Curses and Cucumbers and Carrots, Oh My!

I know I’ve talked about grocery shopping in Sri Lanka before (here), but now that I’ve been here a while, I feel like it’s time to revisit it, specifically with my trip to the store yesterday.

I do know that we are fortunate to have actual grocery stores here. For that, I owe a HUGE shout out to British colonialism and David Sime Cargill who started a warehouse, import, and wholesale store in 1844. In most other countries in this region, getting groceries means going to a shop that has meat, then one that has bread, then one that has produce, then one that has eggs, and then who knows how many other shops to find everything one needs. I could definitely do that here, as well, but thanks to Mr. Cargill, I have Cargill’s Food City and one or two other chains of grocery stores to frequent. Since I also have three Little Explorers and approximately zero patience, I am eternally grateful to Mr. Cargill.

All that being said, getting groceries in this country still is no easy task. I used to be an obsessive menu planner and coupon clipper. I actually enjoyed the whole process of making a list, putting coupons in order, and knowing what was for dinner every week. That all came to a screeching halt when we moved here. First off, there are no coupons. Fine. I can deal with that. The real issue is that, while I make a list, I can no longer be bound to it, nor make a menu based on it. I can’t guarantee that the things on my list will be in the store, even if they were there last week. I don’t know which produce will be fresh and which will be a bit past its prime. I just don’t know what’s going to happen once I push through those doors and grab a shopping cart. Shall I demonstrate with an example? Allow me to take you inside my head during my most recent grocery buying experience:

Thanks, old dude in the white sarong and jacket whose job it is to open the door. I’m going to miss you. Have you considered getting your visa and moving to the States to be a greeter at Wal-Mart? I’ll bet they let you keep the sarong with the uniform blue vest.

Oooh, the produce looks nice today. I love living on a tropical island where the fruit is so yummy and tropical. Pineapples are in season. I wish I wasn’t allergic. Perhaps I’ll get one for the rest of the family. Dragonfruit. I love dragonfruit. Here are cucumbers. I’ll get a bunch of those for Gertrude Bell since she loves them so much. Carrots, check. Apples, check. Mangoes and papaya, check. Onions and bell pepper, or as they call it here, capsicum, check. Capsicum is a weird word. Ok, now to line up and get this stuff weighed and priced.

I’ll just get behind this old lady with the cart full of produce. Maybe it won’t take as long as I imagine. I’d better push my cart up to the side to be out of the way of other shoppers. Ooh, I guess I should get closer before that lady in the red blouse cuts in front of me. Obviously, I’m not in line if there are more than three inches between me and the old lady. The International Man of Intrigue uses the euphemism “butts to nuts” to describe lines here, but, as I have none of the latter, and as my brain is supposed to be PG, I’ll refrain. Good, the old lady is finished. Wait, what is she saying? Something in Sinhalese. Oh, that is a scary look. What? WHAT?? Oh. My. God. I think she just cursed me. She did! She gave me the evil eye and cursed me and I was just trying to buy cucumbers! What the heck?! I’m sorry I’m foreign! I’m sorry I smiled at you! I’m sorry I have to buy groceries and now I’m cursed! Aaaagh!

Okay, the produce is weighed. Calm down. On to the noodles. I really want some soba noodles but I bet they don’t have those here. Nope. Tons of ramen. What are these bags? “Special Noodles.” More “special noodles.” I have no idea what that means. Hey, Sri Lanka…If you tell all the noodles they’re special, they’re going to think everything they do is perfect. You want a bunch of noodles who think they all deserve the tee ball cricket trophy just for participating? No? Well then stop labeling them all special. While you’re at it, maybe consider getting some soba noodles, okay?

 

Mmmm. Maldivian dried fish, complete with eyeballs, on display on an endcap. Won’t see that in the States.

I’m hot. Why is it that I sweat as much getting groceries as I do exercising? Move over Jillian Michaels and your 30 Day Shred. Dorothy Gale’s 30 Minute Shop is coming for you!

Okay, now I need yogurt and cheese. Aaah, they have lots of curd. Who knew it could somewhat replace both Greek yogurt and sour cream in my diet. I’m glad there’s no nutrition info on the side. Here’s the brand I like. Should I buy the stuff in the terra cotta pot with the rubber band holding the cover on or the one in the unsealed plastic container? We’ll base that on expiration. Well, this one is expired, so the plastic tub it is! Good. Now, cheese. I really want some feta cheese. I don’t care if it costs nine dollars. I am totally hungry for pasta with feta cheese. NO! Of course! The one day I am willing to pay exorbitant prices for feta cheese and there is none! Fine. Just fine.

