In the land of curry

I know this is sacrilege to say, but I'm bored of curries now. Can you believe it?! Sri Lanka has the most incredible curries but, it seems, that's all they have, and the monotony is getting to me somewhat, so I thought I'd get it off my chest and tell you about the food here.

The first thing you have to know is that Sri Lankans believe that you can't properly enjoy the flavours and textures of food unless you eat with your fingers. The good news is that everyone washes their hands before they eat although the bad news is it's pretty cursory and the scanciness of the soap leaves a lot to be desired. They then sit down and, if it's lunchtime, unwrap their lunch packet which is wrapped in newspaper, inside which is a hotch potch of rice and various curries wrapped in cling film. People eat off the cling film even if a plate is provided - why wash up a good plate when you don't have to, after all? The wife or mother in the family will have got up at 5am and cooked 3 or 4 curries and the rice and created the lunch packets for her brood before sweeping the house and heading to work herself. By lunchtime, therefore, the meal is luke warm which, given you're eating with your hands, makes sense, I suppose. I do miss piping hot meals, though.

Eating with your hands is tricky. Like in many cultures you're not supposed to eat with your left hand. People do, though, and as long as you don't serve someone else with your left hand, you won't be looked down on. The trick is to sort of squidge some rice and curry together and, with your thumb bent in your palm, flick it into your mouth. It's considered bad to get food beyond your first knuckle and this + the thumb flick is an art that I'm only just mastering.

The curries are scrummy though. Sri Lankans know how to use spices and so the flavours and fragrance of the food is stunning. They do like their meals, spicy, though so be warned if you're palate isn't used to that. I, fortunately, seem to be surviving fine with the spiciness but some of my fellow VSO-ers are struggling with it.

For Breakfast, Sri Lankans, or particularly Sinhalese, will have String hoppers and curry. String hoppers are like vermicelli noodles and are served cold in little bird nest like swirls. I have to say they're not my favourite, especially not for breakfast. They shouldn't be confused with Hoppers which are delicious. They are a small bowl-shaped pancakes made from a batter containing coconut milk and palm toddy that is cooked in a small wok-like pan. Curries are then poured into the Hopper and eaten - stunning and zero calories (not!).

Lunch and Dinner are then the ubiquitous rice and curry. Given the plethora of vegetables here, there are some incredible vegetarian curries - aubergine, carrot, cauliflower, bread fruit and beans create a veritable feast of colour and taste. Fish and chicken are also wildly used although I tend to avoid them having seen the street sellers stalls covered in flies on a daily basis. Curries are normally served with a sambol on the side. This is designed to give that little extra kick to the food. One of the most common (and most eye watering) is coconut sambol which is chilli powder, chopped onion, salt, grated coconut, and "Maldive fish" (salty intensely flavoured shreds of sun-dried tuna).

The alternative for curry at lunchtime are whats called "short eats" which are plates of wadei (spicy donut of deep-fried lentils), rottys (dough pancake filled with veg or egg), fish cutlets (spicy fish balls), and other deep fried delicacies. You're served a plate with a mixture of these and then pay for what you eat. The only watch out is that what you don't eat is served to the next table and the next and Sri Lankans don't have any qualms about touching food and then eating it.

One of the most dramatic dishes is kottu roti. I'm still not sure exactly what goes in it bar lots of vegetables and whatever meat you want. The spectacle is when the chef gets his two massive cleavers and starts chopping up the ingredients as if he was the drummer in a marching band. The noise is part performance part advertising as it is normally done in a glass booth at the front of the joint and seems very effective at luring the punters in.

The beauty of Sri Lanka is, given the different cultures - Tamil and Sinhalese (and to a lesser extent Muslim) there are two distinct cuisines. Unfortunately there are no Tamil restaurants in Galle but I have been to one great one in Colombo. The Tamils eat something called Dosai which are like giant pancakes which you tuck into with curry. Their curries are much the same as what we'd imagine of when we think of Indian curries and, as they say, a change is as good as a break, so I'm looking forward to my next Colombo trip to have some more.

The fruits here are incredible. I have never seen so many different types of bananas. I still haven't worked out which is which so sometimes I end up with the plantains by mistake and other times hit the jackpot by getting the sweetest tastiest bananas you've ever had. The streets are lined with stalls selling pineapples, guavas, jackfruit, papaya, and things I'd never seen before like wood apple (which won't be missed either - they taste as their name suggests!). It's the season for mangoes at the moment which are so cheap and so delicious it's difficult to stop eating them. Interestingly the only fruit that isn't nice here are apples. They began to be imported when the Brits colonised Sri Lanka and are very expensive and not tasty at all.

