Vihara Maha Devi Park

Day 030 of Our Winter: When we saw sun this morning, we knew that the storm was finally gone.  We ate a leisurely breakfast.  As we'd been pretty much confined to the house during the recent cyclone, we ached to get out.  Jay suggested that he and I go to the Vihara Maha Devi Park.  It's a large park in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

We used the PickMe rideshare app and decided to go by tuk-tuk.  As it was a Sunday, the traffic would be light.  In fact, it was perfect taking us only around 20 minutes to get to the park that is fronted by the Colombo Town Hall opened in 1928.  

Jay and I had visited here once on my first visit to Sri Lanka in 1986.  I love Colombo because of the old, planned sections.  This park was originally laid out during the British period and was called Victoria Park.  During World War II, the area was occupied by the British Army and was used as a base by the Australian 17th Brigade.   During the 1950's it became a park again and later in the decade was renamed for Queen Viharamahadevi, the mother of the famous Sinhalese King Dutugamunu.  He reigned from 161 to 137 B.C.  The name change was a symbolic way to celebrate Sri Lanka's own history and culture.

The space is around 50 acres or 20.2 hectares in a beautiful part of Colombo called Cinnamon Gardens.

We spent a great morning under blue skies, so different from the recent days of unusual rain caused by the retreating cyclone.

Jay and I continued our walk by stopping at the Cenotaph War Memorial.  We walked onwards towards the edge of Biera Lake.  We entered the huge Central Colombo Mall and bought some soft drinks in a supermarket inside.

I have quite a number of other photos from our 5K walk, but I think I'll just use these fourteen images. They're from just the park. That's a large number for a single journal entry!

Life After the Cyclone

Day 029 of Our Winter:  I imagine that a lot of people are starting to clean up today. At around 5:30 am, Cyclone Ditwah continued north of the island of Sri Lanka. We didn't get much sun today but it wasn't hard to see the storm had passed. 

Things weren't affected much around the capital area. People were out shopping and the roads busy today. However, the electricity at the Minuwangoda house has been out for more than 30 hours. Trees have fallen on the wires along the Kopiwatte Road meaning that whole neighbhourhood is without power. Still.

Interestingly, here in Nugegoda, some guys came to fix a burnt out light street light bulb. This is not storm related because it was out the day before the storm arrived. Jay's elder sister said it hadn't needed to be changed for years. As there is so many crews out fixing storm related outages, I think they contracted the guys that came today. They asked if we had a mallet. He used a regular ladder and knocked out the IP TV for a few minutes while up on the pole. The real indicator was he had no gloves and little in the way of safety equipment. 

Still, we have little to complain about, especially considering the destruction encountered in other parts of the country.

 

Jay called the dental hospital and rescheduled yesterday's appointment for one at 13:00 today.  He was back in a jiffy as they only had to glue in his crown.

In other news, I was able to pay for my visa extension online today.  Jay wrote an email as he got his the other day and we'd filled out the online forms at the same time.  Now, I'm legal from December 2nd, one month after our arrival, until December 12th, when we head to Dubai for a couple of weeks.  

Jay and I irritatingly discovered this extension, unlike the original, is not multiple entry.  So, we essentially paid for two months worth of visa that will expire when we leave Sri Lanka after just 10 days!  We didn't luck out this time.  We have to apply and pay for a whole new one-month visa while in Dubai in order to come back here.

Sitting Out the Storm

 

Day 028 of Our Winter:  This is the second day that we stayed inside. Cyclone Ditwah has been dumping record amounts of rain on Sri Lanka. Extensive damage has occurred in the mountains to houses and infrastructure.  The coverage on local TV news has been extensive. Around 56 people are known to have died and approximately 20 people have been reported as missing.  

Cyclone Ditwah is on its way up to India skirting along the east coast of the island  That's the usual trajectory for the season and these storms usually cause flooding in Bangladesh. The severity and large affected areas make this one unusual.  It encircled the whole island.  This is an usual situation and the last storm of this magnitude occurred over twenty years ago.  Sri Lanka is often compared as being a bit smaller than the size of Ireland.

