English Blog – Page 59 – Project Salad

Rennie March 29, 2020

English Blog

Tins and vegetarianism

Wednesday 25. 3. 2020

We are enforced vegetarians due to the situation in the world and the inability to buy meat from a trusted source at the moment. Emilka found two canned chicken sauces in our small store on the 5th floor and how happy she was! I can imagine that my dad would have eaten the can himself, but during hard times, I have to improvise and from that, I should make dinner for 4. I cooked a delicious Bologna sauce with extra vegetables, served either with pasta or cuscus and enjoyed by all despite being spicy.

Steve – meat lover, is suffering with vegetarian options. We used to have meat almost every day, now every two or three days if he is lucky! I have canned fish and another canned chicken, one pack of fish and minced chicken in my small freezer, so I still have about 8 meat dishes. I will try to buy meat somewhere on line, but especially here in the hot climate I prefer to buy it in person from a trusted source.

Rennie

Rennie March 29, 2020

English Blog

Mothering Sunday

Sunday 22. 3 2020

A Mothering Sunday with our extended family or an outing for a nice celebratory lunch was out of the question this year due to the ongoing curfew; coronavirus spread is still a huge risk to the population, so we had to stay at home like everybody else. Kids said they will have to do something for me and I was hoping it will be a beauty salon for pedicure from Emi and a back massage from Misa as they did last year in England. It was exactly that.

Emilka made me a luxurious breakfast – a banana pancake with yogurt and fruit, Misa made me a coffee, just as I like it. I was given a home made card and a voucher for beauty treatment, so I used it as I felt like. I was indeed in need of new polish for my toes and Misa’s back massage felt so good! We chilled all day and for dinner we had delicious vegetable soup. Nothing fancy, we will have to celebrate all the missed birthdays, anniversaries and any special occasions once it is safe in the world, whenever that will be. We will have to use our hope and patience.

Rennie

Rennie March 24, 2020

English Blog

A story of acceptance

Tuesday 24.3 2020

A funny story of acceptance:

I was making cheese sauce for our pasta dinner tonight.
I knew I had ants in the bag of cornflour I was going to use, but I didn’t dare throw it into the bin as it is especially precious at the moment. They are invisible in the packet.
R:”Miso, how many ants can you see in the cornflour packet?”
M:”Can’t see anything, Mummy!”
I poured the cornflour into the milk and about 50 tiny ants appeared on the surface.
M:”Look at the buggers, Mummy!”
I am stirring the milk to dissolve the cornflour for a while and Misa says:”Mummy, will you try to retrieve them or will you just leave them there for a bit of protein?”

I just smiled and did retrieve them with a small sieve, don’t worry. We still had a vegetarian dish for dinner tonight!

My friend has got a much better story:

“I had broccoli today with caterpillars in it ….we have two pets now! My 8 years old girl is so happy!”

At least we have our humour in these difficult and uncertain times.

Rennie

Rennie March 24, 2020

English Blog

Shopping – Curfew lifted for 8 hours

Tuesday 24. 3 2020

The curfew was lifted for 8 hours today from 6.00-14.00. I think we have enough food, but Steve would like to go shopping for fresh veg. We knew there would be a lot of people everywhere and were right; people had been at the stores from 6am and by 7am the queues were long. Steve measured one at 400 metres and the other at over 500 metres. When we passed them later on taking a walk to the park it was a pretty depressing sight to be honest; long queues of bored people, hot and sweaty in oppressive heat and breathing through masks (by law). I wanted to go to the park with my family to lift my mood up, however it had the opposite effect. Steve and the kids didn’t want to put their masks on to start with (they are uncomfortable and introduce other contamination risks), but they had to, otherwise we would be stopped by the police. We were all hot immediately, and the sweat was running down our backs and from under the masks (we are entering the hottest time of year now). Park officials threw us out after 30 minutes saying that the park is closed despite it never being busy during the week anyway.

The boys went ahead as Steve had to get back for a meeting, but myself and Emilka had 2.5 hours until the curfew would return, so we tried to do some shopping. Our favourite local SPAR was closed and the queues to Keells and Cargills Food City still enormous, so we took a chance and went to the Cargills Express in our apartment complex. We were lucky, only about 10 people ahead of us, but the shelves were almost empty. However, we managed to buy three bags of food and household stuff. Emilka was very happy, Steve and Misa happy too. They don’t support stockpiling either but my “lax approach” to replacing what we have consumed is apparently killing them!

The children had semolina for lunch, which they love and which reminds them of their Czech grandmother, whom we remember a lot and often talk about as she is self isolating being at risk group. Steve currently works downstairs in the business center and the children are gaming and chilling as they don’t have school today. Teachers were given time off to go shopping in the small window between curfews. We may go swimming in the evening. I tried to buy some fruits and vegetables over the internet, as they are going to allow delivery, so we’ll see when and if they bring it to me.