All of this is, of course, washed down with tea. In the land of tea, though, you'd expect to have the best stuff ever. Unfortunately the best is exported and Sri Lankans are left with the dregs. It doesn't matter too much, though, as they drink it in roughly a 50:50 mix of milk and tea and also with heaps of sugar. The other tipple is arrack, the local hooch. Arrack is made from toddy which is tapped from the flower of the coconut. When fermented and refined it produces arrack (33% proof) which is either drunk neat or with coke or lemonade. I've found it goes well with the local Elephant Ginger Beer here. Last night we had this month's board meeting and the board at the end (11pm!) adjourned to my landlord's house (just downstairs from me) for dinner and drinks. They quickly polished off 4 or 5 bottles of arrack and some got extremely pissed. I was allowed to mingle with the guys (but stuck to beer) but my landlady stayed firmly in the kitchen. It's not done for women to be around men when they're drinking in Sri Lanka.

As you can imagine given the sugariness of their tea, Sri Lankans have a very sweet tooth. There are always stalls at the market selling the most lurid coloured sugary sweets and something that is very similar to Scottish tablet. Cakes are also big here. We went to the funeral of one of my colleague's Grandmother recently (more of that in a future blog), and we took presents of two bags of sugar and a cake - what more do you need for the afterlife, after all?!

Well, all this talk of food is making me hungry, so I'd better go and sort some lunch out. If you're interested in trying to cook some Sri Lankan curries, there is a good website called infolanka.com that has some great recipes. I'd recommend the Cauliflower and cashew nut curry!

10 things you didn't know about Leeches!

Sri Lanka has about every different type of climate and terrain that you can imagine and we visited one of it's most diverse areas last weekend - the rainforest. Centuries ago the whole of the South West quarter of the island would have been covered in dense rainforest. Now only about 3 or 4 sections of it remain intact, the biggest of which is Sinharaja. It became a World heritage site about 30 years ago which, fortunately, stopped the logging.

8 of us woke up at 5am on Sunday morning and donned our long sleeved shirts, long trousers and, most important of all, our leech socks, and set out for about 1 hour to the edge of the Rainforest. Walking through the trees you expected to hear "Gabriel's Oboe" from the Mission playing in the background, but instead we were serenaded by the occasional motorbike driving through on the foot-wide path. There are some 22 villages within the forest and, despite regular petitions to the government for a road and bridge to be built further upstream, the only access they have is via the path into the forest.

Once we got off the main drag, things got much more foresty but, with it, came the leeches. I think if I had to go into George Orwell's Room 101, my worst thing would be leeches. They are the most tenaciously, skin creeping creatures you could meet. So here goes with 10 things you didn't know about leeches:

1. Leeches detect you through skin oils, heat, blood or even the carbon dioxide you breathe out. Every 2-3 minutes we had to check our boots and leech socks to pick off the little blighters before they managed to get into your shoe.
2. A leech has 32 brains - 31 more than humans!!
3. A leech will gorge itself until it's full and then just drop off. It will drink up to five times it's own body weight in blood!
4. Some barbers used to do surgery as well as cutting hair, and they used leeches. When a barber finished surgery, he would take the bloody cloth he'd use and wrap it around a pole to show passers by that he did surgery. This is the origin of the red and white swirled poles we still see today.
5. Scientists are studying leech saliva. They believe that chemistry that the stops the blood from clotting when a leech bites you will soon be able to be used on humans to prevent heart attacks and strokes. Sarah, one of our party, suffered a bite near her shoulder which didn't stop bleeding for 24 hours!
6. Hungry leeches were a problem for soldiers in 1799 who were marching from Egypt across the Sinai peninsula to Syria. The thirsty soldiers, drinking anything they could find, would drink leech-infested water. When the leeches attached to their mouths and throats, some died from blood loss, whilst others died from their throats swelling, filled with blood-filled leeches, thereby cutting off their air - horrible! We fortunately didn't have any fatalities within our group although 3 of the group were "attacked".
7. Four or five large leeches can drain the life out of a rabbit in half an hour.
8. The bite of a leech is painless due to it's own anaesthetic.
9. Burning a leech is not supposed to be a good way to get rid of them as they vomit things into your blood due to the shock!
10. The largest leech discovered measured 18 inches. The ones we encountered were little buggers but they couldn't half move!

