India is Awesome

I'm sitting in my hotel room at 9pm of my last night in India, and I'm sad that I have to leave tomorrow. I had a fantastic time in India for the last 4 days, despite the setbacks of spending waaay to long stuck in traffic, waaaaaaaay too long sitting in the Sri Lanka High Commission, and spending a day vomiting with a migraine as a result of the first two things. People say Chennai is a bad place to visit in India. I reckon (I've started using that word because my Australians do) that any place where people live has interesting things to do. Though Chennai is not known for its ancient temples or landscape, it is still a pretty cool city.

I'm not going to write about my time in Sri Lanka before Thailand. It's been too long for me to write about it in a way that would be very interesting. In this email, I'll tell you about: my trip to India, my time on a colonial tea plantation in the mountains of Sri Lanka, my work, and some other random anecdotes that I find interesting. If you want to know more about the month that I'm not writing about, you can call me on skype (lukesanford). This would also make my day to have any of you call me, and I could hear about how you're doing.

India first. India is awesome. I spent this afternoon riding around Chennai on a motorcycle with a guy who I met on the beach. I'm getting ahead of myself again. Starting at the beginning...

I arrived in India on the 30th of March with an official purpose: get a Sri Lanka residence visa. This allows me to stay in the country for longer than one month at a time and allows me to get paid for my work, get a drivers license (no thanks), rent an apartment, and do a variety of other things tourists are not allowed to do. My unofficial purpose was to check out southern India. Here were my very first impressions of India:
Indian people are the worst people at airports and in airplanes. It is one of my travel policies to aim to arrive at the airport 3 hours before an international flight. This gives time for traffic, long emmigration/customs/security/check in lines. This trip, I was through everything except gate security 2:45 before the flight was supposed to leave. at 2:00 before departure, I looked up at the board to see "Jet Airways Flight 281 to Chennai, last call for boarding." So, I got up and tried to board the airplane. "Sorry sir, you cannot board the aircraft at this time." Huh? Did I miss my flight somehow? "We put last call now so that people will start to come to the gate. Otherwise our flight will leave 1 hour late. Sure enough, nobody was at the gate when they started boarding. At 10 minutes to takeoff, I was on the plane, and then people started all rushing on board. Then, they refused to sit down. Everyone just milled about in the aisles. It took 2 announcements from the captain and a lot of shouting on the part of the flight attendants to get people to sit.
One of the things that annoys me on airplanes a little is when people rush to stand up when the plane stops moving. You know you can't get off the plane yet right? On my flight, people were standing up as soon as wheels touched pavement, starting to grab their bags from overhead compartments, and push towards the front of the plane. At least checking in 3 hours early and being 193 cm tall usually gets me a seat with extra leg room in an emergency exit.

Before going to a new city I try to figure out how to get around by public transportation. I discovered that I could take the train straight from the airport to my hotel (one of the reasons I chose that hotel was the proximity to a train stop). After fending off at least 10 auto-rickshaw (auto for short) drivers who insisted that they were much cheaper than the train at only 200/- to get to the city (40 indian rupees to the dollar) I was on the train from the tirisulam station to the kodambakkam station. Indian trains are sweet. They have open doors, so all of the guys my age hang out them to get wind in their faces to ease the heat of south india in the hot season. I quickly joined them, and drew some bemused looks from other passengers. I had seen no other white people in the country yet, and I got the impression that white people generally don't ride the metro trains in chennai, preferring AC taxis instead.

The auto drivers at my stop were much more helpful than the ones at the airport. I asked one of them how much for a ride to the address of my hotel, and the guy told me he would charge me 40/-, but that I should probably just walk. Surprised by his honesty, I thanked him and walked to my hotel. There I was also pleasantly surprised. For $20 per night, I got AC, hot water, free high speed internet, a flat screen TV with cable, and (the best part) a free south indian buffet breakfast. They also had room service meals for about 60/-. I opted to wander around in search of food, found some place that was busy, watched what others ordered, and got myself that. South Indian food is some of the best food in the world, especially when you include their tea. There are tea stations everywhere, and they mix the concentrated tea with hot milk by pouring the mixture back and forth between two cups, but when someone who is good at it does this, it looks like he's throwing the tea back and forth (and they don't spill any).

I woke up the next morning and headed down to breakfast, where I was helped by a guy by the name of Ashok (easy to remember because half the buses in Sri Lanka are made by Lanka Ashok Leyland) who taught me how to pronounce some words that I was learning (yes, no, where is, how much, thank you, hello, etc.). I was joined at breakfast by a woman of about 30 who I started talking with. She asked me where I went to college. "um, Whitman College?" is my normal response because people usually haven't heard of it. "No way! Me too! When did you graduate?!" What are the odds of meeting another Whitty at breakfast in a random hotel in Chennai? We both had errands to run, but we decided to meet back up that afternoon to go explore the city a little.

I headed off to the Sri Lankan High Commission for visa battle round 1. When I arrived at the gate, the guard told me I wasn't allowed in because I had short pants on. Damn. "Also, we close in 30 minutes." Not enough time to go back to the hotel. Instead, I sped off to the nearest clothing shop. After convincing the guy working there that I didn't want a pair of tailored pants, and I didn't want them hemmed to fit me, and I didn't want to try on a bunch of pants, he handed me a pair of jeans, which have turned out to be maybe the most comfortable pair of pants I've ever worn. Back to the High Commission. I sat next to a 21 year old animation student at the commission, who filled me in on how life is different in India and Sri Lanka. He told me about how he had learned sinhalese so that he could avoid the police as a tamil kid during the war, and how his whole family has now moved to India. After an hour (I thought they closed in 30 minutes?) I got to meet with the high commissioner. After asking for my “good name” and speaking with a constant head-bobble, the high commissioner shot a few questions at me, and then told me the cost would be 8700 /-. I didn’t have the money with me, so I agreed to return the next day at 9 am.