What am I listening to? What is this music? I can’t possibly be hearing what I think I’m hearing. Oh, but I am. Get a load of this. Traumatizing, at best.

 

Frozen foods. Five hundred kinds of chicken sausages. One brand of chicken nuggets, and why are they so tiny? I mean, it would take an entire box just to fill up Arthur Dent. Maybe they’ll have those yummy chicken fingers stuffed with some sort of curry mashed potatoes they had last week. Nope. Of course not. What I wouldn’t give for frozen pizza. Oh, well. Really, I just need to finish my shopping. I need to get out of here before I lose my mind, or before that curse kicks in, but first I have to grab eggs off the unrefrigerated shelf. Hmm. That doesn’t really bother me anymore. Weird. I guess that’s a good thing.

CHECKOUT! I made it. No, lady, I do not have exact change. What is it with the fascination for having exact change? Every single place I go, ever, wants you to always be able to magically produce exact change. Please, stop trying to look into my wallet like I have it, too! I need those small bills sometimes, okay. Don’t make me feel guilty. I’m already cursed. Doesn’t that count for something?

And there you have it, Fellow Adventurers. Exhausting. I’m going to put my feet up and sip on a Coke Light while I cool off. Think of me when you’re cooking dinner tonight, especially if you’re making frozen pizza.

Worst Case Scenario

Remember our not-so-little roof leak? And then the huge waterfall that dumped into our dining room during a dinner party? Well, that’s nothing after last night.

It’s monsoon season in Sri Lanka, which doesn’t mean at all what I thought it would. I thought monsoons would be more, well, monsoon-y. I expected a constant deluge for days on end, the kind of things you see in movies with people sitting and staring out of their thatched roof tropical hut. In reality, it is a total torrential downpour, but it comes and goes, and things return to tropical island sunny in between. Many times, the worst of it seems to come at night, as was the case last night.

All day yesterday, the wind kept picking up. When I was out running errands, I could see the choppy waves and the storm over the ocean. The International Man of Intrigue was scheduled to return from a business trip in the Maldives last night, and I was starting to get a sinking feeling the weather may not hold out for his flight. Luckily, his flight took off only 15 minutes behind schedule, but as the evening wore on, the wind worsened. Our plexiglass skylight, which was the source of our leaks, started banging up and down whenever the wind gusted. I started getting really nervous about it. After all, the two overlapping pieces of plexiglass had never seemed that secure in the first place. And our dining room waterfall? After four visits from the landlady’s henchmen, we’d given up. They kept insisting it was just the gutters needing to be cleaned, even though the embassy’s maintenance man kept telling them there were more problems. In the end, The International Man of Intrigue and I had resigned ourselves to some leaking whenever it rained, as long as it could be caught by a single bucket. By the time I put The Little Explorers to bed, the banging was worsening, and the water was gushing in. I sighed and pulled the dining room table and chairs out of the way and battened down the hatches as best I could.

The International Man of Intrigue finally arrived home from the airport and was also sufficiently impressed and concerned with the banging plexiglass to make me feel like I wasn’t a complete crazy person. He even took a short video to show to facilities maintenance so they could get an idea of the problem. Then, we retired to the family room to relax and catch up on the excitement of the week. He told me about taking water taxis and meeting interesting people. I filled him in on which Little Explorers had snot noses and fevers, leaky bathtubs, and what kind of pizza we ordered for dinner. Oh, yes, it was obvious who’d had the more exciting few days! What happened next was inevitable, I suppose. A particularly loud series of bangs caught our attention. We grabbed a flashlight to check it out, even though we were pretty sure that a large chunk of plexiglass had just ripped off and disappeared into the night. Sure enough. We now had an open air skylight. After a quick call to the embassy maintenance staff to let them know the situation, we turned in for the night. It wasn’t like anyone could show up and replace a giant piece of plexiglass in a windstorm, anyway.

You know how, when you are lying in bed, worst case scenarios and monsters start popping up in your imagination? (Please, Fellow Adventurers, tell me it’s not just me!)Well, as I let my imagination do the thinking, my biggest concern, aside from water damage, flooding, squirrels, mosquitoes, birds, structural damage, or the roof actually collapsing, was the huge breach in security from the hole in the roof. There are monkeys on this island, people. What if monkeys came into the roof? Or ninjas? Ninjas could repel into the hole in the skylight! Or ninja monkeys? Aaaaaaaaagh!

