Keep Track of Julia: November 13, 2018

Time for an update.

October 5 - High tea at the Kawasakis in honor of the visit of Mike Fronczak's mother.

From left to right: Me with Nezumi, Visakha, Ken, Lalitha, Mike, Rushma, Jaya, Barbara (Mike's mother and the guest of honor visiting from Michigan) and Ewen.

Swimming has become a regular thing averaging 4 to 6 days a week. I don't know why I ever stopped. I love doing it and I feel so much better. One day, I arrived to find the poolside pavilion full of hotel staff. One of them approached me to say that they were preparing the Christmas cake and would I like to help them mix it. The ingredients were laid out on a long table almost the full length of the pavilion. Here is the action:

Santa presided over the event

They had added booze from all the bottles on the table at the end. I almost fell over from the fumes. This is going be one good Christmas cake. I must get down there for tea and have a piece.

Walking down and back from the pool presents its own adventures. I run into friends both human and animal, I watch the development of the paddy field of which I am taking daily photographs to be made into a time lapse video, and I find interesting things along the road or the river bank.

This contraption was on the riverbank one day. Veenitha tells me that it is a shrine to a demon or evil spirit. It was all set up to float and burn. When I cam by the next day, it was gone. Hope the spirit was happy and the worshippers did not use it to hex someone.

English classes are going apace as well. The kids have made good friends with the cats.

Especially Himadi loves Buddy. She and her sister are among my original students. Plus her mother and father attend my Electricity Board classes. Her mother is the glue behind all of it. Wonderful people.

October 14 - Attended a mini literary festival sponsored by the Alliance Française at L'Atelier. Quite enjoyable with some good readings particularly from Ashok Ferrey. Aslam, my landlady's grandson also staged a small play that involved solving a mystery at the end. Great idea to get the audience involved.

Some wonderful art around the place and a good saxophonist to get everyone in the mood.

Deanne and I are listening with interest.

Ashok Ferrey is on the extreme left in the dark blue shirt. He read from his book Cut Pieces, a collection of amusing vignettes about Sri Lanka and England. The young author beside him wrote a whole book about a sort of Groundhog Day experience of someone committing suicide over and over again. Bizarre and depressing. The guy with the mike is the manager of the Alliance and acted as emcee while the big man on the end is some professor at Peradeniya University who writes poetry that I though was terrible.

The play with Aslam doing the sound effects in the background.

Trying to solve the mystery. I had it right and then was diverted from the correct path by some friends . Great fun anyway.

October 24 - Went to Colombo with my friend Anu to check out some leather to reupholster my furniture. I got one of my tuktuk men to get us the train tickets. I told him to get them for the Tuesday, but somehow, he got them for the Wednesday which turned out to be a poya day. That is undoubtedly why we managed to get the tickets at all as fewer people travel on that day. We had a great train trip down except that the air-conditioning was so cold we felt we were in a refrigerator.

The leather man made a special trip to his shop to meet us despite of the holiday. Actually going on the poya day proved to be beneficial as most shops were open in Petta being owned by either Muslims or Tamils, but there was not the usual insane crowd of people and vehicles. The leather proved to lovely and reasonably priced. I can get enough to do everything for about C$450. I chose oxblood as my color in split cowhide. Ram whose great grandfather started the business in 1919, assures me that it is durable enough to withstand even all my cats. They are in process of tanning and coloring my order. Things are a bit slow as we have had very heavy rains, but it will get done eventually. I don't even have to make another trip to Colombo as it will be delivered to Kandy by lorry, free of charge.

The mosque in Petta. It has been refurbished and expanded, I believe. Really beautiful even if it is squeezed in among a bunch of shops.

Good thing too as I really dislike Colombo. It has become a city of glass and steel skyscrapers with nothing exceptional to distinguish it from any other big Asian city. Plus the weather is hot and humid. Glad I live in Kandy.

After a bit more shopping in Petta to get supplies for some school concert uniforms that Anu was making, we went to the newly renovated Gale Face Hotel for lunch. This is the first time I have seen it since it was renovated. I used to swim in their salt water pool when I lived in Colombo from 1987 to 1989, so the hotel is an old friend. The renovation is well done with the exception of the removal of the magnificent old carved front doors. They were such a landmark feature of the old hotel along with Kuttan the doorman.

The doors

Kuttan who worked for 72 years at the Galle Face Hotel. He died in 2014 at the age of 94.

Of course, the pool is no longer salt water and is quite a bit larger than it was. Nonetheless, we had a great lunch of fish and chips. Colombo is the only place where I will venture to eat fish as it is always fresh. That was certainly the case here and nicely cooked being moist and flakey. Usually fish in Kandy is dry and hard as a hockey puck plus who knows the state it is in by the time it is trucked here in questionable refrigerator trucks.

Then it was on to a shop that sells all things sybaritic to get some pedicure fixes. Was disappointed to find that my favorite nail polish is no longer on sale, but I got some nice colours and other things, so not a total loss. As we still had time to kill, we went to the Taj Samudra, another of my old swimming holes for a drink. In fact, we had wanted to check out the new Shangri-la Hotel, but couldn't get to it as there was a demonstration in front of the President's office and the road was cordoned off.