Well, I hope you're all itching and feeling ghost leeches as much as I am. For a day after the trip I'd keeping having to check to make sure I hadn't missed one of the blighters. I can't say I'll rush to do the experience again. Because you were constantly checking your shoes and also having to look where you put your feet because the path was so uneven and slippery, the amount of animals and insects we saw was less than I'd expected. One of the highlights, though, was this Kangaroo Lizard which bounces as soon as a camera comes out just like its namesake (see picture). We also saw beautiful Doctor snails with bright pink, large shells, and some stunning butterflies. Our guide was extremely knowledgeable and would be able to last a series of "I'm a Celebrity, get me out of here" quite easily as he knew all the plants and what medicinal properties they each had.

I'm glad to say that I'm back on safe, leech-free land now, and things are going much better at work, which is great. There is certainly some interesting wildlife to deal with here, and that's just the Directors!! More about that another time.

I wish you all a leech-free week!

It's a whole other language

I knew when I got here that communication would be difficult but the reality is both better and worse than I expected. In Sri Lanka there are 3 national languages: Sinhalese, Tamil and English. In effect, there should be a fourth, Sri Lankan English, and a fifth, body language. I thought I'd only need to learn one - Sinhalese - but, in effect, I'm also having to learn the others too.

Sinhalese, firstly, is grammatically fairly straight forward. For example, there is no difference between the present and the future tense. This does lead to difficulties, however, when you're trying to work out if someone is saying that they're are doing something or will be doing something. Equally, the language is surprisingly duplicative; for example the verb to ask and to listen is the same. I can't quite work out why that would be the case but I suppose I have grown up with the most descriptive language in the world. The words bears no resemblance to English so I'm learning vocab through the most random associations of sounds imaginable. I'm focusing on learning to listen and speak rather than to read and write as the script is beautiful but unintelligible to me. I am trying to learn about 20 words a day and am having a 90 min lesson each week now so I hope to achieve my aim of being pretty fluent by the time I leave. My aim feels like a bit of a pipe dream at the moment. I just wish people would answer my questions (asked in Sinhala) in Sinhala rather than in English which is what happens most of the time at the moment.

The second language is Sri Lankan English. Most of the population have, at some point in their schooling, had to learn English, a hangover from the colonial days. Most haven't spoken it since school and also the teaching methods are very reading- and writing-focused rather than speaking-focused, so their confidence and ability is mixed. I met one of the Directors of the Chamber recently and he admitted to me in very broken English that he'd woken up at 5am on the day of our meeting very worried that he'd have to meet with me that afternoon and converse in English. Although it was a very disjointed conversation, I understood most of what he was saying. Even those who don't speak English, pepper their conversations with both English words and Sri Lankan English. For example, when I got here, I kept being told to go to the Bus Halt or the Bus stand. It took a while to realise that a bus halt is a bus stop and the bus stand is the bus station. I was also warned not to eat certain foods because they're "heaty". When I asked what heaty was, my colleagues said: "But you must know, it's an English word". Fortunately VSO gave me a Dictionary of Sri Lankan English which states that heaty comes from Ayurverdic medicine and relates to certain foods or combinations of foods. For example tomatoes, some sea food and pineapples are all heaty foods. I have to agree that if I've had a prawn and tomato pasta dish, my tummy has felt a bit odd in the past. With the help of my Dictionary, I'm slowly getting used to this new vocabulary and you'll probably have to help me back into English English when I get home.

The final new language is body language. Sri Lankans, like Indians, have 3 main head moves: a nod, a shake and a sort of wobble. The wobble means OK but looks more like concern would in the UK. The shake is sometimes used to mean yes and no. The nod can mean "I'm listening" as well as "Yes". I admit that there are many times when I still don't know which is being used so I have to clarify. I've noticed that some of my fellow volunteers have started to perfect the head wobble but I, as yet, don't seem to have a wobbly enough neck! I'll have to keep practising.

Tomorrow I've got my next Sinhala lesson which is on past participles. I hate to admit that I'm not really sure what a past participle is in English so hopefully everything will become as clear as mud soon. Until then, do practise your English skills by sending me an e-mail as I'd love to hear your news. I'm feeling slightly bereft of news from home at the moment.