Welcome Home Gifts

Thanks for remembering me, even though I’ve been gone for a while. About the time I recovered from the Nepal Nasties, we had our first visitor from the States, and then Arthur Dent came down with some unidentified illness. Regardless, I’m back in the blogsphere and, if I can remember them all, I have lots of good stories for you. Let’s start with our return from Nepal, shall we??

If you recall, I came home from Nepal dreadfully ill. So ill, in fact, that I didn’t find out until after I recovered just how worried The International Man of Intrigue was about my health. Apparently the part where my face started going numb scared him more than it scared me…but thanks to the modern miracle of antibiotics, that’s all a story for another day. The story for today revolves around our return to the Intrigue Compound.

We got back from Nepal sometime in the wee hours of the morning. I was still feeling ten times worse than awful and the hour van ride from the airport was spent with me concentrating on making it home without making the van driver pull over. Rather than stick around and high-five The International Man of Intrigue or the van driver to celebrate my success, I rushed in the house, intent on making it to my own bed and bathroom. I opened the door to the house and just about fell over. At first, I thought the smell was perhaps from the leaky roof. Maybe the dining room lake had mildewed and spread the smell through the house? Then it hit me. That was the smell of dead things. Oh, Grilled Cheesus, that smell was a dead squirrel. I ordered the Little Explorers to stay directly behind me, took a deep breath, and headed upstairs. To my relief, the smell was less overwhelming up there. When I reached the upstairs old-west-shootout-style balcony, I could see why. There was the body, downstairs, behind the dining room table. It was impossible from upstairs to determine the cause of death. At this point, I did what any self respecting mom with three kids and an intestinal parasite would do: I took the kids to their rooms, shut the doors, and got them ready for bed, counting on the fact that my husband was awesome enough to just take care of the disposal of the body. He was is. He did. He assured me the squirrel’s death was accidental, probably caused by either a fall or being trapped downstairs with no way out. I believed him and went to bed.

The next morning dawned bright and way too early and we realized how wrong we were. A squirrel kept running through the house on the rafters. It was tweeting constantly, and I don’t mean #partyattheintrigues. The high pitched noises woke us up and made us immediately suspicious. Was what we assumed had been a horrible accident actually…murder? Had the squirrel been pushed to his death? I just knew CSI:Colombo was going to show up any minute and arrest us for disposing of the body and disrupting the crime scene. How much trouble were we in for cleaning up all the sticks and rocks and other nasty stuff the squirrels had dropped from the ceiling? I asked The International Man of Intrigue how well he’d hidden the body. He said he’d left it on the curb in a plastic bag for the garbage men to pick up. Since the garbage men secretly hate us, I knew the gig was up.

While the cause of death of Mr. Squirrel was never determined, luckily for us, the punishment for tampering with evidence and all the other crimes we committed is sharing our house with squirrels. Since the squirrels have made it clear by their tweets (#movingintotheintrigues) that they’re not going anywhere, I think our punishment is being carried out.

Bangladesh passport stamp? Check.

We just got back from a five day trip to Dhaka. For those of you who aren’t fluent in geography or political history, Dhaka is the capitol of Bangladesh. Bangladesh is almost completely surrounded by India, other than touching a tiny piece of Myanmar (Burma), and, until 1971, was part of Pakistan. It’s a third world country.

There were several high points of our trip. The first was the airport in Delhi, India. The restrooms were clean. In a third world country developing nation, most restrooms are on the shady side of filling station clean, so this was a very pleasant change. There was also a myriad of fast food and other things to eat and buy. We got McDonald's! The International Man of Intrigue had a Chicken Maharaja Mac and I had a spicy veggie burger that was delicious. The Little Explorers were content with chicken nuggets, fries, and a Sprite to share. All that, and still time to catch our flight to Dhaka.

Oh, there was one more bright spot. All the way home from the Colombo airport, I was terrified of unlocking the door and finding who-knows-what going on in our house. I pictured the squirrels building a lakeside resort in the flooded dining room. Nope! The house was dry and squirrel free. I guess they’re good at cleaning up their post-party messes, at least.