I headed back to my hotel, got a delicious lunch delivered to my room by a very nice guy who forgot to bring a bottle of water the first time (apparently this comes with lunch), and then rushed back into my room with a fork after I was nearly finished eating, informing me that he forgot that western people “don’t know how to eat with their hands.” I assured him that I did, and showed him my almost finished lunch to prove it. After lunch I went to the Pondy Bazaar with my Whitman friend, which I thought was going to be a bunch of street shops. It turned out to be a 6 story air-conditioned building that mostly sold saris and other clothing. I picked up a new wallet to replace my falling-apart old one. The new one is fake Gucci. Score.

We then hopped on the train to the beach, which I had heard was enormous. It did not disappoint.


It's a little hard to get a feel for it from the picture, but its a flat stretch of sand that is over 300 yards wide, and about 5 miles long. We wandered around there for a while, and then started walking back into town towards the train station. I had noticed a few signs encouraging good driving before, but this time I started to write them down. Here's a picture of one of them:



Others were:
Drive slowly and you see the world, drive quickly and the world sees you
Slow down, speed arrester ahead
Please obey lanes
Please drive carefully
Please obey traffic rules
These were almost everywhere I looked. Perhaps the strangest one was a sign in the same color and font as street signs was a sign that said "Please Collect Rainwater." The really funny part about all of these signs is that people in India are by far the craziest drivers I've ever seen. They never drive slowly, swerve into oncoming traffic to avoid "speed arresters" (speed bumps), completely ignore traffic lights and lane lines, and generally don't believe in traffic rules at all. One guy I met told me that he doesn't follow traffic rules because there's not way the police could catch him if they did see him breaking some rule, because they don't have cars.

It was really interesting talking with another Whitty who is traveling the world. We had dinner together and were served by the same charming guy from lunch, who again forgot water and eating utensils (in that order again), and then she jumped in a taxi and flew back to the US. I feel like I see Whitman people wherever I go.

The next day, I woke up early to go get my visa finished. Unfortunately, my auto driver got really lost, and it took almost 2 hours to get there. Fortunately, when I did arrive the high commissioner recognized me, ushered me into his office quickly, and we got down to business. He said "welcome back to my office good sir, I can see that you are wearing a very nice blue shirt today, you are looking very smart." I thanked him, and told him he was also looking very smart. He asked about my degree, and then said that he is also a student of political science, and that he is very interested in US foreign policy because of its effects on Sri Lanka and the rest of the world. Just as I felt us on the verge of a fopo discussion, he said "well, I can see that you are in very much of a hurry, so I will let you go. Thank you very much good sir for your time." Ok. He also instructed his secretary to get me through the rest of the process very quickly, so whenever anyone told me to come back at 4:00 that day, or tomorrow, or in one week she ran over and told them to just do it now. After an hour of waiting, I was handed my passport with a nice big stamp in it that makes me an official resident of Sri Lanka. Woohoo!

I got back to the hotel, and immediately was afflicted with a headache and stomach ache. I drank a litre of water, which didn't help. I lay in bed, fell asleep for a few hours, and woke up with a migraine. I hugged the porcelain toilet for an hour, and then finally began to feel better after emptying my stomach. Weird. I opted to stay in that night, and start writing you this email. (Aside: I'm in Sri Lanka finishing this email, which looks like it will need to be in 2 parts because its already too long to read over breakfast, and a HUGE thunderstorm just hit. It was the most intense lightning storm I've ever been in, with lightning bolts visible at a frequency of greater than one per second. I unplugged everything, and went downstairs where two dogs and two cats all tried to climb into my lap. Cheyenne of the dogs is a great dane:
)

The next day I resolved to go make up for being sick, so I headed out early to check out what was touted by wikitravel as "the second largest mall in India." I think that you can learn a lot about the character of a place by its shopping malls, so I opted to spend an hour there. Spencer Plaza was not what I was expecting. It was smaller than most malls I've been to in the US, though it did have 3 stories and 3 "phases." It was sort of air conditioned, but still hot enough that everyone was sweating. In Bangkok, there were multiple malls that dwarfed even the biggest malls I've been to in the US, and were much more high end too, with multiple Gucci, Prada, Armani, etc. stores that I was too intimidated to go into. Sri Lanka only sort of has malls, and when it does they are usually dominated by one large store that fills more than half the area of the mall. I was expecting a mall in Chennai (one of the financial capitals of India with a population of over 6 million people) to be much more like Bangkok. The best (and largest) shop in Spencer Plaza was a bookstore called "Landmark." I decided to check it out. I quickly discovered that whatever section of the store I was in, I would always find self help books or books about business that barely matched the description of the section. I found only 1 book by Salman Rushdie (this was very surprising to me), but hundreds of copies of "The 4 Hour Workweek" and other books about how to do well in business, how to market yourself effectively, and many other areas. Even the "Classic Literature" section had these titles alongside books like "Ulysses" and "Sherlock Holmes."

