“Did you see the elephants?” Amitha asked me this morning. The power had gone out and we were taking a break out on the balcony, a futile attempt to avoid the heat.

I gave him a confused look from the hammock in which I was perched, never quite trusting that I had bridged the language barrier. He, however, had no problem reading my face. “In Kandy, at the Temple for the Tooth.”

“Oh,” I said, remembering that Kandy was famous for elephants. With one foot idly draped over the side, I rocked the hammock hoping for a breeze. “Huh. I didn’t see any elephants.”

They were shocked. Everyone jumped to explain where the elephant was and to show their surprise at missing such a massive animal, let alone a cornerstone of Kandy sight-seeing.

“Well, it wasn’t there.” I replied, after I was positive that I understood its standard location. I wasn’t sure at first. But really, how does one miss an elephant?

The whole notion of elephants here in Sri Lanka has been a bit unexpected. Most people are aware that there are elephant preserves. This week I will even be visiting an elephant orphanage. However, the blend of religion into animal deities sometimes results in unexpected outcomes. Take the cow, for example, a Hindi deity, commonly seen feasting on road side garbage heaps. Elephants, representatives of Ganesh, have a special place.

Approximately two weeks ago, during yet another break out on the balcony, we were talking about exotic foods. We were teasing Anjuna about his love of dogs, to which he indicated his preference that they be cooked. Sushi led to snake, and snake lead to beef, and the journey down the slippery slope began.

“So, do you ever eat elephant?” Kara asked. The boys were silent.

“Like when they are old?” Kara quickly added. The boys exchanged a silent yet meaningful glance. The silence took on a tense air.

“I mean, after they are done working,” Kara continued. I looked around for a shovel.

“No!” Anjuna cried out.

“Never, no.” Amitha said at the same time.

It was only at this point that I understood their former silence as horror.

I wasn’t quite sure what to say. However, I wasn’t about to let such a golden opportunity in the ongoing rivalry pass by. I looked at Kara and said, “Yeah, I think they used the cross for the barbeque.”

“The key to comedy,” my high school drama teacher, Robin Edwards, would say, “is repetition.” Ever since our faux pax, Kara and I have teased the boys endlessly about eating elephants. It is always done in an exaggeratedly false manner, in order to make light of our prior insensitivity. However, today when a game of cricket was proposed as a means to pass the time, Amitha said we would need something for goal posts.

“Elephants!” we cried.

I’m not sure if Robin was right. The boys didn’t think it was funny.

From the moment I touched down in Bangkok, I have been fascinated with brand identity here in Asia. I really just don’t get it. It started when I hopped in a cab for the Grand Palace and saw a billboard for Sony. It was simple a very large Sony logo. That was it.

Last weekend while in Kandy, just having recovered from my massage, I was walking down Dalada Vidiya when I heard a familiar sound that tickled at my memory of a distant past. I followed the music around the corner from the bookstore where I had just discovered LT, the Colombo expat guide to life, and the solution to the Sri Lankan plague of obesity, Atkins for Life. There source of the music was a Food City grocery store and a KFC (joined from the inside, of course). The music? The Backstreet Boys, of course. I couldn’t help but laugh, but was able to restrain myself from busting a move. Ice-cream cones, however, are 15 cents, so me and my dehydrated self waltzed through the front door.

Inside the front door was a small but over commercialized booth behind which a DJ was mixing my high-school memories. As I walked through the store trying to find some cold bottled water, I noticed sales people engaging customers, and passing out samples. I didn’t spend too much time looking, but did notice that their hats were all en-blazed with the logo “Prima!”

Water purchased, and Ice cream in hand, I sank into an air-conditioned seat, grateful for the temporary reprieve. It was only then that I glanced at the DJ’s booth again. The “Prima!” logo large over his head, I couldn’t avoid the shock at the text below: “Softer, creamier butter!”

All around the store were workers for the promotion passing out samples of butter in small paper cups. The Food City customers took the samples graciously, tasting them thoughtfully, and smiling with approval. As if a promotion for butter wasn’t bizarre enough, there wasn’t a cracker in sight.