The rest of the trip? With the exception of lots of time with our friends, the Madlingers, and bringing back a cooler full of cheddar and jack cheese from the American Embassy’s commissary in Dhaka, it was no fun. Really, it was all that we expected it to be. It definitely lived up to its hype as a third world country. I’m going to need a few days to find the funny in it all, besides the part where Dhaka rhymes with caca. As you know, Fellow Adventurers, a poop joke is always funny.

You Say "Tip", I Say "Bribe"

So, I realized in reading back through it that my last post (here) sounded kind of grouchy. Totally unintentional. Sorry about that. I actually really enjoyed going to the movies and thought the experience was as interesting as the movie itself.

The International Man of Intrigue and I often chuckle about what I like to call "The Synonym Game". Sri Lanka was a former British colony and English as a language got deported but never went home with The Crown, so many people speak it as a second, but very familiar language. The funny part comes in when these people, who most days are very fluent, look at you like you have nine heads if you use a word they aren't familiar with. Last week we were asking our driver about getting a ticket for traffic violations. It took him a few minutes to figure out we were talking about what he calls a "chit". If someone asks your phone number and it is, for example, 700-549-332, you have to say "seven, double zero, five four nine, double three, two." If you say "seven zero zero, five four nine, three three two", I swear to you, your phone number will not be understood. (I also swear to you that I made that number up, and if you try to call it, I don't know what will happen or who you'll talk to.)

All that is to bring me to the point of my post, the garbage service. Don't say trash, or refuse, or rubbish, or poopy diapers (poop again!) and empty Diet Coke cans and dirty tissues, or no one will understand you. The garbage in Colombo is partially privatized, but the government took it over after the end of the thirty year civil war to give soldiers something to do, and to see to it that it actually got done instead of not done, which was apparently the case. (I'm not sure how close to the truth this last sentence is, but I'm sure that if you asked seven people who would know, you'd get seven different, but similar answers. That's Sri Lanka, Fellow Adventurers.) ANYWAY, here's the crazy part about our garbage men. (And they are all men. I have seen women sweeping streets with a garbage cart, but all the people who come to actually pick our trash up from the curb are men.) They come several times a week. One of them runs ahead and rings all the bells, because no one leaves their trash ahem, garbage, on the curb. I have no idea why. After he rings the bell, someone, usually our driver, Kumar, if it's during the week, takes all the garbage to the curb and brings back the bin. If the garbage collectors help, they literally dump the contents of the bin onto the sidewalk and then pick the trash up off the sidewalk and put it on the truck.

All of this only happens because we "tip" the garbage men each month. We moved into our house in mid-February, so we didn't tip them right away, but we did give them more than the typical monthly tip to haul off our boxes. At the beginning of March, they showed up, asking for a tip more than three times the going rate from The International Man of Intrigue. When he gave them the amount that is the going rate, the foreman rubbed his belly and said, "But we're hungry." Since the dude looked like he might actually be eating for two, it was hard to be sympathetic. The International Man of Intrigue was even less likely to be sympathetic when the head garbage dude asked if we were Russian. My husband is a child of the 80's and loves the movie "Red Dawn," so you could say he didn't exactly take this as a compliment.

The kicker of all this is, after we paid them, the garbage collectors refused to come back and didn't pick up our trash for over a week. The International Man of Intrigue was ready to climb our wall and scream "WOLVERINES!" every time they passed us by. This is one of the reasons we have employees like our driver, who is five feet five inches of awesomeness. He went to straighten things out with the garbage men and when they tried to tell him that we hadn't "tipped" them this month, Kumar called BS. The guys have never missed our house again and are extra polite and carry all the trash out for me if Kumar isn't around. Of course, the first thing out of their mouths on April 1st was "Money, Madame?" which proves what I have been saying all along. If I have to pay it or you don't do your job, it's either a salary or a bribe. Since I don't get a bill and I'm just supposed to know how much to give them, and they are supposed to technically pick it up whether I pay them or not, I'm going with the latter. Anyway, it sounds so much more glamourous and fancy to tell The International Man of Intrigue over dinner that I remembered to bribe the garbage men this month.