At the bookstore I remembered that it was my Aunt's birthday, so I made my way to the greeting card section and began searching for an appropriate card. I found the perfect one: larger than an 8.5X11 piece of paper with an apologetic sounding birthday congratulation.


I then went to the food court, because someone had advised me that they had excellent food. I sat down and ordered my favorite south Indian dish: a paper masala dosai. This is what came:



It's again a little hard to get a feel for how big this thing is from the picture, but it was over 3 feet long. After a 45 minute battle with it and all the curries that came with it, I surrendered, leaving almost a third of it left on one of the three plates it was served on. Next stop: the beach.

Almost. I went outside and bargained with an auto driver to get to the beach, but quickly discovered that being white and leaving a mall puts you in a bad position for bargaining. After failing to reach a consensus on a price, the driver offered a solution: if I go inside a touristy wood carvings shop for 5 minutes, he'll get a commission, and I won't have to buy anything. This will offset his cost, and he'll reduce my price by half. Perfect. I wandered around for a bit, and then asked about the price of some large wooden statue. They told me, I said that was the only thing I was interested in, and that it was about $150 out of my price range. Then I left, despite their best attempts to keep me around. Problem solved.

After wandering around the beach a bit, I sat to watch the waves break for a bit, and was soon approached by a group of three Indian guys about my age. They asked why I was sitting alone, didn't I have a girlfriend? I said no, I don't have a girlfriend, and that I was visiting India alone, so I didn't have anyone to sit with. They all sat down, and after a brief conversation asked if they could take their pictures with me. I agreed:


and


They decided to take off, and I asked if I could come hang out with them for the rest of the afternoon. They agreed, and I hopped on the back of David's motorcycle, and we sped off. They first decided to show me St. Thomas Basilica, and on the way there I realized that it was Good Friday. St. Thomas was one of Jesus's disciples, and he was buried in Chennai after going to India to spread the word. It was interesting to be at the Basilica on Good Friday and listen to sermons and see St. Thomas' grave. We then cruised onwards to the City Center Mall, where these guys wanted to hang out and look for the ladies for a bit. David (guy in red shirt) told me that Vasantha (guy in brown shirt) has lots of girlfriends. I told them that I could see why, which made them laugh a lot. I made it a running joke for the rest of the afternoon, which the other two guys thought was really funny. While we were at it, they decided to interrogate me about my love life. They were shocked that I had 0 girlfriends currently, and that I haven't been in a long-term relationship. They said, "but you look so smart [this means good], how is it that you cannot have a girlfriend?" I rallied off the normal set of excuses-- "I'm too non-committal, I'm too picky, I travel around too much, I'm too interested in other things right now, etc." They told me that it's good to not have a girlfriend, "in our culture, girlfriends are bad. Wives are good." "Then Vasantha must be a very bad man." Laughs. They offered to find me a girlfriend tomorrow if I wanted, but I told them I had a morning flight back to the US. whew. In Sri Lanka and South India, guys who are close call each other "Machong," which is sort of like "bro" except without the fratty connotation. It's a way to address your close friends. By the end of the evening, we were all "machongs," which made me pretty happy. As we left the mall, we spotted a crowd of people, and decided to investigate. Some TV channel was doing a contest where you had to unwrap candy bars with cricket gloves on (like hockey gloves). The host saw me and pulled me in to participate, so I strapped on the these cricket gloves which were way to small, and started unwrapping candies with my friends cheering me on. I unwrapped 2, and the announcer told me that I'd probably be on TV sunday at 3pm on VR plus. Unfortunately, we don't get that channel in Sri Lanka, so I'll never know.

We headed grabbed a cup of tea, then headed back to the beach were we played a carnival style game where you shoot balloons with a bb gun from about 10 feet away. My friends were amazed that I got a balloon on every shot (thanks for getting me that bb gun for my birthday mom and dad). After wandering around some more, they decided that they had to go home, and took me to the railway station, which was right by the Chennai Super Kings cricket stadium. You could see the game from the top of the railway platform, so the three of us watched for a bit before my train came. I said bye to my friends, and hopped aboard. I had to take a train to the central station and then a different train out to my hotel, and when I arrived at the station and asked which was the platform I should wait on, and my train was already there. So I sprinted off, and my train started to roll away. I managed to catch up to the train right as it accelerated to faster than I could run, and I leaped through the door of the last car. The car was packed with people, so I spent the rest of the ride with a foot and a hand inside the car hanging on, and the rest of me flying in the wind outside the door. Woohoo!
I want to include one more thing in this email before I let you go off to do whatever you're undoubtedly procrastinating on. India just passed a law that gives its citizens a universal right to education. This is really cool. The bill passed while I was there, and newspapers and television were immediately filled with advertisements informing people of their new constitutional right (a constitutional amendment passed earlier that year). Here's a picture of a newspaper advertisement:



I thought that it was really cool that India was able to do something like this, and that it was being advertised in this way. One of the provisions of the law is that private schools have to have 25% of their students from low-income families. What's more interesting is that the conservative party did this, and the liberal party is criticizing the act for not being enough! If only politics in the US were like this...
I have lots more to write about, but this email is already too long, so I'll let you go for now. Write me back, please.
Namaste, (they don't say this in Tamil Nadu)
vanakkam,
Luke

Update

Update part 2:

First, before I forget, I need to include a message from one of my friends who I’m staying with in Mae Sot (Matt). He says that if you know him, you should come visit him because he wants to see you, and that if you come, you should bring him some good beer. His favorites are microbrew IPAs and ESB’s. When I first saw his traditional Thai house, I was impressed by his collection of microbrew bottles sitting on a shelf (among other things about his house, see the picture below). It turns out that he’s accumulated them from friends visiting and bringing beers. So, you should mostly visit him because he wants to see you, but also because Thailand doesn’t have very good beer. Their beer is better than Sri Lanka’s though, so if you’re feeling beer-pity, come visit me first.