Our hotel in Kandy was gorgeous. Twenty-five dollars got us a room with a view in an old colonial house with impossibly high ceilings and an impossibly stunning view of the hills surrounding this graceful town. There was one problem: mosquitoes. Kara had bargained for three mosquito coils, but later informed me that they don’t really work. “Well then,” I said, on our way back from a surprisingly good dinner of Chinese food, “let’s just try and kill them all.” And so Kara and I, tired from the day, did what any expats on vacation would do. We went on an good-old-fashioned mosquito hunt!

The next morning after a stunning two course breakfast with excellent coffee, fruit, eggs and toast, Kara took off to church, and I, wanting to keep a best-friend tradition alive, despite the country, went to get a massage. After all, how often are you in Sri Lanka and can get an Ayurvedic massage? I spent the rest of the day covered, literally head to toe, in oil.

Later that day, while on the train back to Colombo, Kara looked at me alarmed. “What is that?”, she said looking at the side of my head. Not certain if she should risk contact with the offending sight, I wiped some sweat from the part of my face apparently responsible for the duress, only to find my hand, well, green. “Oil,” the masseuse had said earlier, as he reached for the next in a succession of vials that were used, “Very good quality. Smell nice, no?” Apparently that was not the only indicator of its quality.

“You happy?” the masseuse had asked when my hour was over. The question seemed a strange invitation for an evaluation of the massage. I had said yes, and of course it was true. But add some humidity, dirt, and a lot of walking and sweating, and I think my answer had changed by mid-afternoon.

This past weekend during our escape to Kandy, we had the great luck of visitng the Peradeniya Botanic Gardens, Sri Lanka’s Nation Garden. You should really look at the gallery for the most phenomenal pictures. While it is hard in the tropics not to just accept the fact that you have no idea what you are looking at, botanically speaking, here at the gardens there were maps, plaques, and more, all to give us a hand. Ignoring the cannon ball tree, enormous fruit bats, Orchid House, and the irresistible hunt for the sausage tree, the highlight of the gardens is a ficus. As we came around the bend, Kara excitedly pointed it out. “Isn’t it amazing?” “I guess so,” I said, feeling a bit botanically gracious. I guess it was a pretty tree. “I mean its all one tree,” Kara continued. I was a bit confused, “Is that large for a ficus? Do you just find it aesthetically pleasing?” As we walked over to a cafe to get lunch, I could tell Kara was a bit deflated at my lack of enthusiasm. While she excused herself to the restroom, I casually thumbed through Lonely Planet to the section on the gardens. “The ficus, covering 6 hectares, stands as the nations botanical gem”, it said. Something was wrong. I looked back out at Kara’s tree and noticed that the green hill behind it was not a hill at all.

I made an executive decision. I needed an out. While logistically realizing that I had been working around the clock in a climate that is not very supportive of such ideas, I had not realized that emotional implications. I was getting very frustrated with Sri Lanka. When the internet dropped into total failure at the end of the week, I decided it was time to leave Seeduwa. I was in a Sri Lanka, it was time to do something!

I informed Kara that we were going to Kandy, and the next morning at 9AM we caught a bus for the Colombo train station. Dad would be proud, as should everyone else. This was my luggage. I slipped it in Kara’s backpack, tucked a book under my arm and we were off. An hour later we had boarded a 2nd class train for a long 3 hour mountain assent.

Kandy is in the central part of Sri Lanka, about 115km inland, and has a population of about 120,000. The geography is predominantly hilled, with endless houses tucked around ever ridge and in every valley. Supposedly locals refer to it as Maha Nuwara (Great City), but I never saw any evidence of it. Both the boys, however, seemed very excited at my choice for a weekend jaunt.

As we boarded the very crowded train, it was clear that a seat was not in our future. A little frustrated at the prospect of standing for 3 hours, neither Kara nor I had any clue as to our good fortune. Soon after the train started, a very kind man invited me to sit on the floor of the car next to him, as he sat, feet dangling out the train car door. He began pointing out the towns we were passing, and we quickly took to finding them on my map, tracing the route across the rice patties towards the mountainous center of the island. It was only a matter of time before he invited Kara, surely presuming she was my wife and that we were the strangest looking couple he had ever seen, to take his place and sit next to me. Feet dangling out of the train door, we would lean out with childlike glee, urging the train to faster speeds and greater heights.

