Tamil word for "ministry" as used in Singapore and in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It was spelt "Amaichchu" (அமைச்சு) in Singaporean Tamil, while in Tamil Nadu, the word is "Amaichchagam" (அமைச்சகம், with the 'g' pronounced almost like 'h'). It was interesting to see from the sign below that Sri Lankan Tamil also has it as "Amaichchu". When it comes to Tamil usage, is the mother country out of step? I wonder how Malaysian Tamils spell the word.


Bollywood-style film posters in Sri Lanka! I love these familiar-yet-different experiences. It turns out this is a hit movie (Mahindagamanaya).


Then I went back to Arpico (the supermarket) for some shopping. I bought some tea for my relatives in India when I go there next week. It was at the shopping centre that I saw my first Buddhist monk in the flesh! He was in brick red robes and was probably doing some shopping himself. I saw another person approach him and bow to him, and I heard the monk say something with the word "Deerghaayu" (Sanskrit for "long life") in it. I love it when I can pierce the veil of another culture, even if only for a moment, and understand what's happening. I'm also grateful that through spending my formative years in India, I've been able to pick up so much linguistic and cultural background without conscious effort. I'm sure if I go to Pakistan, all the conscious and unconscious Hindi/Urdu learning will similarly pay off. I remember reading the phrase "India's cultural penumbra" in some article somewhere that talked about the entire region from Africa to Southeast Asia. It's at moments like this that its meaning comes home to me with full force.

I also bought a T-shirt at Arpico because I found it very interesting. It's part of a series of artifacts labelled "Mother Sri Lanka" (like "Mera Bharat Mahaan", I guess). What I thought was clever was the way they spelt the three words in the three languages of the country - English, Tamil and Sinhalese. In fact, it was the red Tamil "Shree" that first caught my eye.



"Help spread the message of pride and honour of a great nation by purchasing this product."

Done!

Lunchtime Walk in Downtown Colombo

I took a walk around noon to see some sights. It was hot and muggy. I think it must have rained recently.

There were soldiers standing outside my hotel and I saw them wave down an autorickshaw and ask the passenger some questions, but they took no notice of me. It was a reminder that this is a nation that has very recently emerged from a civil war and the constant threat of terrorist violence.

My driver of last night had recommended a small restaurant near my hotel, so I walked there.

The Sri Krishna Villas (double L!) is a fairly downmarket Tamil restaurant, but like a western tourist, I was interested in an "authentic cultural experience" complete with cuisine. I ordered a standard meal plate. There was no spoon provided, so I washed my hands and went for it. I don't eat with my fingers even at home, so this would have been amusing to my family :-). Surprisingly, there was no yoghurt or buttermilk to have as the last rice course, but there was a sweet dish. The bill came to LKR 115, perhaps AUD 2.30 in PPP terms. Cheap at the price, but it wasn't a great meal all told, and I probably won't go there again.

It was fairly hot and uncomfortable to walk in the sun, but I wanted to buy a street map of Colombo. Again, surprisingly, this proved very hard to do. I was directed from place to place, but no one seemed to have street maps. The last place I visited was a supermarket (Arpico), which seemed very like a supermarket in India. There were guards milling around the supermarket, so I didn't dare take any pictures.

Some street scenes were amusing, and I snapped them. I find it surreal when things are familiar yet different, like my trip to Mauritius in 1991.

The Sinhalese script looks hauntingly familiar, like I should know it. It looks South Indian (although I'm told Sinhalese is related to Oriya rather than to any of the South Indian languages), but I can't read it for the life of me, though I can read two South Indian scripts (Kannada and Tamil) and sort of decipher a third (Telugu).

There are autorickshaws on the streets, just like in India, and they're made by Bajaj too. People refer to them as tuk-tuks, but then the driver of a passing tuk-tuk called out to me, "Auto?", just like in India.

I thought this poster ad for a DVD was interesting.

This is a nice banyan tree at one end of Park Street, where my hotel is.

This is the entrance to Park Street hotel.

The hotel has a colonial style. I think I can understand why the British colonised our countries in the first place ;-).

And this is my room. Ver-ry nice.

Sri Lanka - First Impressions

I'm in Sri Lanka, on a trip combining business with pleasure. Here are some initial impressions.

When departing Sydney for Colombo (via Singapore), I was struck by two curious facts. One, no currency exchange counter had Sri Lankan rupees. Two, neither of the two bookstores I saw in the airport had travel guides on Sri Lanka. Mind you, there are travel guides for virtually every country from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe and even for cities (San Francisco, for example), but the omission of an entire country was very strange. I put these down to the fact that Sri Lanka is only just emerging as a travel destination after decades of civil war. Let's see how things look next year.

[I did manage to find a travel guide for Sri Lanka at Singapore airport, but the currency exchange counters there had no Sri Lankan rupees either. I had to wait till I reached Colombo for that.]

Coming to currency exchange, an Australian dollar (AUD) trades for about 110 Sri Lankan rupees (LKR), but that still gave me no indication of what I could consider cheap or expensive by local standards. [1 AUD is currently 46 INR (Indian rupees).] Remembering the informal Purchasing Power Parity calculator of The Economist, I asked the driver of the airport pickup car about the price of a burger at McDonalds. He said it was between LKR 250 and 300. A burger in Sydney costs between AUD 5 and 6, so that's a factor of 50. Taking the official exchange rate into account, it means one can buy two burgers in Colombo for the price of one in Sydney. In other words, I should expect things to be half as expensive in Colombo when I convert their prices to Australian dollars.

Cultural curiosities: As an Indian emigré in Australia, I'm gifted with two lenses with which to see the world. My first impression of the streets of Colombo (at least at midnight, which is when I was driven from the airport to the hotel) was that they were definitely not of First World standards, but seemed far cleaner and in better condition than roads in many Indian cities. (Having said that, the roads in Chennai have been getting better the last few times I was there.)

We were averaging 80 kmph, but my driver Harish (short for Harishchandran), said it was impossible to do more than 25 kmph during rush hour.

Harish, as it turned out, was a Tamil, but after an initial attempt to converse with me in Tamil, he decided it was better to fall back to English! I realised the truth of George Bernard Shaw's comment about England and America. Indian Tamils and Sri Lankan Tamils are two people separated by the same language!

Three are huge Buddha statues at prominent roundabouts in the city, which I have never seen anywhere else. The airport also featured sayings and slogans based on Buddhism, and I realised I have never before been to a Buddhist country. [India is culturally diverse but overwhelmingly Hindu, Australia is similarly diverse but predominantly Christian, and even relatively cosmopolitan Dubai is unmistakeably Muslim.]

Talking of Muslim, I saw many groups of young men playing cricket on the main roads at one o'clock in the morning! Harish explained that these were Muslims, and since the month was Ramadan, they were enjoying life at night (when there were no fasting restrictions). The next day was a Sunday as well, so it was Saturday Night Fever for these youths.

The next few posts will have more of my impressions as I see more of Colombo.