Since I started composing this email, I’ve been exploring the Mae Sot area more, and its awesome. First, I realized how many ex-pats there are here. There are probably as many or more westerners living in Mae Sot as in Colombo, but it’s a much smaller town, and I can relate to many of the people a lot more. I was lucky enough to spend the last three days with a group of four other American NGO workers who are all generally my age and either have bachelors or masters degrees and have been living abroad about as long as I have (except for Matt who has been here for two and a half years now). It was interesting to talk a lot with people who are in my age group having similar experiences to mine in a south asian country. I was very interested to find out about their work, because working directly with students or refugees is both very different from what I’m doing right now, and something that I’ve thought I might like to do. Furthermore, I learned that one of them had played ultimate for Stanford for the last 5 years (I had played against him twice), and two of them went to the same college as me.

The five of us booked a bungalow at a national park for two nights, and, in classic 20-something fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants style, didn’t know much about what was in the park, where the park was (other than a general area it might be), what the bungalow would look like, if there would be food there, and a variety of other potentially important variables. We packed for the trip by buying 5 rice and curry packets, about 15 lbs of fruit including 2 enormous pineapples, and about 20 L of water. Matt had a piece of paper with a description of the place we wanted to be dropped off written on a piece of paper in Thai that we could give to the bus driver. At this point I should explain that the reason that he doesn’t speak very much Thai is that he mainly works with Burmese people, so his Burmese is quite good despite his location in Thailand. This was true of the other people in our group, so despite their collective five + years of living in Thailand we still resembled a group of tourists who had been in Thailand for a week.

After doing our shopping, we jumped on a couple of motorbike taxis with our backpacks (2 of us per motorbike, plus the driver) and sped off quickly towards the bus station. Once there, we waited for a bus towards Tok, showed our piece of paper to the bus driver, crammed into seats which were much too small for the three of us who are over 6’2” and sped off at a heart-stopping rate towards our destination. It turns out the park has a huge sign on the road that even has English writing on it: “Lansang National Park.” A 3 Kilometer hike in along the road brought us to the entrance to the park where we were picked up by a pickup truck, which brought us to our bungalow. In the vicinity of the bungalow were a couple of restaurants and a variety of other amenities. Our bungalow had 4 beds (most people here sleep on mats), a real shower (many people use bucket showers), a real toilet (as opposed to a squat toilet), and even hot water coming from the showerhead. Unfortunately, the water was only hot, and the water pressure was so low that Matt described taking a shower as (trying to wash your hair using a mist machine). Fortunately, there was also a bucket available for a bucket shower. That evening we hiked a short ways up to Lansang waterfall, the namesake of the park. The water of a small creek flows over some beautiful limestone to make several very pretty waterfalls, the first of which we got to see that first night.

We headed back to our bungalow at dark, took all of the chairs in the vicinity, and set up a nice area on the grass in front of our bungalow. We sent Thane off to grab some beer and soda water and ice, opened up one of the bottles of “good” Thai whiskey we had brought along, and hung out and told stories late into the night. Altogether it was a very nice experience. The next morning we were awoken by the people living in the bungalow next to ours playing lout Thai music and talking loudly at about 6 in the morning. We collectively went back to sleep until about 9am.

We got up and walked down to one of he restaurants and decided that after breakfast we would go explore the rest of the waterfalls. Most of us were feeling pretty good despite the litre of whiskey and bunch of beers that we had finished over the course of the previous night and after a pretty good breakfast of fried rice we set off towards the creek. At the base of the first waterfall we came to a consensus that it would be much more fun to try to navigate up the creek itself rather than simply hike the trail. None of the waterfalls were completely vertical, and all had easy climbing lines with bucket handholds carved into the granite by the water. The air was cooler down by the water, and between waterfalls we got to wade up the streambed to stay cool. All of us were wearing flip-flops, which we stuck in the waist of our shorts to climb. At the top of the second waterfall Matt, who was leading the group, encountered something that I had already been nervously expecting. He poked his head over the top of a ledge to see a large snake slither quickly into the pool at the top of the falls. His frozen demeanor had me guessing immediately that he had seen a snake. That snake disappeared before any of the rest of us made it up there, but we were a little more careful from that point forwards. It also gave Matt an excuse to find a large stick to bang on the rocks with to alert snakes of our presence.