Copyrights sort of cease to exist once you leave America. Well, perhaps their stability in the US isn’t that stable to begin with. At any rate, despite the slow internet connections, I have been downloading some of my favorite shows, as well as some of my least favorites.

TV is a strange and mythical beast in my mind. As many may know, my family didn’t have a TV in the house until I was seven or eight. However, even after an undersized screen appeared is the enormous cavity in the family room, intended for a big screen TV, it’s power cord typically was encased with in a strange box, preventing it’s use.

This lack of media, and God forbid, too much fresh air has resulted in a surprising social handicap of which my friends enjoy taking advantage. Comments such as “He drove around in a train?” and “Who is Gary Colman anyway?” are not as rare as one might hope.

What I did lack in TV, I made up with in video games. I remember one summer taking an ordinary kitchen knife and witling a hole in the TV’s power lock. The whole, just big enough to allow the electrical prongs out, gave me complete dominion over the TV, but with the desired anonymity. I think I pretended to be sick during a lot of family outings that summer.

Despite my parent’s best efforts, however, here I am, completely plugged in and watching TV. The Olympics in Torino started just days before I left the country, and I wasn’t able to see the opening ceremonies. So here is a thanks to that anonymous Canadian who recorded CBC’s coverage and posted it on the internet.

It turns out that there aren’t that many Americans in the Parade of Nations. Or, at least if there are, no one else besides us seems to care. It was interesting to here the light foreign banter between the two broadcasters, discussing their favorite aspects of Italian culture.

A recent family poll revealed that most of us would like to visit Italy in the near future. But with my mother’s recent trip in mind, I could help but chuckle at a conversation one claimed to have had with Pavarotti.
“Pavarotti,” the broadcaster said, or so I imagine, “what do you prefer, red wine or white?”
“I,…” he replied, giving ample time for dramatic flair, “am an Italian man! I only drink white wine when we are out of red!”

It seems I need to work on my palate.

“How is a Windows Domain like a cult?”, Kevin asked me far to late in the night for him to still be awake (midday for me!).

“Oh dear…”, I muttered in reply.

“If you join one you loose your identity, and if you try to leave you’re screwed.”

If you got that joke, or even still care, kudos to you. Otherwise, abandon all hope at the door.

In a gregarious act of ignorance, truely the source of most of my computer problems, I removed a computer from a network domain without reseting the password for the local computer’s non-domain admin account. Ugg.

Sort of funny – I am the one who is supposed to know everything, and what do I do? In a coun try without any resources, no reliable internet connection, not even a Windows CD to rebuild the machine with, I lock myself in a digital room and throw away the key. To make matters worse, I did this all in the few seconds it took while leaning over an engineers shoulder. He got a long lunch.

Windows has tight security, and everything I found to break password was either hundreds of dollars, or non-existant. And then:

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

It is a linux based boot disk that will fork into the user accounts on a Windows computer and let you change anything. Got to love that windows security. Take that Kevin!

“Problem refers to a situation, condition, or issue that is unresolved or undesired.” – Wikipedia

There is that common question that I keep having to field: “How is it?” The hot answer has gotten cold, and so I find myself commenting on technology. Work is not going well, and while I have done my best to be deferential to a culture to which I am a guest, I finally snapped.

Simply put, the Internet does not work. We moved the offices to this house in Seeduwa because it was the only reasonable place in which we could get broadband internet access. But the access is shaky, and I have yet to be able to transfer all of the files I need from the U.S. As you can see, the wiring leaves much to be desired. (This particular example is how our phone is connected to the splicer.)