Then it was back on the train. This time were grateful for the air-conditioning. About 20 minutes out of Colombo, it started to rain in such torrents that you could not see the greenery by the tracks. Then the lighting started. It was striking all around the train. I was convinced that it was going to hit us. The noise was deafening between the train itself, the lashing rain and the thunder claps right over top of us. Everything was flooding: paddy fields, canals, roads, yards. In any event, we made it back to Kandy safely and only 1/2 hour late. Anu's father picked us up in an aging vehicle and proceeded to drive like a maniac in the pouring rain and on the narrow, winding and hilly roads between the railway station and my house. I was lucky to make it home unscathed. As it happens, he was in a car accident last week and had to be taken to emergency. I am not surprised.

October 25 - The birds were going crazy this morning: crows, black headed orioles, green parakeets, babblers, bulbuls, a kingfisher, a Braminy kite, and a white bird of paradise (called "The Visitor" is migratory from India. I did not see the latter, but my landlady saw it a few times), magpies. All together, all calling, all flying around. We could not figure out what was causing the ruckus. When I got home from my swim, it became obvious as a small water monitor lizard came over the neighbor's fence and harrumphed into the jungle. Monitors do not usually come this far away from water, sticking close to the river bank but with all the rain, the paddy field below us is flooded and this one obviously thought we were just another part of the river bank. ♫♫Welcome to the jungle♫♫

Wrongo rhino breath! The birds were not going crazy because of the monitor but because of the flying termites. During the heavy rains, we get two varieties of flying termites. Big ones and small ones. This season it has been the small ones. Thousands of them and of course, the birds were feeding on them.

This is the large variety.

October 27 - I was prevailed upon to attend an outing with Discovery Club. I rarely go as there is a lot of temple touring of which I am sick, but this time, the trip was organized by my friend Jayantha so I went along with him and his wife. As it turned out, it was a great day.

The whole day was all things "Delma". We started at a soap factory.

Jayantha with one of the workers in front of ingots of baby soap.

The ingots are cut into bars by this machine.

These are the laundry soap ingots.

This machine takes all the leavings after the bars are cut and recycles the bits to make more ingots.

The place was remarkably clean but very smelly from the perfume that they add to the soap. The laundry soap is packaged by machine, but all the other soaps are packaged by hand. The factory employs about 100 employees, 35 of whom are engaged in hand packing the soap. How they stand the smell, I don't know.

The next stop was a match/incense factory cum hotel/wedding reception hall. Only in Sri Lanka would you get a match factory paired up with a hotel. Like we have a dry cleaner cum bakery in town as well. Surprisingly, the match factory was very noisy inside, but very quiet outside, so the hotel and wedding guests were not really disturbed by the presence of the factory. Plus the place smelled from the incense paste. Oddly, the smell stayed inside as well.

The match/incense factory.

The hotel which is right above the factory. Very nice hotel with a large swimming pool and lovely landscaping. They served us a wonderful lunch as well.

The matches are made from twisted paper dipped in wax. Here the stems have been cut ready to have the tips put on.

The frames full of the stems are placed in the paste that makes up the tips and then tamped down by hand.

The finished frames with the tips on set out to dry.

A worker filling the small boxes with matches. All by hand.

These machines fold the boxes.

The paper is twisted by machine and the boxes are folded by machine, but everything else is done by hand. The small boxes are shipped out in packets of a dozen boxes each that are wrapped in paper. This wrapping is done by a team of 9 or 10 women. Their target is 2,700 packets a day for which work they are paid LKR.27,000/month (C$204). They need a union.

The factory makes about 200,000 matches a day which is not nearly enough to supply the large supermarket chains, so they sell to small shops. Sri Lankans use a lot of matches partly because many people still cook on wood fires, they burn leaves and garbage and because the matches bend and break a lot because they are make of paper instead of wood.

There is small section devoted to incense making which was not operating the day we were there, but they gave me the general idea. For some reason, the manager took a liking to me and gave me a personalized tour. Probably because I was the only one actually paying attention to what he was saying and not just wandering around. In the end he even organized a pack of a dozen incense stick boxes for me to take to Veenitha and Poomani for their respective sadhu and pooja. The 12 boxes cost LKR.385 (C$2.90). They were thrilled.

I am back to hair tattoos.

Totally appropriate for Halloween. A pussy cat outside and a devil inside.

We hold our classes on Thursdays in the Ceylon Electricity Board Central Province head office auditorium. This is what I found when I went in on a Thursday a couple of weeks ago.

CEB celebrated their 49th anniversary. There must have been ceremonies like this all over the island.

All the rain has been producing wonderful growth both in the flower and vegetable gardens.

Tula planted this plant in a pot at the foot of my stairs. I don't know what it is called, but it produces the most beautiful purple bell shaped flowers.

Pumpkin greens. They make an excellent substitute for spinach or mustard green for saag paneer.

Small pumpkins beginning to form.

The rain is bringing out all sorts of interesting insects.

Heterorrhina elegans is a type of scarab beetle. Here they are feeding on the pineapple skins we put out for the birds. Mostly a vivid green, but a couple of lovely cobalt blue ones snuck in there.