Our first Road Trip

We just got back from our first Sri Lankan road trip, or as we call it in the Intrigue family, ADVENTURE! As anyone who has ever attempted a road trip with three small children knows, this was no small undertaking. Add on the fact that we are currently leasing a Daihatsu Terios and packing the car becomes an adventure in itself. A Terios may sound like a breakfast cereal, but it is a small SUV that seats five. On a regular day, Amelia Earhart’s booster doesn’t fit in the back and she has to settle for a lap belt-don’t judge unless you’ve lived in Sri Lanka, Judgy McJudgerton. I mean it. For one thing, I don’t think we’ve ever gotten out of third gear, for another, there are no carseat laws here, or even helmet laws that seem to be enforced, as evidenced by seeing a parent and three kids riding a motorcycle, a common sight around here. Also, don’t think it doesn’t bother me, but cars here are ungodly expensive, even used, and we just don’t have several TENS of thousands of dollars in cash waiting to be thrown away on a not so gently used 1982 minivan. So, you can sympathize or you can judge, but if you’re judging, kindly keep it to yourself.

Anyway, we piled everything in the car, tightly packing so much stuff around the Little Adventurers that they wouldn’t be able to move, much less poke each other, for at least the first 20 minutes. The International Man of Intrigue dumped a log book, the Lonely Planet guide, a handful of maps, and his old (non-talking, non-direction giving) Garmin in my lap and proclaimed me Chief Navigator. I wondered if this was the best idea, considering I had just tried to get in the wrong side of the vehicle. Darn right side steering wheel and left side driving!

It seemed like we had barely watched the gates shut behind us and turned off of our street when we were lost taking a detour. We were driving through parts of Colombo I’m not sure any westerners had ever ventured near. I’m pretty sure as people saw us they were thinking, “White people?!? There goes the neighborhood!” The problem with being lost taking a detour through Colombo was that driving here is less than boring. While there is a method to the madness, at first glance, it can seem like there are no driving laws at all. Two lanes painted on the road can mean three driving lanes. Drivers will drive on the wrong side of the street if it will get them around a car that is driving slower than they are, then come to a dead stop in front of that car to make a right turn. The powers that be will change the direction of a one way street, or make a two way into a one way seemingly on a whim. In short, it’s crazy.

The major problem with being lost taking a detour before we even got out of Colombo was that traffic got crazy. The International Man of Intrigue had a death grip on the steering wheel and I was wearing out my imaginary passenger break. I kept screaming things like, “BUS!” and “There’s a guy walking with his scissors point up!” Cars zipped around us with abandon. Motorcyclists in their standard black windbreakers we dubbed Lankans Only Jackets wove in and out of traffic. We tried to figure out where we were in a town where maps are sketchy and roads change names whenever they feel like it. We dodged busses. Busses in Sri Lanka are terrifying. Did anyone have the game Simpsons Road Rage for Playstation 2? Those busses were modeled after Sri Lankan ones, I’m sure. If you didn’t have the game, let’s just say all busses are homicidal and driven by a not entirely sober person. Red busses are the worst. Soon any form of danger had me screaming “RED BUS!” The absolute worst moment came when we found ourselves with a bus on either side of us and they were both jockeying for the position where our car happened to be located. I’m pretty sure the laws of physics state that one bus can’t occupy the space occupied by a Terios, let alone TWO FREAKING BUSSES! One bus was two inches from our right bumper and closing in. The other was two inches from our left and closing in. The International Man of Intrigue swore. I swore. I screamed. He honked. The Little Adventurers kept poking each other in the back seat, oblivious. By some miracle I in no small part contribute to the two St. Benedict Medals in the car and our guardian angels, the busses returned to their own lanes and we came out alive. I was shaking and almost started crying when it happened: an improper emotional response. Apparently I was so completely stressed that some wire crossed in my brain and instead of crying, I started laughing hysterically. I laughed and laughed. The International Man of Intrigue looked worried but he was too busy driving to do anything about it. This was around the point we figured out where we were, but things were still crazy. I screamed “That van is going to t-bone us!” as a van decided his red light was optional. The International Man of Intrigue asked, “Tebow?” as he obligingly slammed on the horn and accelerator simultaneously. I thanked him and said if we got out alive, we should all consider Tebowing for a while.