Ignoring the modem/router unit which is giving me error messages in French, and enough configuration options to hang myself with, very frequently the problem is simply that a connection can not be established with the ISP. When a connection does come through, it lasts for 5 minutes before crashing into a never ending cycle of failed connection attempts. While I am sure this is boring to read, it is even worse to experience. I have spent more time trying to get a network connection than any other task. The bulk of my time has been spent trying to get the internet connection to stabilize, while realizing that it is completely out of my control. This morning I came unglued when not only had the internet connection gone down, but it had rippled back into the office network, preventing the computers from connecting to each other.

(more…)

“This is about the only place in the house,” Kara said the first night I arrived, placing my cup on a shelf in the kitchen, “that isn’t infested with cockroaches.”

Lovely… Welcome to Sri Lanka!

I can deal with a lot, but I have had some surprising reactions, and some fantastic discoveries over the past couple of weeks. There are the obvious notables, such as cats and dogs running around with no one treating them as pets (Anjuna seemed annoyed and confused at the idea, although he was familiar with it). There are a surprsing number of cats, a good number of which are kittens, near the house.

For the benifit of the breed aware, half of them look like a tabby/bengal mix, while the others look like calicos, with a strong emphasis on the white and orange. All of them look scrawny. Anjuna was suprised when I told him I had a cat (“Blue?“), but was quick to tell me that a friend of his had 6 dogs. I got the impression that Anjuna didn’t make house calls very often.

There are bugs, of course. I was glad to usher a spider out of my bed a few night back, and was grateful that this unexpected beauty to the right didn’t put me into a hospital bed when I almost walk straight into his web while getting out of a trishaw in Negumbo last weekend.

While in America I do my best to live in karmatic harmony with all the little creatures loved by Mother Earth. Here it is war. Mosquitoes are the worst. Dengue fever is hitting a lot of local ex-pats (at least from what Kara says), and I am not taking any chances. The first time I went after a mosquito I barely nicked it before it exploded all over my shorts. I was caught somewhere between the horror of having killed the bug and the horror of now having to wash my shorts as the morbid delight, akin to a 12-year-old boy with a magnifying glass, took hold.

And then there is Ted. Ted is a gecko. He lives behind the oven. He is my friend.

Okay, he scares me to death. Something about the way he moves. It doesn’t help that he is always moving while in the corner of your eye. It doesn’t help that he snakes his way in unpredictable patterns across the wall, with you never knowing if his next move might be to leap at your head and suck out your eye ball.

The other night he was in my shower (A.K.A. the pipe in my ceiling — Kristi, think Bulgaria, minus the curtain). It was time for us to talk. It turns out he had first dibs, so I went and talked to Grant on I.M.

“There is a gecko in my shower.”
“Coolio,” Grant replied. “Have you named him?”
I didn’t miss a beat. “Ted.”

I don’t know why his name is Ted, it just is. That was the first name that came to my mind. Grant didn’t like this logic, but Kara and I couldn’t help but laugh the next day when I relayed the story. Our boss’s name is Ted.

Brent, Ralph – I am completely serious. I met Jay’s Sri Lankan brother.

While running around Colombo yesterday, Kara and I dropped by Majestic City to buy a new cell phone and look for housewares. We were asking people for “silverware”, a concept that doesn’t translate so well. A sales man in one store took us both by surprise when out of his mouth came perfect English. Kara later said, for reasons beyond her, that I seemed mesmerized by this man.

He had a long face and doned wire framed glasses. He teased Kara when I encouraged her to buy a spatula. “Oh, he wants you to cook him a good meal,” he teased.

In our counter chovanism, Kara and I both hopped at the chance to inform him that I would be cooking with the new spatula. He was delighted, telling me that cooking is a hobby of his as well. “In America, many men cook,” and having met her gender equality quota for the day, she continued shopping as I chatted with our new friend.

His hair was bushy, and just a little on the wild side — unusual for Sri Lankan hair. There was a familiar quality to the glint in his eyes. It was as if he was both absent, yet completly aware. And as he continued telling me about his recent adventures with sushi, each of us sharing horror stories with wasabi, and his run in with bad cockney accents in England, I found myself a bit startled as the connection began to form in my mind.

I miss you Jay, and I wish you well.