A friend who was repatriated to Canada gave me 12 bottles of UHT milk (Ultra Horrible Taste as Steve calls it!), 72 eggs, a kilo of onion and garlic, a large glass of Parmesan cheese and mayonnaise and some small things, so now we have enough, hence I am not panicking. Oh – two cans of Guinness and two of London Pride from her husband for Steve, too!

Let’s try to survive this difficult situation somehow. It will get tougher but cannot last forever.

Some pictures below from the internet of today’s queues for food and of our short time in the park.

Rennie

Steve March 21, 2020

English Blog

Silence and Fresh Air

This morning we awoke in our city centre apartment to… Silence. Pure silence, broken only by the twittering of birds and a very occasional motor vehicle driving by on official business. None of the usual clattering of engines in queuing traffic, incessant blowing of horns or clanking and banging from the countless construction sites. Just lovely peace draped over the city like a blanket.

Once up and about, Rennie suggested that we sit outside on our balcony in the warm sunshine where for the first time we could hear lovely piano music coming from a practice session or lesson in another apartment. We also noticed something that we have never seen before in Colombo; a complete absence of haze. Compare the two photos above and you\’ll see what I mean (click each to open full size in a new tab). The difference of a week with hardly any traffic is profound – and this is just one city of our world. In our case it was cause to just sit, enjoy this rare moment in a normally noisy and dirty city, sip our coffees and exercise some mindfulness.

The backdrop to this is that on Saturday night last week, the Sri Lankan government announced that Monday would be an extra mercantile holiday with intention to reduce intermingling of the population. As expected, one day became three, and even afterwards on Thursday and Friday the city was very quiet. We took a decision to operate the business from employees\’ homes all week and will do so again in the week ahead. The business continuity plan has been almost faultless in execution and the employee morale and can-do spirit, fantastic; I am enormously proud of everyone. We are under no illusions though; the real test, and tough times, lie ahead.

On Friday morning, the government announced there would be a curfew from 6pm until 6am on Monday. This has since been extended to 6am on Tuesday. Whilst there have been nothing like the selfish behavioural scenes from the UK that sadden me as a fellow Brit, it is fair to say that there was some stocking up going on with bread, flour and rice gone by the time I went for a quick shop for weekend fayre in the late afternoon. For some reason milk has been completely unavailable for over a week now. Everything else though is normally in plentiful supply, including lovely fresh fruit and vegetables.

It feels like the calm before the storm, Sri Lanka so far having been a very low risk place to be but with early signs of a surge of cases starting to come. All we can be is be calm and sensible ourselves, cutting each other slack when confined to barracks – so that\’s how we are. We\’re lucky to have a couple of nice swimming pools just an elevator ride away, but the gym is closed, so during the curfew our other exercise is confined to taking many flights of stairs instead of using the elevator each time we come up. Oh – and Rennie joined her zumba class via Zoom video call yesterday!

Steve

Steve March 21, 2020

English Blog

School comes home

There were many reasons why we chose the children\’s school, but one of them was the way that technology is actively embraced and used to educational advantage. When the children first started, the school was implementing Bring Your Own Device, and before long the children\’s year group was included. They use Microsoft Teams on their own laptops, both in the school and at home. The latter is normally for homework and additional study, but on Friday last week when the school closed until after Easter at the earliest, it took on a whole additional role; the classroom came home with the children participating in their normal lessons, to their normal schedule with their normal classmates and teachers.

Absolutely great, and the effectiveness has impressed me. I hope that Misa and Emilka keep at it as they have another couple of weeks to go before the holiday starts. The apartment tower where we live has a business centre where I\’ve been working this week, and it has been lovely to have my children with me at the same cluster of desks and to see them studying hard and clearly enjoying what they are doing. Ok, I\’ve caught them each a couple of times on Roblox when they weren\’t quite quick enough flicking back to Teams, but the truth is that they have studied well and had results to prove it. In the image, Emi\’s cheering her grade A result in a music test.

Steve

Rennie March 18, 2020

English Blog

First visitors from the Czech republic – Trip to work with elephants

Thursday 12th and Friday 13th March 2020

It would not have been a holiday in Sri Lanka not to see the elephants, they simply belong to Asia. The Millennium Elephant Orphanage project in Pinawalla was one of the best I heard of so I booked us all three girls to do a 4-hours volunteer job. I tell you, we nearly died in that heat! Children went to school at 6.45 by taxi and we left in our taxi with a driver at 7 am, so we can commence the work at 10 am.

