Colombo First Impressions

"Oh, you're sweating!" - [no s$*t Sherlock!]

This wasn't quite the welcome that I'd been expecting from what I'd had been told was one of the most friendly nations on earth. In fact, the Sri Lankans are just saying this to show their concern but it's going to take some getting used too, as is the 32C - 35C heat. In fact, stating the obvious is the key approach we've been taught in our language lessons so far. If you meet a man fishing you don't ask "Have you caught anything?" as this will bring him bad luck. Instead you ask "Are you fishing?". How this will start a conversation, I haven't quite fathomed yet but I'll try it out next time I meet a fisherman and test the theory.

The only time the obvious isn't stated so overtly is around how your dressed. The Sri Lankan's are EXTREMELY fastidious when it comes to dress. You see the children en route to school (which starts at 0730 here) in beautifully white, pressed school uniforms. One of the first things we've been told to buy is an iron. This will ensure that we don't get asked: "Were you in a rush this morning?" [translated as "Why are your clothes not ironed"]. "Don't you like jewellery?" equals "Why are you not rich enough to possess more of it?" The two comments I have received so far are: "You look very beautiful today" [Translation = "You should dress like that more often"] and "What a wonderful blouse!" [Translation = "So much nicer than the kind of thing you usually wear"]. And I thought I only had to learn the language...!

7 of us landed in Colombo on 16th February and, since then, we've had an intensive 3 week training course comprising of 6 days a week of language training in the mornings and briefings in the afternoons. Sinhala is grammatically a fairly straight forward language although difficult to retain given it bears no relation to latin-based languages. Fortunately they use a lot of English words e.g. "telephone", "voicemail", "post office". Our teachers have been brilliant and with a concerted effort from here on in I hope to get by. The afternoon briefings have been extremely helpful to help us get under the skin of what's going on here, especially politically. The elections are coming up soon - more of that in future updates.

Colombo hasn't got a huge amount going for it. We were fortunate enough, though, to be here for the annual Navam Perahera festival. Every month the Buddhists celebrate the full moon which they call a Poya Day. The February Poya day has become a big event in Colombo marked by this festival which features anywhere between 50 and 80 elephants dressed to the nines. They're accompanied with dancers from all over the country and it goes on for hours. This particular Perahera was marked by one of the elephants breaking loose which created a huge crowd panic. We couldn't quite see what was happening so were quite perturbed when the locals started running and diving over surrounding walls. Suzanne's (a fellow VSO Volunteer) first assumption was that it was a Tamil Tiger (LTTE) bomb. What we found out later was that there had been lanterns of burning coconut husks laid out along the path of the procession; one of these lanterns had fallen over and the poor elephant had stood on the burning embers. I was surprised how unprepared the police where to handle the situation. No health and safety here! Anyway - it all made for an eventful evening and the elephant is fine as is the crowd.

We all head to our different placements on Monday. I'm going to be the only one based in Galle but I'm not worried about that. It's a place that the others all want to visit so I won't have any lack of people around me. I'm looking forward to making my flat feel like home and am especially keen to get into my job.