The area near the capital has been less affected than other regions.  Most businesses closed today and this meant Jay wasn't able to go in for the fitting of his dental crown.  We have had it easy here compared to those who have become homeless or worse.

 

Too Much Rain / A Dinner of String Hoppers

 

Day 027 of Our Winter:  Today has been a completely wet.  That is unsual here.  It can rain like hell for twenty minutes but often the sun returns soon afterwards.  The cyclones in the Indian Ocean have set rainfall records on the island of Sri Lanka. This is supposed to the most rain received in Sri Lanka since record-keeping started. This is because the entire island is receiving rain rather than during traditional years where two separate monsoon seasons, months apart, provide rainfall to the the east and west coasts. 

This area near the capital is probably the least affected. The news programs surely had lots of large-scale flooding videos. Dozens of people have lost their lives.

Our only inconvenience was we pretty much stayed put.

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I'll add a few photos of yesterday's dinner.  If you follow this journal regularly, you'll remember Sri Lankan hoppers in a recent entry.  Today, we had red-rice string hoppers.  Many people make traditional white ones too.  They are composed of the dough extruded into thin noodles on special 'trays'.  They're then steamed to make the thin, hand-held patties.  

Different foods can be eaten with them and they soak up liquids easily.  My plate is always spotless after eating string hoppers.  Tonight we had with a mackerel fish curry and cooked coconut with added dried shrimp, 

Getting Ready for Steaming  

Getting Ready for Eating

Go, Team, Go!

Day 026 of Our Winter: The television news was on last week and the Sri Lankan National Cricket Team lost against some team or another, perhaps Pakistan.  I watched the replay segments and noticed the uniforms worn by the team.  As well as some known endorsements, on their jerseys, I noticed a moose.

"That's odd," I thought, obviously aloud.  I wondered what company with that logo might have sponsored the team.  So I started doing a little searching.  No, it wasn't a Canadian company or business in northern Europe.  Moose, as it turns out, is a local company and the official clothing partner of Sri Lankan cricket.  This required a little more research.  

I had my AI provide a little background on the things I learned for you.  Click the link here:

Moose Clothing Company: A Homegrown Sri Lankan Essential

I found their online website and noticed the items were a good value.  They were sort of basic, everyday clothes but in a rainbow of colors.  So when we were in Colombo, we stopped at the Galle Face One mall at a flagship store location.  I found a jersey to my liking.  I also saw that the clothes were indeed export quality and pretty cheap. I bought a short-sleeved seersucker dress shirt and several tank tops too.

I never really owned a sports jersey before.  Now, what is cricket, again?

Walking the Colombo Fort, and the Galle Face

Day 025 of Our Winter:

 

Jay said, "Let's go to Colombo." And we did.  We always like to look around.  I've been visiting Sri Lanka since my first trip in 1986.  So, we go to see changes.  Colombo, a colonial city is well laid out with large boulevards and parks.  The center of things are near the port. It's crowded there. We chose the Fort Railway Station as a drop off in my PickMe ride share app.  It's the terminus station right in the center of things.

 

We had the driver drop us off exactly in front of the Fort Railway Station.  We peeked inside at the Victorian era ironwork and did notice many foreigners scurrying to trains to their vacation cities.  We walked across the pedestrian walkway and moved slowly into the thick of things.

   

We walked old, familiar roads.  The bustle of the Fort area is always a bit amazing and occasionally overwhelming.

 

Next, we walked past the aging Cargills Building that had once been THE department store in the country.  Today, it is sort of a sad shell of a place.  One remaining vestige of long-ago times is the modern Cargill Supermarkets found everywhere on the island.  One sort of convenience location was still inside.  A statue of Queen Victoria still looks down upon the former glories  I fear it may not last there a whole lot longer.  As is our custom now that the Pagoda is no longer around, we stopped inside for cool drinks.  One Elephant House brand Ginger Beer and a Cream Soda, please.