After scrambling around in the riverbed for another couple of hours and seeing all of the beautiful waterfalls the drainage had to offer, we found ourselves at the most distant named waterfall from the trailhead. The trail did not extend any farther, and the waterfall was a 35-foot near vertical slide into a fairly shallow pool. We stopped there and had lunch of bread and peanut butter served on some banana leaves we found, swam in the nice cool pool, and played a guessing game that is some sort of mix between 20 questions and contact, and then decided to see if we could go off-trail up and around to the top of the waterfall. To do this we had to scramble up a particularly steep slope covered in very slick dried bamboo leaves. I was most nervous about encountering another snake in an environment where it blended in very well, so I was happy when the group decided to turn around and head down in favor of an afternoon of tossing a Frisbee, playing cards, swimming, and relaxing. We climbed most of the way back down the creek; I briefly spotted another snake darting off into the water as well as a dried snake carcass that was missing its head. A roundtrip of only about 6 Kilometers felt much longer at the end of the 5 or 6 hours that it took us, and we were all exhausted. That night a dinner of fried chicken, corn on the cob, sticky rice and beer almost re-created the atmosphere of car camping at a US park. We retired to our bungalow to play an evenly matched game of spoons, and in-between rounds would work on riddle games that one of the other guys and I provided (including: green glass door, counting elephants, the train game, the land of bologna, big blue moon, and a few others). We crashed early.

The next morning we were awoken early again by our other Thai neighbors conversing loudly. When they saw that they had woken us they good-naturedly bellowed “hello” and “good morning” into our open windows. Despite the circumstances I think most of us managed to sleep in until at least 8. We had a pineapple for breakfast, got a truck ride out of the park, jumped on a bus back to Mae Sot, and were home before 11. Total expense per person for the trip: about $33 including food, drink, lodging, and transportation. Thailand is cheap. Come visit Matt.

The rest of my stay in Thailand was also great fun, if not quite as adventuresome. I got to spend a lot of time in the school that Katie works at hanging out with her students and even teaching a couple of classes. I have a lecture on why water management is important, and another one on gender studies and why it is important. The kids were totally on board for water, but not as much for gender studies. However, I think it did help to have a man presenting a gender studies class; normally the students are taught by Katie, and perhaps got the impression that only women can be feminists or care about gender studies. Hopefully I helped to remedy that a little. Hanging out at the school was wonderful. The kids were constantly bringing me tea or coffee, unripe mango with chile powder, or something else delicious. I spent one great afternoon learning a little bit of guitar from the students and singing along to the english songs that they had memorized. Another evening I had dinner with them, and committed my only cultural faux pas of the trip. I remembered not to point my feet at anyone, not to touch anyone on the head, to return everyone's slight bow and hands praying gesture, and all the other stuff I was supposed to. The kids at the school tricked me. I hung out with them in the kitchen all afternoon as they cooked the food, offered to help ("no teacher, you don't know how to make our food"), and then sat down to dinner with them. They served me up the food they were eating, and 2 extra dishes of curry. I asked why I none of them were eating the curries that I was eating. They said that in Burma teachers have to eat better than their students--there is a hierarchy that needs to be respected for these things. So, I decided that it was best to show them gratitude, and finish everything that they served me. This turned out to be the mistake. It turns out that they love having guests so that they can make their better curries, and then finish the leftovers that the guests leave. So, a combination of my ridiculous appetite and a misunderstanding of their intention led me to finish EVERYTHING they gave me. woops...
Katie and Matt both told me that they expect foreigners to do stupid things like that, and, as a result they often think that foreigners can't do anything properly (hence their refusal to let me do any cooking, including simply chopping garlic). Oh well...

I took the bus back to Bangkok a few days later and spent another hectic day in there, splitting time between street markets and the Siam Center where I found a bookstore and drooled over some of the books on my reading list (including Gravity's Rainbow, Ulysses, and a few others). Alli, I'm even farther ahead of you on the 1001 books now...

Anyway, one more email is in the works about Sri Lanka, so expect another one this weekend. I'm currently working hard on this UNEP report where I need to have a rough draft done on Friday, so I should have time after that.

I’ll also re-iterate my request that you should write me back or give me a call on skype. If you’re receiving this email it means I care enough about you to want to know how you’re doing, so when you get a chance you should let me know. Also, if you’ve been thinking of coming to visit Sri Lanka, now is the time to look into it. I’ll only be here until June 15 and you probably won’t ever come up with as good an excuse to visit this country.

I hope that you all are well, and I was really happy to see a lot of you this winter.

Luke

It's been a long time...

but I haven't forgotten about you. Here's an email I started writing to you about a week ago, with more to come...

Right now I am lying on a mat in Mae Sot, Thailand. I'm directly underneath a fan because it's really hot here. Lots of you are probably asking what I'm doing in a small town in Thailand on the Burmese border. Here's the story: Currently, I have a tourist visa for Sri Lanka, which means I'm only allowed to be in the country for a month. So, I have to leave Sri Lanka each month to renew my visa. While this is a little annoying, it does force me to go see other parts of South Asia. I picked Thailand because my friend Matt Schisser lives here, and it would be a shame to have been in Sri Lanka for almost a year and not visited him. I later discovered that there are around 10 Whitman grads living here, including a friend of mine called Katie Levy. Both Matt and Katie are working for NGOs that help out Burmese people who manage to get across the border. I flew into Bangkok 3 days ago, and spent the last 2 days in Bkk trying to see as much as possible without knowing any Thai or knowing much about Thailand outside of what my Lonely Planet guide told me in the first 10 pages. Here were the highlights of Bangkok for me:
Landed at the airport and took a taxi to the Mo Chit bus station to meet up with Katie. Mo Chit is the bus terminal for getting to northern Thailand from the capital, and is enormous. Around 150 bus "gates" that I saw, not including another section of the bus station filled with what looked like vans. Katie had taken an overnight bus from Mae Sot to meet me in Bkk. She's only been here a month, knows 2 words in Thai (which I also know now) and hasn't explored Bkk much either, so she took me up on the offer to come meet me and adventure around the city for a while.