We started with a tour of a small museum where we got a lot of information about elephants
Girls got a sickles to cut a long green grass which we than fed to one elephant as a snack – Kandula
We got gloves and a brush and cleaned Monica’s bed, first throwing the old bedding – with poo as well, clean and disinfect the concrete bed afterwards – this was the hardest part of our experience
Big vitamin balls from the protein was made by Tamarka, and we fed them to Monika and Rimu
Girls chopped watermelons, pumpkins, corn and sugar cane with a big sharp machete
And with a basket full of goodies, we went for a 45minute walk with Monika – that was the most beautiful part of our experience. Her Mahoon (carer) allowed us to approach her, stroke her, we fed her along the way, chatted with her (she understood Czech!), such a privilege. The feeling of her being only ours was amazing. So close to such a beautiful animal I’ve never been before.
After the walk we bathed her and scrubbed with a coconut shell (and dodged her floating dung!)
We conducted a tour of a small factory making paper from elephant dung – fascinating!
We got lunch (rice and curry!) and a certificate!
Farewell to all nine elephants was a sad one.

We drove to a hotel to relax and remember our special time with elephants. The hotel was by the river where the elephants go swimming each ady at 10am and 2pm.

We were pretty dead from all the sun so the pool at the hotel with a coffee came in handy.

After breakfast, we enjoyed a 120-minute view of the elephant’s beauty as they were able to bathe with their carers in the river. Splendid.

On the way to Kandy we stopped in the Tearoom, where we saw how tea is being made and we had a tea tasting of 10 kinds of tea – I had some biscuits in my bag, they went well with the tea!

In Kandy, we had a very tasty Tamil vegetarian lunch (something like a big pancake, but made with rice flour and lentils), saw the Temple of the Tooth Relic, and before we set out on a 3.5-hour journey back to Colombo, we managed to see Kandy’s cultural show of dancers accompanied by three drummers. Walking on the fire was the top for me – I don’t understand how they did it.

The kids were fine with daddy Steve, a friend brought them from school on Thursday and Emi made hoola hoops with cheese for dinner before Steve came home from work at 9pm. Steve picked them up from school on Friday and made steak for dinner! Everything went well, it seems, so I am suggesting, that I should go away more often!

Rennie

Rennie March 18, 2020

English Blog

First visitors from the Czech republic – Trip to South

Friday 6th March to Monday 9th March 2020

Full moon on Monday, Poya Day, mean an extended weekend, I planned to go to the south of island with the kids, first time by train along the coast. I bought the train tickets on the way to the airport, they sent me to three different counters. They wanted all the passport numbers (good job I wrote it down and Steve was able to tell me the numbers over the phone) and paying with cash – no card, government run services are mostly behind in terms of use of technology. I picked up the children from school earlier, quick shower and change and took a taxi to be at the train station at least 30 mins before departure (I was advised to do that), so we could push through the possible crowd of people finding our first class carriage. It surprised me, clean and spacious, but the air was cold, about 10 C and we were not prepared and nearly froze during our 2.5 hours journey! Again, Asian contrast, 33 C outside and 10 C in our wagon, can’t understand why? We arrived in Weligama around 7pm, had a lovely 1.5km walk to the hotel, through town, along the road and on the beach. We stayed in a small hotel near the road, because the next day at 6 am I went with the girls by Tuk Tuk to the port of Mirissa (we left the children at the hotel) and went on a Whale and dolphin watching. 5 hours on the boat, of the possible 70 places we were about 30, so we had a lot of space, morning tea, bread breakfast and then a big two pieces of watermelon. We saw a couple of whales, even though they were far away, a pair of dolphins and one beautiful turtle. The children were waiting for us at the hotel impatiently, having gone to breakfast, doing their homework and relaxing. Then we moved by taxi to Unawatuna (approaching Colombo) to the beautiful luxury hotel Thaprobane Waves. However, we arrived, they did not have my name on their guests list! When I found out that I had accidentally booked two hotels on the same night (tomorrow night), I nearly fainted. I paid an extra Saturday night at the hotel and we decided to stay two nights as the next night was paid. I’m still waiting and hoping to get a refund for the hotel we haven’t traveled to the next day.

The hotel was beautiful, spacious rooms with balcony, superbly beautiful nested into the rocks, excellent breakfast, salt and fresh water pools, comfort for everyone, and good free WiFi as a bonus! By Tuk Tuk we went to Wijaya Beach both afternoons, where we swam with turtles, dangled on a rope, tasted delicious pizza and pasta, and drank cocktails and King Coconuts. We enjoyed Monday Poya day by the pool and at 2pm we drove towards Galle – our last stop, Magda was much looking forward visiting this place, because her friends own a villa there and they were enthused about it. It was hot, the sun was burning and even though we sent our luggage with a friend to Colombo, after 30 minutes of walking in the sun, we were completely finished and cold drink in one of the local restaurants with stunning sea views was a God sent. Galle is a tourist town with fort around the town and a lighthouse in the middle. Lots of restaurants and cafes, but nothing special. We had a problem to get a taxi due to the fact that last month there was fighting initiated by tuk tuk drivers unhappy that Uber is taking their business, but eventually we got to the turtles’ farm, where we spent more than an hour with beautiful animals, which children very quickly warmed to. The taxi back to Colombo was organised by the lady on the farm – her cousin called a friend and he had a son who took us in an almost new minibus. I noticed here in Sri Lanka, that it’s like the movie “We must help each other”. Magda was sceptical we will not get home, but I didn’t doubt once, the kids had to go to school the next day.

