Quotidiana
It’s been a busy week.

Last weekend I was in Trincomalee visiting Malka and having the most lovely swimming experiences of my life. Moonlight, soothing waves, sarong, no bathing suit, slight photoluminescence…followed by beer and fresh grilled tuna and marlin. Also elephant riding, Tamil learning, BBC watching, fresh curd eating, water buffalo milking lessons (theory not practice), rather pleasant endless bus riding.

Right, but then I came back Monday and ran around all day doing errands and having this incredible thali lunch with Lisa. Monday night was the earthquake off Indonesia, prompting a midnight flurry of attempted phone calls around the island. The phone system was overtaxed and so it was hard to get connected. I ended up at Jill’s house, mildly freaking out, before crashing out exhausted…

…to wake up and find that no waves had come. Sigh of relief. Then I dove into a long Sinhala lesson, mostly on the subject of dating, partly on this funny letter I got from the niece of a woman I met on the bus. The niece had written me, earlier, wanting to practice her English—I replied half in English and half in Sinhala, and she wrote back a sort of instructional letter in Sinhala with parenthetical translations of the words she considered hard or useful or whatever. It was cute to see what she picked. She was writing about her A-levels studies so I now know all about her project on the “solar system.” She also translated “English” which in Sinhala is “Ingriisi”—anyone can figure that out!

Spent the day at home working on my CV and research, then went to town for yoga. Ran into Dilani and Dilanthi Ranaweera (mother and daughter of the house I live in) on their way to dance class, so Lisa and I dropped in there for a while to watch a lesson on ‘jive,’ which is swing. Later I attended the same teacher’s Wednesday class: tres silly. Couple dancing is very popular here and people are pretty damn good—beginners, even, have groove. Americans just starting out in couple dancing usually look miserable and stiff. Sri Lankan salsa dancing is one of those bizarre cross-cultural things.

Yoga totally kicked my butt. Hard core. Lisa Jill and I stopped off at Food City on the way home (ha ha, that’s their slogan: On Your Way Home) and I found, delight of delights, two luscious new asepti-pak’ed juice flavors: orange-carrot and kiwi-cranberry.

Wednesday I spent most of the day at CIS, an int’l school in Kandy, observing drama classes (and one maths class that was fun because it made me remember learning fractions and how hard it all seemed at the time). Drama class was fun but I felt like the teacher could have given the kids more of a sense of seriousness about drama as a skill, as work—the games that they played were more like team-building or just physical stuff, and the crits were all about being competitive rather than learning to be better, louder, more expressive, whatever. I am perhaps overly serious about drama, of course, but I know that even kids who are 10 and 11 can handle dramatic ‘work’ rather than make-believe ‘play.’ Otherwise drama class is just a more codified/restrictive form of PE.

So that’s my exciting life. Today’s agenda: Washing the sheets. CV-perfecting and sending (job that I am underqualified for but want to start getting used to rejection, y’know). Survey protocol writing. Dinnermaking for Jill Lisa Jeremy Gavin (maybe): hummus and related foods, I think. Sri lime piebaking for ICES for Friday. Wearing my new green linen skirt. Watching a movie now that I have proper DVD software…

Yammer yammer. Better to look at my new photos than to have read this.