Serendipity

You may think there’s been no activity on my site for a while, but there has — in the non-code background. All of the Sri Lanka posts have been moved over. The difficult part was incorporating images into the actual post, something of a struggle for me because I want to keep them separate from the text and in a database so I can move them around. However, the biggest complaint I get from users about usability is: the images get missed because they are separate from the posts; they’re not a part of the story.

So, they’re now a part of the story. The photos from Sri Lanka are nothing spectacular. All of these were taken in the day of film and my Sri Lanka film was destroyed in a photo lab in Hyderabad, India and even Photoshop can’t quickly fix the damage.

There have been some pleasant surprises in all of this. For example, in Mihintale I wrote:

“The people are different in this area. They have a different look in their eyes than all the other people I have encountered thus far. It is as though the horrors of war have taken their innocence away and weighed them down. The women are all different. I would like to say they are stronger, but that is not entirely true. I guess harsh would be a good term. Many of them have had to find their own way without their husbands, who have gone off to war or who have died. They are self reliant because the war has eaten into their stock of men and boys.

I rented a bicycle and this is how I got to Mihintale. It was a long ride: 11 km and there was a bicycle race going on so people lined the streets in places. People cheered as I biked past and more than once they wanted to splash water on me like they would the racers. At one point I stopped at a little shop to have a coconut. The man running the shop was missing one of his arms, either from war or from a mine. He was really interesting to talk to. He told me to watch the locals and if they all disappeared then I should run and hide because something was about to happen…”

I completely forgot about this and many other posts I’d written while in Sri Lanka. It seems they all got lost behind the Elephant Bum Story. But, there’s more: trying to get to Sri Lanka, meeting Michael Ondaatje’s family, the Sacred Bo-tree, Navam Perahera, Galle, Hikkaduwa, the Galle Road Adventure, the Lowland Dance ceremony, and finally getting to see herds of elephants.