Our first month in Sri Lanka is already done?! It seems just yesterday that we were taking our first tuk tuk ride through Colombo's busy streets. But when I think about all the things we've seen and done, it's amazing that we've only been here a month. Sri Lanka is the kind of place where amazing experiences come fast and furious. Here are our impressions of life in Sri Lanka, after one month.
Ayurveda is a traditional style of medicine which uses completely natural treatments and emphasizes a balanced lifestyle. Although predominantly associated with India, it's massively popular in Sri Lanka, where you can't walk a block without finding another ayurvedic dispensary or clinic. Ayurveda has also gained a foothold in Europe and, predictably, an unending line of hotels and spas in Sri Lanka (always quick to capitalize on tourists) have started to offer ayurvedic vacations from a week to a month long.
Kandyan Dance, an exuberant combination of drumming, costumes and athletic dancing, is the most famous cultural product of Sri Lanka. A few places in Kandy put on a daily show, and we decided to check out the performance at the YMBA. Yep, that stands for "Young Men's Buddhist Association" -- and good luck trying to spell it out with your arms.
With its fluid, circular characters, written Sinhala (or Sinhalese) must be one of the world's most lovely scripts. A page full of it almost looks like absent-minded doodling, with its loops, spirals and squiggles. I've been fascinated by it since we arrived, and bought a book called Let's Learn Sinhala, Volume 1. Five days later, I can confidently write important words like head, crooked, bones, eye and bait. That's a good start towards a strange, sinister sentence.
The practical, puttering tuk-tuk is one of the classic mainstays of Sri Lankan life. Clogging the streets of every city on the island, and found bumping along even the most remote mountain roads, the motorized rickshaw is an unavoidable, and incredibly fun, method of transportation.
