Ceylon

Today I will write my blog from Sri Lanka in english. No, not because I want to sound more international and no, not because I want all the curious hindus who is obviously sneaking up behind me at this internet cafe to understand what I'm writing. It's simply because I really don't care much for writing in swedish without the three last letter å, ae and oe. Walking around in the streets of Kalmar you honestly can't understand how important these three letters are, but trust me for it, there is no worse feeling than blogwriting in an incomplete swedish alphabet. So until we find a swedish computer - that will not happen, we are lucky if we even have a working indian keyboard, most internet cafes offer a discountless broken machine.

Anyway, that is more to our amusement, we are not here to feel at home. In fact we have been having a great few days already. This early morning our driver took us hunting for Jessicas biological relatives in the jungle. The jungle, litterary. When the guide with ease found this place with only a few stops at a post office and to ask some people on the street, they really lived more like in a jungle than I have seen jungle on the nature channel. The houses they lived in were very poorly made by her uncle himself, one house, or... a shact morelike, built with logs and pretty much whatever wooden material they could get their hands on to. In the other house there were two bedrooms, it was built with the cheapest bricks I could even present to you and with nothing protecting it from the sun, it was like a finnish sauna in both bedrooms. I did not try their beds but its no long-shot guess that they were dreadfully uncomfortable. Inspite of this poor circumstances they wouldn't take no for an answer when they asked to give us what we can assume were their last cookies and their only bottle of very cheap soda. Filled with guilt we ate and drank these not very delicious gifts. Our friendly muslim driver knew both big languages in Sri Lanka; sinhala and tamil along with english and arabic, so who could be more excellent to speak for us.

You would not believe this, but when Jessica visited these people eleven years ago when they were living in a completely diffrent part of the island, her parents brought them a picture of Jessica. This picture they had framed practically in the best spot of the inside wall. They had no other pictures, they had a free calendar a la some big Negombo Supermarket and a couple of broken clocks, and that was it. What a celebration! They were so happy to see her they almost cried, their kids a.k.a Jessicas cousins, they couldn't take their eyes off of her. Maybe because cousins are allowed to marry eachother here, I don't know, but preferably because they were sentimental about this missing piece of their family. Families are very close here, I cannot start do discribe it, and neighbours are like family as well. In Sweden we don't know the names of ours nextdoor neighbour but here they practically know everything about their whole villages. And our guide, who ofcouse never had met Jessicas uncle Sundara before, started talking to him like if it was his brother and they were talking like chipmunks before we even sat down and then went on even faster. What a community! What fiendly people! Totally unbelievable.

Anyway, since they were unprepared for us they had ofcouse not any time to offer us a meal as they were sad they could not, and neither would we ever demand it, but they asked us very modestly if we could come back later during our journey and tho it would mean for us to rearrange a lot of our upcomming tour we could not deny them this. We will see them again shortly, how very lovely. As a present for us, and as a gesture of their thankfulness when we gave them a little money, they cut open three coconut from their garden palmtree and let us eat and drink from it. We gave them a very small amount of money for us, 5000 rupies which means 360 kronors, but for them our guide said they could buy 1000 bottles of water. One thousand! This, for a family who usually get their water from a small dirty fountain in the yard which is rarely pouring with water during the out-out-rainseason such as now. Very emotionally touched we left waving from the car, back to our beach guest house and a completely diffrent world from what we just had experienced, still very very far from our own.

Other from that today will be a slow day for us, having no worries what so ever, except from maybe a bunch of mosquito bites that itches like there is no tomorrow. Tough mosquitoes here, they got through our net and didn't mind our quality anti-spray at all. I was thinking about giving blood again when I come back home but now it seems I should not have much left to give away, ha ha. This will be my struggle for this trip, Jessica has a few too but she claims they aren't itchying on her. Oh my gosh, this blogpost went on and on I see, I didn't mean for it to but it did, but now I will put a stop for it so that I have something to write about tomorrow. There is lots to say about this country. Please take a look at Jessicas very beautiful blog at http://jessicaaalm.blogspot.com/ and see the photos she posted today from our trip so far, may I add that she is getting extraordinary pictures with our camera, she is really gifted as a photographer. The following one, though, is my work of art :)