Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Vignettes of Sri Lanka

Culture is a set of uncontested assumptions and expectations about the way things should be and people should behave. A blessing of travelling is realising that other countries are different. Sometimes these cross-cultural encounters can be amusing and endearing and other times they are unsettling.

duty-free shopping before customs at Colombo airport sells large refrigerators, ovens, ...
encountering an extremely political statement in a context that I don't normally encounter such statements...
a dead body washed up on the beach... no one seemed to care or want to get involved....
crazy tuk-tuk [3 wheeled taxis] drivers....
walking through a slum on the beach front...
a menu offering "a pot of Nescafe"...
selling baked goods out of a tuk-tuk....
miscalculating the exchange rate by a factor of 2.5 and thinking everything was rather expensive for such a poor country...
kids from a slum playing with homemade kites on the beach..
a KFC delivery motorbike...
losing my cashcard in an ATM machine..... getting it back several days later...
more crazy tuk-tuk drivers...
in the middle of a seminar a man came in and handed out coffees and sweet rolls...
visiting an orphanage....
our taxi driver stopped mid-journey so he could visit a Buddhist temple we passed by...

For vignettes of a previous trip to Serbia see here.

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