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| Here's another selfie! This was our last day in Talpe. |
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| Building sand castles! So much fun!! :) |
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| A sweet picture of Awesome Aidan! |
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| A sweet picture of Cutie Cody! |
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| Aidan having fun in the sun and sand! |
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| Here's a fantastic picture of Eka and Cody! |
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| A smaller, 3-wheeled bread truck! Cody is obsessed with bread trucks! |
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| My sister-in-law sent this to us, and I couldn't resist adding it to my blog. This was our Sri Lanka wedding reception in Maryland ten years ago. I am wearing a wedding Sari, and about 70 Maryland family members helped us celebrate our wedding. |
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| We spent a weekend in Talpe, near the southern tip of Sri Lanka. |
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| Our hotel lounge area. :) |
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| A beautiful picture of the night sky. |
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| The boys are playing in the sand outside of our hotel room. |
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| This is a view from our hotel lounge. This hotel was built four years ago, just six years after this area was devastated by the Tsunami. It was quite eerie being in this location, but I felt we had to come. It's beautiful here, but the ocean can be very unforgiving. I took each boy in the water for just five minutes because the undercurrent was so strong. The waves could have easily swept us away, so I pulled the "plug" on that adventure. |
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| We love this hotel, but it's a lot smaller than we expected. The "pool" is like a large Jacuzzi! :) |
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| It's not all play and no work here! Check out the background, and here I am lesson planning. ;) |
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| Aidan on the beach at sunset. Pretty awesome! |
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| We have no idea who that is, but the shot is AMAZING!! |
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| Happy New Year Everyone!! Cody is right outside his grandmother's house with some sparklers. Sparklers can be dangerous, but even more so without a long wand to hold onto. Cody got burned once poor thing! Child safety does not rank very high here. |
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| Aidan is trying out a different kind of sparkler, but we soon realized that most of them were duds. We had a couple of good ones though. The best fireworks were the discs in a package of 50. Once you lit them, they spun around on the ground throwing off sparks. |
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| This is the view from our hotel room in Hikkaduwa, which is about 45 minutes south of Athurugiriya. We stayed for an overnight to see the Indian Ocean and all its glory. It was a bit rough for swimming in though. |
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| Cody is enjoying the sandy beach. Soon after this picture was taken, a big wave drenched him and washed away his masterpiece! |
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| At our hotel, named Citrus, we played ping pong, billiards, and Carrom, which is pictured. You flick the yellow disc with your finger to try and get your color chips in the pockets followed by the red chip. It's a little like pool. Cody included Flat Stanley in his picture for a class project. He's writing journal entries for different places that he has visited while in Sri Lanka. Look for more Flat Stanley pictures in the upcoming posts. ;) |
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| This is part of the buffet at Citrus. The boys love all the choices and the opportunity to eat something other than traditional Sri Lankan food. |
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| This is a picture of the downtown area of Athurugiriya, the town where my mother-in-law lives. After taking this picture, I realized that it doesn't accurately reflect the amount of congestion or people present in the streets. Since I was last here three years ago, they have added a crosswalk to increase pedestrian safety, but without traffic lights, it's still dangerous to cross the street. We've seen a few stray three-legged dogs along the streets. |
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When you hear the music calling you, it's not the ice cream truck, it's the bread truck! Bread trucks visit the neighborhood twice a day, and Cody likes to check out what they are selling. Besides fresh bread, they also sell yummy desserts. As an aside, it seems like Sri Lanka may have surpassed the U.S. in their love of starches!! We eat rice three times a day, enjoy pastries, and consume many root vegetables similar to potatoes. ;) Here is a traditional dish that I learned how to make during an informal cooking class at home! Dishes with fish, chicken, and food similar to lentils/potatoes are common staples of a Sri Lankan's diet. Don't forget to throw in a ton of rice and some vegetables once in awhile.
Side note: As I was writing this post, I felt like I was getting bitten or something was crawling on me. Turns out, I am not paranoid! There are quite a few small ants milling about on the desk where I am writing. Yuck! We are again staying at a hotel with air conditioning (quite a treat in Sri Lanka!), so I expected to escape the recent ant and other insect attacks, but no such luck! Mosquitoes, ants, and house flies are as common as gray skies in Washington State; however, I've had some bad experiences while being here. Just to name two, I found HUNDREDS of ants in my bed right before I was getting ready to take a nap. Eww...so gross. Needless to say, the ants woke me up! Another awful experience occurred when we had an overnight adventure about 45 minutes south of Athurugiriya. I was lying down on a padded lounge chair in the shade. I felt terribly itchy, but I thought it was just my allergies. Come to find out, I was getting bitten by some kind of flea that had nested in the hotel's cushion. I was bitten over thirty times on the backs of my legs. They were nasty bites and they still have not gone away, so I now have polka dotted legs. No exaggeration!! I was planning on writing more, but the ants still keep coming. Stay tuned for another blog post!
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| Aidan is saying goodbye to his auntie, who was getting ready to head to Paris and then back home to Boston. She overlapped with our trip for six days. We are sad to see her go! |
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| We look forward to seeing Auntie Gayani again in a few weeks when she comes to visit us in Washington State for the weekend. |