From Mo Chit we jumped on a bus to Khao San Road, the backpacker and tourist ghetto part of Bangkok. We were definitely the only white people on the bus, and we quickly discovered that lots of Thai people don't speak much english at all, and many of the signs here are only in Thai. We found the right person to ask 2 stops before ours, which was lucky. Khao San road has more shirtless (or wife-beater wearing) dudes with tattoos and either buzzed hair or dreads than I have ever seen before. It seems like its a real big part of the traveler circuit that includes climbing and scuba in southern Thailand. However, there was infinite good street food, from grilled chicken to pad thai available for less than a dollar. Even better, there are people wheeling around fruit carts everywhere, and you can get a bag of papaya or watermellon or pineapple for 50 cents. In my 2 days in Bkk I probably ate close to 20 servings of fruit and at least 10 helpings of pad thai, along with other foods that looked interesting, which I tried.

The Grand Palace is one of the main tourist attractions in Bkk, but well worth it. It's a totally absurdly decadent palace where everything is painted in gold paint or jewelled, and where the king used to live. Katie and I jumped on a free tour that lasted a couple hours. By the end my feet hurt really badly, but I had gotten to see some beautiful buildings and the emerald buddha in his winter attire.



One of my favorite things was a bit of text under a bodhi tree meant to warn tourists: Beware of your expensive belongings. Fascinating that a mistranslation of "keep an eye on your expensive belongings so that people don't steal them" resulted in something that the buddha might have taught while sitting under his bodhi tree.



That afternoon, I returned to Khao San road, relaxed in the gloriously cool A/C room, ate a ton of pad thai and lots of fruit, and fell asleep early.

The next morning promised a lot of things on the to do list before getting on a bus at 10:20 pm to Mae Sot. The next morning started with something that most mornings ought to: Mango with sticky rice. Definitely on the list of the things that I want to eat right now. I then headed to Wat Pho, another Wat near Khao San Road. It included some very beautiful buildings and paintings, and the very impressive reclining buddha:




What makes this place even better is that it's where the Bangkok Massage Academy is located, and you can get a 30 minute thai massage for about $6 from a professional masseuse! It felt great, but the feeling was short-lived because I had to hop on a night-bus that evening which undid all of the good of the massage. After Wat Pho, Katie and I went looking for Chinatown so that I would be able to communicate with people for a change. We may or may not have found chinatown, but we did find a cool market (one of hundreds like in in Bkk).



we munched some street food that was too spicy for katie, and then tried to find someone who could tell us what bus to get on to go to the siam center. After lots of pantomime and finding people to translate for us, someone answered our question and we were on our way.



The Siam center took us from crazy market to crazy ultra-modern shopping mall. It was by far the biggest shopping facility I have ever seen. It has about 8 stories in 4 different buildings, with each story the size of a normal shopping mall. Each building has a movie theater on its top level, and each one appeared to have a department store that occupies part of each of the 8 stories. After wandering around this place for a while, we jumped on the skytrain (lightrail system) and headed towards the Bangkok Night Bazaar. We got off a stop early and had to walk, but in the process found a cool park where tons of people were running and exercising. At one point everyone stopped running and started doing aerobics to some music blasting out of huge speakers. It was impossible to capture the scope of the mass-aerobics exercise on camera, but I estimated between 300 and 400 people participating with 8 people leading the group. Wow.




We walked on after watching for a while, and ended up in the night Bazaar, which is a huge outdoor market with some open areas for listening to live music, excellent food (you can find food on literally every block in bkk), and fish that eat the dead skin off of your feet:




This felt great once I got used to it, and I realized that I had already encountered these fish in the wild here in Sri Lanka while swimming in a stream. It was much scarier in that situation--I didn't know what was nibbling on my feet. After the night Bazaar I jumped on the subway to the Mo Chit bus station, grabbed some more food there, and jumped on the wrong bus. They kicked me off, told me that I had bought a ticket for a different bus than Katie (but still going to the same place), so I jumped on another bus and tried to fall asleep. I woke up the next morning before dawn about 10 km outside of Mae Sot.

Its back to work for me right now, but I'll write another installment (or two) in a day or so about: my time in Mo Chit, my camping trip in a Thai national park, my experience hanging out with the kids of burmese political prisoners in an illegal thai school where they live, another yoga retreat, life in Sri Lanka round 2, and a bunch of other things you won't want to miss.

As always, write me back, I'd love to hear from you.

Luke

More Updates

Here's another big email about Sri Lanka, I hope you enjoy it. Maybe the longest one yet. Unedited as usual, so please excuse the inevitable typos.


On November 23 I drove off towards the northeastern part of Sri Lanka in one of two matching Toyota Land Cruisers bearing the emblem of IWMI in the side. With me were:
Uncle Dave--Deputy Director General of IWMI,
Tuashar Shah--An IWMI researcher who has published several books and hundreds of papers on water management, generally thought of as a guru in the field, flown in from Delhi
Samad--Director of the south asian IWMI program, flown in from Hyderbad, India
Manthri--the Central Asian Director, flown from Uzbekistan
Ari--the guy who planned the whole trip,
and me.
Colin, the Director General of IWMI was supposed to come instead of me, but he had to run off to another conference or something, so I got to take his place. We drove over to the Batticaloa district, which is where a lot of the fighting in the civil war happened about two years ago. Our goal was to assess the irrigation situation there and see if there were any projects that IWMI could start working on in the area. Apparently the Gal Oya irrigation system (the one we looked at most) was the system used for developing a model of water governance called Participatory Irrigation Management (PIM) which has been implemented throughout South Asia. However, nobody has really studied the Gal Oya system for about 20 years, so nobody knew how PIM was doing there. In the interest of making this email shorter and more interesting, I won't give you a day by day account. Instead, I'll share some highlights and observations.