Now that we were found, we high-tailed it out of the city at a brisk 40 km per hour. That translates to about 25 miles per hour for you non-metric speaking people. Luckily, our destination was a mere 60 km away. For some reason, the laws of motion do not apply to Sri Lankan “highways”, so that meant we were about a half a day’s drive away. This gave us plenty of time to take stock of our driving injuries thus far. Turns out the International Man of Intrigue had developed a blister from gripping the wheel too hard and my leg muscles were twitching from trying to shove my feet through the floorboard. Other than that, we were fine, so we enjoyed looking around at the surroundings. A KIK Cola billboard proclaimed, “Lankan to the Last Drop” and I proclaimed, “So is her headband and matching plastic earrings.” We saw a business that advertised itself to be “Volunteer Caterers.” What the heck does that mean? They cater for free? They only cater for volunteers? They are from Tennessee? We also got to stop to take the Little Explorers potty on a fairly regular basis. Lucky for us, you can’t just pop in somewhere and use their facilities. For one thing, there’s a good chance they don’t HAVE facilities, or the ones they have aren’t “western style”. For another, they just don’t let you do that here. Luckily, we have the coolest travel potty ever made. If you have small children, you need it. Look here. As we drove, we also realized that each town seemed to specialize in selling something: ceramic tiles in one, clay pots in another, inflatable kids’ toys in another, and one seeming to specialize in Lankans Only Jackets. So that’s where they come from…

Finally, after hours of driving, we turned off of the main road toward the Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage. That’s when I saw the most shocking thing I’d seen all day. Two women in saris were walking along the roadside. They held leashes in their hands. The leashes were attached to PORCUPINES. I SWEAR TO YOU, I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. These women were walking porcupines on a leash. Large porcupines. I still can’t get over it. And with that, I’m going to end this chapter of our trip. Stay tuned for the continuing adventures of the Intrigue family as we do exciting things like eat lunch and visit orphaned elephants.

The Rest of The Perahera Post, weeks later.

Yes, I’ve been absent for a couple of weeks, but I brought you the International Man of Intrigue, so we’re square, right?

Oh, my pictures of the Perahera? That’s what you’ve come to see? I was hoping that The International Man of Intrigue’s guest post would distract you. Hmm…well…how do I put this? Let’s just say after agonizing over the pictures, and after much soul searching, I came to grips with the fact that I’m a writer, not a photographer. I think rather than water down my blog with a bunch of crappy pictures I’ll just stick with what I do best and write for you. I really struggled with this because I feel like a good travel blog needs lots of gorgeous pictures. Really, a good travel blog, a good travel magazine, a good travel book, they all have great pictures. I don’t. Then I realized, Bill Bryson doesn’t clutter his books with lots of pictures, and people still love to read his writings. I know I’m no Bill Bryson, but I do think I’ll just go with my strength on this one. I will still include the occasional picture, it’s just not going to be a focus, or in focus for that matter.(Ba-dump-bump-ching!)