And then I fell asleep. Apparently skylights ripping off and rain coming in sound nothing like children crying, so I had an excellent night’s sleep.

Bright and early this morning, the sun was shining down through the hole in the skylight and everything looked fine. There was surprisingly little water on the floor. A lot of leaves, but surprisingly little water. The best part? No ninja monkeys! The embassy maintenance staff arrived first thing and the henchmen shortly after. The head henchman walked in to assess the damage. He looked up at the skylight and, for the first time ever, was speechless. No blaming it on leaf filled gutters or trying to find a way to pin a leaky roof on the inhabitants (because, yes, I climb up and poke holes in the roof when you’re not around). He simply blinked a few times, muttered two words in Sinhala and walked out. I have been smiling about that every since. The Intrigues: 1, Henchmen: 0! (Okay, really, the current tally is probably The Intrigues: 3, Henchmen: 47, but we won this round, and I think we get extra points for Head Henchman Dude being rendered speechless.)

It’s mid afternoon as I write this, and the skylight is currently being replaced. It looks like I can go to bed free of worry of invading ninjas. I’m not holding out much hope on this keeping the water out, though. I’ll keep you posted, Fellow Adventurers.

Friday Pizza Nights Are Back!

I don’t even know how to make this funny because it’s embarrassing, so I’m just going to come right out and say it. We ate at Pizza Hut on Friday. We did. We moved our entire family to the entire other side of the world so we could eat at Pizza Hut on Friday night. And it was delicious, thankyouverymuch.

Back stateside, Friday night is pizza night in the Intrigue house. Sometimes we ordered in, sometimes we’d bake frozen pizza, and sometimes I’d make homemade pizza using Trader Joe’s dough, homemade sauce, cheese, and turkey pepperoni. I’m not big on eating pig, but I do love “roni” on my pizza.

Now that we’ve been in Sri Lanka for a while, we decided it was time to revive our Friday night tradition. Our residence hotel has room service, and they make some decent pizza, but we felt like going out, and Pizza Hut is within walking distance of our hotel, which is handy considering we have yet to find a car to purchase.

Are you just dying to know what a Pizza Hut in Sri Lanka is like? No? Well, too bad, because I can’t think of any other way to finish this blog post.

Pizza Hut in Sri Lanka is like…well, how do I say this?…Pizza Hut. I guess that’s kind of the beauty of chain restaurants. For the same reason we sometimes despise them, “They’re all pretty much the same,” “They have no personality,” they are also nice when you just want to know what to expect. We walked in and it was air conditioned. There was a big salad bar in the middle. The décor was a little more modern than I remembered, but I’ve been boycotting Pizza Hut since 2009, so I could have missed some corporate redecorating. (Yes, the Intrigue family likes a good boycott. We also boycott Heinz Ketchup and Amarillo, Texas, among a few other things.) Annoyingly, they didn’t have any high chairs, but that isn’t the most unusual thing in Colombo. All the employees were in their black pants and red polos. The managers meeting at a table in the back were wearing their blue chambray shirts and pizza topping ties. The female manager had on a white headscarf, but that was pretty much it for anything out of the ordinary. The menu stated that the restaurant started in "Kansas, United States, "also the birthplace of yours truly, coincidentally. Our girls were even given balloons. Amelia Earhart looked at hers and said, “It would probably pop if I stuck it with a toothpick.” We told her that’s exactly what would happen. The first time we turned our heads, she stuck it with a toothpick and it popped. She promptly dissolved into hysterical tears. Yes, just like dining out back in the States.

The menu was a little different. We had French fries for an appetizer—excuse me, “appetiser.” We could have stuffed crust pizza filled with cheese like in the States, or stuffed with chicken sausage. Not ground sausage, a big old log of chicken sausage. It didn’t look very appealing to me, but I had to talk the International Man of Intrigue out of it. We decided on two pizzas, one topped with Australian beef pepperoni and one tandoori chicken. Both were delicious. I loved that the pepperoni wasn’t pork, and the tandoori chicken was really flavorful and not too spicy. We branched out a little on drinks, too. I got a Fanta instead of my usual Coke Light and the International Man of Intrigue tried a cream soda, which turned out to be shockingly neon yellow colored and a bit gingery tasting.

Even though we spent the evening poking fun at ourselves for being the uncultured Americans who travel to the other side of the world and eat at Pizza Hut, it was kind of comforting. I made it up to myself by trying the cashew curry the next morning at breakfast.