The first thing that really struck me on this trip had very little to do with the trip itself. In the car, I began thinking about how things are named here (roads, mostly). The first day, we drove down a road known as the "17 Hairpin Turns Road." It was always referred to in this way, even by our drivers and people who we asked for directions on the side of the road. The "official" name of the road is someone's last name or something, but it's known for it's turns (for good reason, it was a scary drive with busses coming the other direction. Think Mokey Dugway). In Colombo, roads are named in a similar way. Roads always refer to where they go. The Galle Road connects Colombo to Galle. There are at least 10 Colombo roads that come from the center of the country towards Colombo. In this way, road names in Colombo also change depending on where you are going. The road that connects Pelawatte to Thalawatugoda is either the Pelawatte road or the Thalawatugoda road, depending on which way you are going. Some roads don't use this naming system. The roads that don't use this have their official names changed on a regular basis. The road atlas of Colombo has two appendixes for road name changes--for the last two iterations of names. This of course means that people often refer to the same road by different names. It is impossible to give phone directions here without a good working knowledge of landmarks, and Google Maps has given up on directions in Colombo (despite trying to stay up to date on road names).

I guess I'll consolidate Sri Lankan quirks into one section of my email and talk about Sri Lankan english here. some of you have probably already noticed this in my speaking or writing, but I'm beginning to start using the colloquialisms that Sri Lankans use. However, I'm still far from speaking the dialect that Sri Lankans speak and understand. I had a particularly frustrating experience that demonstrated this to me. I was in the car with a guy working for a Japanese NGO called "JEN," trying to ask him some questions about irrigation in the area. Here is a rough transcript of our conversation (I wrote it down right afterwards)

Luke: Can farmers grow rice during both the Maha and the Yala seasons?

JEN guy: "I cannot understand..."

Other guy in our car who became my Sri Lankan English (SLE) interpreter for the exchange: "He is asking, the farmers can be growing it the patty during the Maha and the Yala?"

JEN: "No no, only in the Mala they are growing it"

Me: "If all of the tanks and canals were restored, could farmers grow two crops per year?"

SLE Interpreter: "The farmers could be growing it the patty twice if they were restored tanks and canals, isn't it?"

JEN: "Yes it is!"

Me: "Before the war, did any farmers use agro-wells to irrigate their crops?"

SLE Interpreter: "Before the terrorism conflict, farmers were using it the wells for patty irrigation?"

JEN: "No no, it is not"

And so on. I'm sure most of you have had the frustration of not speaking another language well enough for you to get your point across. This was an oddly similar experience, except that I wasn't speaking my own language in a way that they understood. Rather, my english had to be helped along (the grammar had to be destroyed) before the Sri Lankan working for JEN got my point. It was a really odd experience. Another thing about Sri Lankan english that I picked up on the trip was the use of the terrorism trope straight from the US. The LTTE is often referred to as " The terrorists." The war is often called the "terrorism conflict." It might have been that we were in a post-conflict area asking about the effects of the conflict on irrigation, but it seemed to me like people in SL have picked up on the use of "terrorist/ism" even more than people in the US have. One person I spoke with told me that he likes Obama because "he is beating the terrorism".

People asking me about Obama after finding out that I was from the US also happened quite often. The head of the Irrigation department asked me a question about Obama after I had questioned him for almost an hour about his irrigation system. He asked what I thought of Obama. I responded that I think he's doing pretty well, but it's still too soon to judge a lot of things. He seemed pleased, so I asked him what he thought of Obama. He responded with only one word: "good". After a couple minutes of silence, he said, "blackest president?" I said yes, he is the blackest president of the US. He responded with a strong head bobble and a smile. On the last day of the trip, one of our drivers approached me seriously, and asked "do you think that american wrestling is real? I correctly guessed that he was talking about the WWF, and told him that I didn't think it was real. He asked "really?" I said, "no, in fact I know that it is not real." He looked a little disappointing as he walked away.

I won't bore you all with the details of my meetings with Water Users Associations on the trip, but I will say that I found the process very interesting. Because my uncle and I are white, and we drove up in nice cars, and probably a host of other reasons, the first thing that they always did was ask us for money to fund some project. IWMI doesn't fund projects in the same way that many NGOs do, so we don't actually go and drill wells, or hand out a chunk of cash to fix a canal. Rather, we would study the feasibility of developing groundwater resources or help the irrigation department decide how to manage water in canals better. The next thing that was really apparent was that the irrigation department had spoken to all of the Farmers Organizations before we got there to make sure that we got the point that they needed more money to renovate some canals that led into the former conflict zone. This got more and more irritating when each farmer stood up and told us they needed the same thing, and when we asked what else, they said the same thing again. it would be really interesting to go to this type of meeting without the irrigation department there, translating everything that the farmers said for us.

If this is interesting for you, shoot me an email and I'll tell you more about these meetings. If not, no worries.