Anyway, do you still want to hear about the Perahera? It was amazing! We walked the two blocks down from the hotel. As we got closer, a carnival atmosphere filled the air. There were vendors everywhere. There was all kinds of food and some of it smelled delicious. Wooden carts filled with corn had little platforms with flames burning on them. The salesmen would roast the corn right there and hand it to you. Of course, being westerners, we didn’t eat any of it, since we had no desire to spend the next week living in the bathroom. As anyone who has done it can attest, when you move, or even travel, to a Third World Country Emerging Nation, you spend a lot of time thinking about poop, enough time to devote an entire blog post to it. Anyone interested in reading that? That’s why we don’t eat street food, even though it often looks and smells delicious. Sometimes it doesn’t look and smell delicious. I still regret not photographing the fish cupcakes we saw on one of our first days in Colombo. FISH CUPCAKES, PEOPLE. Yes, little cupcake looking things with dried fish, complete with eyeballs, on top. Eating one of those would definitely result in a blog about poop, no question.

I’m the master of distraction today, no? Blame it on the fact that my kids have interrupted me about every third word. I’m not a slow typist, so that’s pretty often. As I was saying, the Perahera was amazing. We had VIP seats on a raised platform, so everything was up close and personal with a great view and none of the elephant poop that could hamper a good time if one was sitting at street level. (Poop again, I know.) The parade started off with young men in local costumes with what I first thought were huge pythons wrapped around them. The pythons were actually whips and the young men started cracking them with such speed that they sounded like firecrackers.

Well, crud. I stopped after writing this paragraph a couple of days ago, and here I am, trying to blame it on my children and the fact that the movers came Wednesday night at 7:30 and brought our stuff and I’ve been unpacking ever since. This is officially the longest blog post ever. And by longest, I don’t mean number of words. I mean amount of time per word. The Perahera was on February 7th. It’s now February 25th. You’d think that would make the writing better, since I’ve spent about a day per sentence. I’m a good writer, but not that good. Anyway, tonight is the night. I’m finishing this blog post and this beer I’m drinking and then going to bed. Now if the International Man of Intrigue calls me over to see another picture on Facebook of a friend of his I’ve never met or some cool thing he’s done on the Playstation, I’m going to scream. I have to write this Perahera stuff and then never promise you I’ll write about something again, because it just gives me writers’ block on the subject and makes me want to write about all kinds of other cool things, like the people who work for us or the room under our stairs.

ANYWAY, the parade, which I think was actually considered a procession since it was marching a relic of Buddha from place to place, went on, with the first elephants coming by. They were completely decked out from trunk to toe. They even wore masks. Many of their gowns were intricately decorated, beaded, or embroidered. The first elephants and the ones at the very end of the procession, nearest the Buddha relic, had little lights running up and down their masks. I set Amelia Earhart to the task of counting the elephants. I figured it would be good practice for her to keep track of something while she was excited and there was lots going on, and I knew I’d immediately get distracted and forget to count so I could tell you how many elephants marched in the procession.

There were lots of other amazing sights. Kandyan Drummers dressed up in their intricately beaded red and white costumes, Buddhist monks, some not much older than the Little Explorers, marching two by two, and my favorite, Cane Dancers. I searched the internet to try to link to a video, but I couldn’t find anything. I had seen these dancers when I watched from the breezeway at our hotel. From that vantage point, I was impressed by the rapidly spinning and spiraling groups circles of dancers, weaving in and out of one another. From the ground, it was an entirely different story. It turns out that these male dancers, who were in two concentric circles, with one guy in the center of the smaller circle, were all connected and interconnected to one another with bendable pieces of cane. The guy in the very center of both circles seemed to be holding the ends to all the pieces. They all walked along in formation until it was time to perform. Then, the guy in the center dropped to the ground and began spinning. All the other dancers in the two concentric circles began twirling and weaving in and out of one another at a dizzying speed. It was like the most insane Maypole dance ever, but the guy in the middle was the Maypole. I couldn’t believe it!

