Anyway, let’s at least get started today with beautiful Sri Lanka. Zack and I were SO ready for this vacation. We were seriously emotionally run down and trying to hide our bad attitudes from our students by the end of the quarter. Here is a picture of us (Zack looks beautiful and I look tired, as usual) drinking terrible Vietnamese beers in the airport.
Often when I travel, I try to project myself into the city or country I’m visiting, wondering if it’s the kind of place I could live. Almost as soon as we stepped our of our charming B&B into the relaxed quiet of Colombo on a Sunday, Zack and I both said we felt like it was the kind of place we could live. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was the walkable city center, or the delicious curry, or the fact that we could interact so naturally with Sri Lankan people because of their English proficiency, but something about Colombo felt like it would be such a lovely place to live for a while. And now, a Colombo collage:
Before I get into what we got up to in Colombo, I have to say something about the amazing B&B we stayed in, Colpetty House. We loved it there so much we booked another night for our last night in town. Colpetty House was fabulous for many reasons. It’s spacious, quiet and clean and the breakfast is divine, but the real draws for us were the owner, a completely delightful woman named Anushika, and Emma, an Australian woman who was working there when we visited. They both went out of their way to make us feel welcome and at home, and Anushika sat with us for over an hour during breakfast helping us plan our first day in Colombo. At the end of our trip when our return flight was canceled (more on that later), Anushika let us come back and use our room for the rest of the day until they had to clean in preparation for the next guest. Seriously, if you’re headed to Colombo, I cannot recommend Colpetty House highly enough.
Our first day in Colombo, we wandered through a very charming park full of canoodling teenagers, then headed to a super tasty restaurant called Upali’s where we ate hathmaaluwa (mixed vegetable curry, advertised as a 2000-year-old recipe), ala sudata uyala (potato curry in coconut milk), and paan (hearty Sri Lankan bread). Photos to come (after I steal them from Zack).
We wanted to catch the sunset from The Kingsbury, but we had quite a lot of time to kill so, in typical Zack and Elizabeth fashion, we wandered from restaurant to cafe to restaurant, eating and drinking our way through Colombo. Our first stop was Whight & Co, where we obviously had to try some beautiful Ceylon Sapphire tea (by “some” I really mean “three pots of”). Whight & Co. has a great view of the ocean and very classic, clean, nautical-themed decor. Here’s Zack gazing pensively out of the window:
After Whight & Co., we wandered over towards the train station to snag something tasty for dinner. We kind of stumbled upon a roti shop called Pillawoods Hotel, where Zack absolutely lost his mind with excitement:
Finally, as the sun was beginning to set, we wandered over to The Kingsbury, a super fancy-looking hotel with a nice rooftop bar. We sat up there and sipped gin (naturally) and watch the sun set over the ocean. It was a magical first day.
We also inadvertently spent another day in Colombo at the end of our trip because our AirAsia flight was canceled. AirAsia can look super attractive because it’s a discount airline with really cheap tickets, but as with many discount airlines, their service is absolutely terrible (definitely worse than some others I’ve been on like Southwest or EasyJet or RyanAir). They canceled our flight after we’d already arrived at the airport, put us on another flight very late that night (so we missed work the following day), wouldn’t even give us taxi fare back to the city center, and were completely and utterly remorseless when we went to the office to complain. They were basically like, we are under no obligation to run all of the flights we schedule, we are under no obligation to help you in any way when we cancel a flight, and also we don’t care that you are missing work tomorrow. Oh and by the way the reason we didn’t contact you to let you know the flight was canceled was because you booked through a travel website rather than the AirAsia site. Sorry not sorry.
So basically, if you aren’t on a specific timeline I guess taking a gamble with AirAsia would be worth it because it’s so cheap, but if a canceled flight would really mess up your schedule and make you miss work or something, you might want to go with a legit airline.
After our shouting match with AirAsia at the airport, Zack and I dejectedly headed back to Colombo and Colpetty House, where we were so happy to be able to lay down for a little rest. Finally we did get back out for a little wander - we headed over to a store/cafe called Barefoot. They had some really lovely textiles and handicrafts and other souvenir-type things. The other thing they had was live Jazz in their outdoor restaurant (apparently this is an every Sunday thing).
This trip kind of had three parts for me - the city, the mountains and the beach - so it seems logical to split it into three blog posts. So I’ll leave Sri Lanka here for now, and hopefully get back to you in less than 9 weeks with the next installment :)
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