4th October 2019
On Friday evening we enjoyed a family dinner at King of the Mambo, a lovely al fresco restaurant at the Galle Face Hotel with a South American theme serving delicious seafood. Always a nice place to watch the sunset, we’d reserved a table with a sea view and were blessed with colourful hues turning to fiery orange as the sun sank.
Steve
So, which of the three pairs were chosen? The answer will hopefully come during Wednesday!
Steve
“Every storm runs out of rain”, according to Gary Allan’s song – but not soon enough for this lady simply trying to get a tuk tuk home during a downpour of epic proportions this evening!
Steve
My hold baggage allowance for the flight home from England was 50KG – carefully checked after August’s shenanigans but nice and simple this time as I wasn’t on a code share ticket.
Every last gramme and a bit more was used to bring treats; more-or-less half in a cardboard box and half in a suitcase. The children had the pleasure of discovery – from pork sausages, bacon and a Cheddar cheese mountain, through cereals and chocolate – to hidden amongst some of the latter, Rennie’s much-missed blender and hand mixer that had been casualties of repacking when we moved to live here. Somehow a bottle of Laphroaig from my father sneaked in there, too. Thank you, Dad!
Steve
…the two young mice in Colombo will play; in this case to consume all of our whizzy-fast fibre-to-the-home internet data allowance when there were still eleven days to go to the end of the month. It\’s not like the allowance is low, either. This blog will next be updated some time on or after October 1st unless I have opportunity before I fly back home to Colombo on Sunday, arriving on Monday – or Rennie uses public WiFi.
Now that the schools are back and traffic is chronic, Uber is proving very unreliable; more often than not, drivers cancel without warning to get a “better” job (travel time between jobs is unpaid) and you’re left with the option of another wait and no guarantee of a pick up, or a Tuk Tuk.
Yesterday this meant an ironing board purchase and school pick-up for Emi by Tuk Tuk (Míša is still Tom and Dick), and today a trip to school by Tuk Tuk for Rennie and Emi with a cake the latter had made.
Hopefully today we will finally have a driver agreed who we can trust for the morning school run.
Steve
Government departments aside in my experience, Sri Lanka has long been an impressive early adopter of technology. High up this list is fantastic 4G penetration almost anywhere you go – even out in the hilly sticks given that it is the main internet carrier. 5G rollout is also under way, and I expect to be at quite a pace.
Unfortunately this reliance on radio delivery often comes at an ugly price; This collection of masts on Kynsey Road in Colombo carrying cellular and microwave arrays is one example. Somehow I don\’t think it\’d get planning permission in the UK.
Steve
The opening bangs of a fireworks display and the flitting of laser light over the city heralded the spectacular opening of the equally spectacular Colombo Lotus Tower. My thanks to the organisers for scheduling it between evening calls, so allowing some impromptu photography!
The photos show this evening’s event, plus a couple of other shots from previous days to give a sense of scale. Look carefully above the Lotus bulb in the close-up shot and you’ll see three lucky souls with a spectacular view of the city – although unfortunately they missed what I could see. When the booking queues have subsided a bit, hopefully we’ll have dinner in the restaurant one evening.
Steve