The Perahera went on for hours. The Little Explorers enjoyed it, but we could sense it was getting dangerously close to a melting point. One spilled water, one miscounted elephant, and this was over for us. We rounded up the kids and got ready to make our way back to the hotel. There was only one problem. The procession went down to a certain point, turned around and came back down the same street. Right now the beginning of the parade was just making its way to the point where we were sitting. It was double parade right down the street we needed to walk up. We did what we had to and walked two blocks in the *opposite* direction of the hotel, dodging elephant poop and people who wanted to touch Gertrude Bell’s blonde hair. When we turned off of the main parade route to double back, there were plenty of tuk-tuks waiting to rip off tourists. Normally, we wouldn’t consider letting the kids ride in the three wheeled, open sided cabs, but it was late, we were as exhausted as the Little Explorers, Gertrude Bell was going to have a meltdown if one more person touched her, and there wasn’t much traffic. Lucky for us, we didn’t show up in Sri Lanka yesterday (more like a month ago), so when the first driver tried to charge us triple what a fare should have been, we laughed and kept walking. We’re the Intrigue family. We know better. Sure enough, ten steps later, there was another driver who was willing to take us for a decent price. We all squished in the back seat and held on to the kids as tightly as possible. The girls decided it was almost as much fun as a ride at Disneyland, rushing down the back streets of Colombo toward our hotel. The full moon was bright and the breeze helped cool us all down.

So, there you have it. The Perahera. I am sure we’ll do many more exciting things during our year here, but I think I’ll always look back on the Perahera as a big deal. Walking through the crowds, experiencing the sights and sounds, that was what I really imagined it would be like to live here.

And, on that note, it’s way past my bedtime, and I’m out of beer. But, hey, I finished this post, right?! Oh, and Amelia Earhart counted sixty elephants. That's a lot of elephants for one parade!

Super Bowl and Perahera

Some of my military readers may not find the first part of this post very unusual, especially if you’ve been stationed overseas, but in the interest of those that haven’t, here’s a little taste of what it’s like when Super Bowl Sunday doesn’t fall on Sunday evening. Afterwards, I’ll tell you about the holiday the locals here in Colombo are celebrating.

For us, the Super Bowl started Monday morning at 5 am local time. It was a day off here for other reasons (stay tuned), but it’s not uncommon for it to be a day off for folks like military stationed in Germany or deployed in harms’ way, so military men and women can enjoy the game whether it falls in the morning or in the middle of the night. We were going to watch the game with other Americans at our rec center. Lucky for us, we were streaming the game from the internet instead of watching on American Forces Network (AFN). If you watch on AFN, there are no commercials. Isn’t that at least 60% of the reason we watch the Super Bowl? Instead of commercials, you get public service announcements, like how to recognize depression and mini history lessons.

By the time we showed up at 7, the third quarter had just started. Wow! We had some typical Super Bowl things, like adult beverages and spinach artichoke dip, and some that fit with the time of day, like waffles, sausage, and eggs. I thought it was a great football game. I’m a Chefs fan, great googly-moogly, so I didn’t have a vested interest in either team, but I guess I was rooting for the Giants just because I like Eli Manning better than Tom Brady. Last time these two teams met up in the Super Bowl, the International Man of Intrigue was off shooting terrorists and Amelia Earhart was a baby. We left the party we were at early, thinking the game was “over”, but by the time I got home and put her to bed, things had taken a turn and I ended up cheering and screaming all alone in my living room until the wee hours.

Anyway, the most exciting moment of the game for me, and everyone we were watching with, was the moment right before that crazy final touchdown. The play had just started and our screen went blue! Screams of anguish filled the air as someone dove to wake the computer! Luckily, it was just in time to see Bradshaw stop and sit/fall over the goal line! What The What?!?! With that, we watched the Patriots’ final attempt and then jumped into the pool for a swim. We were home and ready to feed the kids lunch and take naps by 10:30!

Now, it just so happens that Super Bowl Monday was also a holiday in Sri Lanka. It’s not because our Sri Lankan hosts were putting on their Giants and Patriots jerseys. Every full moon is a holiday called a Poya Day here. Poya Days are Buddhist religious holidays. Banks and government agencies are closed, along with many schools and shops. No alcohol or meat is sold in stores. This Poya Day is also the Perahera in Colombo. It is a huge celebration and parade. We were lucky enough to be invited by an acquaintance at the hotel to watch from his penthouse apartment. The view of the little Buddhist temple sitting on the water in the pond near the hotel was even more beautiful than usual. The entire temple was covered in lights. Trees all around the pond were lit up. There is a bridge to a small island and it was covered in blue lights.