 

Then we headed towards the Galle Face Road and the ocean.  I could have added a whole lot of interesting photos here as the Colombo light house tower and former presidential residence hasn't moved an inch during the near forty years of my visits.

 

We walked past the Ceylinco building, once the tallest in the whole country.  We went to the Gall Face One Mall.  We passed the Hilton, Shangri-La, the Kingsbury, formerly an InterContinental.  We went past the twin towers of the World Trade Centre opened in 1997.  We passed the old Parliament Building from the 1930's.

 

Galle Face One:  This is a premier mall with all sorts of high-end shops that I don't know who really shops in.  I headed for the Moose Clothing Store.  But, I'll save that for discussion in a later journal entry.  We returned to the Galle Face green and the capital city's interface with the Indian Ocean.

 

We walked the Galle Face towards the iconic Galle Face Hotel.  We didn't get down to that end but sort of cut off our walking 'city tour' at nearly 6 km near the national flag.  

A new PickMe driver dropped us back off in Nugegoda in around a half hour.  We paid about US $3.50 with a substantial tip to the driver automatically through the app.  We had come back to the house in the air conditioned comfort of a Suzuki Wagon-R along the always-crowded boulevards of the part of Columbo once considered the suburbs.

A Cat in the Curry Leaf Tree and Other Things

 

Day 024 of Our Winter:  The events of the day sort of lent themselves to be presented as a list: 

1) Jay went to the Smile Dental Hospital at 9:15 am exactly one week after having his root canal. Today, one of his teeth was permanently filled, filed, and the area measured for his dental crown. The Zirconia crown is being created but may not be ready to be affixed until Friday or even next Monday.

2) Jay's sisters received their UAE visas. For the mid-December trip they needed rather special multiple entry ones. This is because we only stay one night in town before boarding the MS Euribia for a seven-night cruise. When boarding the ship we will be technically leaving Dubai. So when it docks upon our return, they will be entering the country again for an additional week.  Canadians automatically get free visas on arrival, so Jay and I don't require anything special.

3) We bought three nights in a hotel in Pattaya. Our second trip of this winter from Sri Lanka will be to Thailand.  We'll be spending a little time in Pattaya and Chiang Mai as well as a majority of the days in Bangkok. 

4) Jay and I completed our online applications for Sri Lankan visa extension. Our first month will end next week!  We have already been pre-approved and will receive back some information and a  request for payment in a few days. 

5) I used AI to create a nostalgic, upcountry image of Sri Lanka even though we're still down here in the heat by the coast.  Lipton has a special place in Sri Lanka's history.  You can look it up if you're thusly inspired.

 

Locating Images from 21 Years Ago

Day 023 of Our Winter:  As a general rule, I use photos or images taken the day that each journal entry is written. 

Today, I toyed with the idea of uploading the lab report PDF showing yesterday's normal blood A1c test. I had elevated glucose levels reported by this type of test since the late 2010s. Levels hovered around 6.0 to 6.2 more recently, with one 6.3 a few years back. The standard diagnosis for diabetes is a 6.5. Those days seem like history as I was a 5.8 when tested in April and it now sits at 5.5. That is a normal test result and due to my use of Ozempic. 

Yet, I decided instead to wait on that as we had plans to visit some relatives late this afternoon. Jay's sister here has some in-laws that live quite close. She's widowed but we planned a visit to some of her late husband's family. Indeed, we did. We talked and talked.  But no one thought take photos although there were at least a half dozen phones in the room at the time. 

After we got home I checked Flickr. I remembered that twenty years ago, I joined the photo sharing site and had uploaded some pictures taken in 2004 on a trip to Sri Lanka.  Indeed some of these folks were the ones we visited today. I am so lucky to have put so much of our photographic lives online. I fear that most people's jpg memories are stored on an inaccessible disc or storage device never to see the light of day. 

I downloaded a few and forwarded them to the folks via our devices.  These were included:

 

September 8, 2004 - Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage

September 12, 2004 - Galle Face Kite Festival

September 14, 2004 - Dehiwala Zoo