Our scout expedition was a success, Magda brought trousers with elephants, we did new things and we had a lovely quality time together which we will remember for a long time. I realised, that I have no problem to deal with any situation – such a lucky personal characteristic to have. Nothing can beat a morning coffee by the sea, where you can only hear the waves crashing on the boulders, it was worth all the stress.

Rennie

Rennie March 18, 2020

English Blog

First visitors from the Czech Republic – Colombo

5.3 – 14.3 2020

Sometime in January, a friend from my hometown contacted me to say, that she is thinking of visiting us with her 16-year-old daughter, when she has a spring holiday in March. Of course, I agreed, the first Czech visitors in Asia! Instantly, I became a tour operator, I bought them air tickets on the Internet, organised visa, wrote and planned itinerary stay. I had to incorporate the care of the children as they will be at school with cooking, cleaning at home, but I also wanted to devote myself to the girls and enjoy them so they would enjoy it here. I knew it would be an experience for them both and they would be amazed. Totally above everything.

On Wednesday evening, I “flew” with them on internet checking Flight Radar 24 all the way and periodically took screen shots of the plane on the map.

On Thursday morning I picked them up from the airport, they had a rest in the afternoon as they found the journey extremely tiring and, in the evening, they went to bed relatively early. It was a nice welcome, they bought lot of gifts, healthy vitamins, eucalyptus spray, healing creams, typical Czech wafers and especially, Czech bread rolls! You’d have to experience how the kids and Steve enjoyed them, salivating in the process!

On Friday morning we were invited to “Breakfast with friends”, which we all enjoyed, as always. Meeting my “Sri Lankan family” was very pleasant and the girls saw the reality of my days and a nice benefit of my life as an expat. We visited the oldest and the darkest fruit and vegetable market in Colombo and after picking up the kids from school little earlier, we took a train to travel South of the island to the sea for a long weekend (see separate post). A successful and enjoyable expedition!

On Tuesday I had regular monthly expat association meetings, which I had to go to, girls spent the morning at the pool. In the afternoon, when I brought the children from school, I arranged for Tuk Tuk and the driver Lathiff to drive us to the Colombo temples, which was very interesting and tasting of the Ceylon tea a pleasant experience. We had a delicious dinner with the sunset in our favorite King of the Mambo, Steve came with the kids to join us. Splendid.

On Wednesday we visited two of the finest temples in Colombo and enjoyed an ice cream with a coffee at one of the shopping centre nearby. When the children arrived from school, we all took a swim and went to watch the sunset on the coast created by Port City (reclaimed from the sea) and the newest shopping center, One Galle Face.

On Thursday, when the kids left by taxi to school, we also left with our driver Uranius, only the three girls, for two days to be with the elephants (see separate post). An unforgettable experience.

Saturday was their last day in Colombo. We went to our favorite Jazz café for lunch and I made Victoria sponge cake for afternoon tea to celebrate their stay in Sri Lanka. At 22.00 I took them to the airport for a 1.45 night flight with Qatar airlines via Doha. The last day, however, was overshadowed by the uncertain situation with Coronavirus in the world and we were all nervous about what will happen next. We were hoping they will reach their home in time to be with their loved once, before the situation worsens with quarantine, isolation, etc.

Again, I “flew” with them on the Internet and took screen picture where the plane was flying. They managed the tiring journey with anxious minds, husband and brother meeting them at Ostrava train station, and the reunion with them and with dog Brixi must have been warm and full of love. The boys had to fend for themselves for 10 days so you can imagine what state the house she found in!

The week flew by, we really enjoyed their presence, especially talking all day Czech was great and together we experienced things that were new to us. Tamarka can speak English very well, understands and can communicate. Magda understood, but all she said was “Thanks”.

They saw Sri Lanka from another point of view, with everything as it is, with the dirt, with the smell, with the heat and humidity, they got to know the people’s mentality, saw daily problems and challenges, not like a tourist arriving from the airport straight into the Luxury Hotel Complex spending days by the pool or by the sea with excellent cuisine and comfort from morning to evening.

I think we gave them an experience of a lifetime.

Sri Lanka is still one of the most requested holiday destinations.

Rennie