Unfortunately, that’s where my story of “movin’ on up to the east side, to deluxe apartment in the sky” ends. The little explorers were not dealing well with being out past bedtime. The parade of 100 elephants, jugglers, dancers, drummers and more was supposed to start at 7 pm, but this is South Asia. Nothing starts on time. By 8 I had the screaming, wailing children in bed and was headed to the kitchen for a drink and a snack, moping because The International Man of Intrigue was still upstairs watching the parade.

But wait? What was that noise?? Could it be??? YES! Even though our room faces the wrong side of the hotel, I could hear the drumming so loudly, I stepped out into the breezeway/laundry room to look outside. Yes! I could see the turnaround point of the Perahera. I could see the elephants in all their splendor. (Apparently in the world of elephant fashion, if one is marching in the Perahera, one should wear formal attire.) I saw the dancers spinning and whirling. I heard the drums. I’d love to say I took pictures, but it was really far away. There is no way, unless I had some crazy professional lenses, that I could have gotten a decent picture. If I had taken pictures and posted them on here, it would be like looking at an ultrasound picture when you’ve never had a baby. You would all smile and nod and pretend you could see the elephants but be secretly annoyed that you have no idea what you’re looking at. Lucky for you, I didn’t take pictures. Luckier for you, I found this guy’s blog, and he did. LUCKY for MEEEE, we got tickets to go down and watch the Perahera tonight. Oh, I didn’t mention the Perahera goes on for two nights? Well, it does, and who has ten thumbs and tickets for tonight’s events? The Intrigue Family! I will try to get some awesome pictures and report back.

Oh, and if all that wasn’t exciting enough, we should be moving into our house tomorrow. Because I’m not sure if we’ll have internet from the get go, it might be a few days, but I’ll report back as soon as possible, Adventurous Readers.

Carnegie Hall

“Airplane travel is nature’s way of making you look like your passport photo.” –Al Gore

How do you get to Sri Lanka? Practice, practice, practice! What? That’s Carnegie Hall? Well, I think it might actually be easier to get the five of us to Carnegie Hall than it was to get us to Colombo. (Colombo is Sri Lanka’s capital. It always made me think of the TV detective, until the International Man of Intrigue pointed out that the show was actually “Columbo,” and now it just makes me think that he ruined it for me.) Our entire trip, door to door, was about 36 hours, if my math is anywhere near correct. Math is not my strong suit, so give or take 12 hours on my calculations. Even though I’m sure you’d just love to read every word of a blow by blow account of our trip, I’ll hit the highlights.

We lived a 5 minute car ride away from our small airport. Cinch, right? Nope. Getting 14 suitcases, 6 carry-ons and 5 people there proved to be a major hurdle. Seems no cab company had a mini van available at 4 a.m. Fine. We’re the Intrigue family, we can deal. So, one poor cab driver got to make three trips to get all of us and all of our crap there.

I know some of you are immediately annoyed at reading the amount of luggage we were taking. Not as annoyed as I was. Oh, and not as annoyed as the people standing in line behind us, trust me. The International Man of Intrigue and I fancy ourselves travelers. In college, we traveled Europe for weeks with only a backpack and a tomato box. (What? You use luggage? Well, obviously you’ve missed travel enlightenment if you aren’t using a tomato box. True.) Here’s the thing I had to get over: We weren’t traveling. We were moving. We have children. Small ones. We needed a pack and play, diapers, tons of baby food (because it can’t be ordered through the mail), and lots of OTC medicine. We also had Christmas and Gertrude Bell’s birthday to celebrate after our household got packed up and before we left the U.S., and Amelia Earhart’s and Arthur Dent’s birthdays to celebrate shortly after our arrival. Oh, and we had to pack a box containing 2 high back boosters and one convertible car seat (which will come back to haunt us later in the story). So, we had a boatload of stuff. It was still one less bag than we were authorized, so maybe I should have packed more shoes…

Well, I just got all defensive, and no one has even made any snarky comments or anything. Sorry. Moving on…

Can I tell you, while LAX is the scourge of the Devil, Cathay Pacific Airline is awesome?! Immediately upon boarding, our girls were given Disney themed activity kits and we were handed a diaper kit for Arthur Dent, which even contained sample sizes of Mustela baby goodies. I’m a sucker for free sample sized toilitries, so Cathay had me right there. They also had a pre-installed infant seat for Arthur Dent, as promised, and their flight attendants were so in love with the kid, I thought the biggest problem might be that they’d have to say goodbye to him in Hong Kong.

It’s at this point I have to wonder how people like the Pilgrims crossed the ocean on ships with no in-flight on-demand movie and game system. That thing was a lifesaver. Amelia Earhart got to watch Alice in Wonderland twice in a row. Gertrude Bell enjoyed playing an episode of Handy Manny on repeat because there was a baby in it. (She’s almost as big a sucker for babies as those Cathay Pacific flight attendants.) I got to watch THREE WHOLE MOVIES! And, since they were my choice, I could pause them every five minutes to take one of the little explorers to the lavatory! I watched “Our Idiot Brother” (HILARIOUS!), “The Help” (predictable but endearing), and “The King’s Speech” (totally get the Oscar hype).

And then we got to Hong Kong. Late. And discovered that the infant seat we had been repeatedly promised and had gotten on the first leg of our trip was unavailable for and incompatible with the plane we were riding on from Hong Kong to Bangkok and Bangkok to Colombo. Talk about two grouchy parents. For the next 7 hours, we were going to have to hold Arthur Dent. The folks at Cathay were very apologetic, even offering to get our gate-checked carseat out of the plane in Bangkok. Unfortunately, it wasn’t gate checked, it was under 17 layers of packing tape in a moving box with who knows what else we shoved in there, since they had assured us during no less than five phone conversations that we would have their handy-dandy infant seat. So, we sucked it up and made it through the next 7 hours and arrived in Colombo sometime in the middle of the night.

Arriving in Colombo in the middle of the night after a 36 hour trip is kind of like partying at a club all night and then having the lights come up after last call. You’re left squinting and wondering how bad your hangover is going to be the next morning. Two weeks later, and I’m still wondering. I’m going to take some asprin and a Diet Coke and get back to you.

In Other News

I don’t want my (hopefully) loyal readers to think I’m going to post every day. I don’t want you to get tired of me! I do have to share this, though. I’ve been laughing about it for a full day. This little tidbit appeared in the Colombo Sunday Observer yesterday. It was hidden a few paragraphs down in an article about cobblers (who, in Sri Lanka, are street vendors that spread out a blanket on the sidewalk and fix shoes and bags).

Legend has it that shoes of soldiers in the American Army were repaired by the elders of an American tribe, called “Cobblers”. The tribe “Cobblers” was living in the Southern part of America during the early part of the 19th century. They killed animals for their livelihood. The hard skin, they removed from animals was used to produce clothes and slippers. A platoon of the American army during their routine in this tribal village had spotted old men mending clothes out of hard skin of animals. The legend further says that cobblers thereafter gradually practiced the 200 year old art of mending shoes and had done a tremendous service to people by repairing shoes, leather belts, bags and hats.

Now, I am no history major, but the International Man of Intrigue is, and he concurs with my assessment that, if his memory serves him correctly, this is a load of made up craziness. Honestly, the paper here has something laughter inducing every day. I’m going to miss it when we move out of our hotel into a house and it’s not waiting tucked in the doorknob every morning. The story does bring up the deeper theme of perceptions of America and Americans, but I’ll save that for another blog post (or twenty).