The other really interesting thing from the trip that I'll comment on was the experience of going into an area where there had been a war going on two years earlier. All of the police and army outposts (there were a lot) were enclosed in several lines of stacked razor wire and then dug in. Bombed out buildings were pretty apparent in villages in the area, and concrete structures bore the marks of gunfire. The people who were re-settling this area really have nothing, as most of them were forced to leave everything behind when the war displaced them. They are getting a lot of funding help from NGOs, but that help seems to me to be not very well directed. We noticed that there were a number of cheap things that NGOs could have done to improve water access enough that farmers could grow vegetables with slightly more security and make a slightly better living. As it is, most of the people there work as migrant labor on fishing boats or on others farms. I've been in a bunch of situations where I've thought about my privileged position compared to a lot of people in the world, but nothing really prepared me for getting a glimpse of people really living on the edge. A lot of these people were just doing what they had to do to survive, and that's it. It made me appreciate the work of IWMI a lot more.

On the last day of our trip, we traveled to a university in the east to give a talk about water and try to get involved with some of their students. The hightlight of this was that I was introduced as "Doctor Lukey Sanford." We talked about IWMI, Tuashaar gave a fantastic speech about the questions that he had after looking at the Gal Oya system, and the Irrigation professors spent about an hour trying to answer his question. We were served the traditional Indian Chai and sweet bread that we were served everywhere we went. Immediately after this, we began a 12-hour drive down the coast to the yoga retreat that we had planned for the weekend. At about 8 pm after 10 hours of driving I remembered that it was thanksgiving day, and Uncle Dave and I had some cashews to celebrate. It's impossible to get the feeling of thanksgiving or christmas here with perpetual 85+ degree weather and palm trees and the beach.

The yoga retreat was actually something that I had agreed to as one of the conditions of coming to SL and staying with my aunt and uncle. Before coming, Karen said that she would be taking me to the retreat, and I sort of had to agree before coming. I'm sure it wasn't actually a condition, but Aunt Karen can be a little intimidating sometimes. Anyway, on thanksgiving day I found myself driving to a yoga retreat which would involve 6+ hours of yoga every day. I was more prepared for this than most of you are probably guessing right now. I've been doing yoga almost every morning with Karen, and the week before my trip to the east I attended a 2.5 hour long class with Paddy (the instructor who I sent a video of last time). Oddly, she seemed to like me, complemented me on a somewhat regular basis in front of the class, and even used me as a demonstration once or twice. Uncle Dave and I developed a theory about this. Paddy's best students almost only get yelled at for not doing things right, but her not-very-good-but-try-really-hard students like Uncle Dave and I get lots of encouragement. Anyway, the encouragement helped to offset the slight feeling of dread I experienced driving up to the yoga retreat.

At the hotel we met Karen, Nicholas Roost (my swiss/australian mate), and Samyuktha. Nicolas is an Osteopath who is in his fifth year of medical training in australia who used to work for IWMI. Uncle Dave says "he's my biggest failure. He finished his post-doc with me and then left the water field forever." Really, Nicolas discovered that he was more passionate about medicine than he was about hydrological modeling. I'm sure a good number of you are skeptics of Osteopathy (I was a little bit), but after talking with Nicolas (and getting a treatment from him) I'm convinced that its an effective way to treat certain things. Not best for everything, but neither is any form of medicine. Anyway, he turned out to be a great guy who I'm sure I'll keep in touch with.

The yoga retreat begins every morning with a bell wakeup call around 5:15 each morning. You get up, and go meditate until around 6. Then, you do pranyama breathing for about an hour (not my favorite, but interesting to try and probably good for increasing my concentration). We would then switch to a 2.5 hour session of backbends, headstands, warrior poses, trying to twist myself into a pretzel, etc. About 45 minutes before the end of the session, the hotel guy would bring out food and set it on the table in the same room that we were practicing yoga. It was all I could do each day not to run over and grab a rotti in-between poses. When it was dinner time, nicolas sam and I would grab food and go sit up on the rocks behind the hotel and watch the waves roll in and crash on the rocky shoreline there. A very yogic way to gorge myself.

We then had time off until the afternoon session beginning at 4:00. I spent the time off swimming in the ocean, bodysurfing, playing frisbee with Nicolas, and playing beach paddleball with Sam (she might be better than me at this, much to my surprise after her stream of "I have no hand-eye coordination" comments). Each day I found that I was pretty exhausted when it came time for another 2+ hour long session of yoga. The first night, Sam Dave and I had planned to escape for a little bit of "toxin replenishment therapy" (read, beer). Last retreat Dave got in a bit of trouble for ordering a beer and getting caught, so we decided to be a little sneaky about it. Much to our surprise, Aunt Karen endorsed the concept and even had a bit of beer herself. wow.

After 3 days of this schedule, my body was slightly more accustomed to the torture that I was putting it through, and my backbends, handstands, shoulderstands, forward bends, and just about everything about my my body felt better. My knee really gained some good flexibility that I'm trying to keep with daily yoga practice since the retreat. I ended up having a fantastic time and getting a lot closer to Nicolas and Samyuktha.

I've already probably gone on too long, but I'll share a couple more short stories that I find pretty amusing with you.

Every morning one of the sounds I wake up to is a trishaw carrying "bunnes" which are sweet buns that parents buy for their kids on the way to school. The bunnes carts all have a tune that they play (like the icecream truck). Everyone who lives near Colombo can hum it for you. A few mornings ago I heard a bunnes cart playing a song that wasn't the normal one. The sound activated deeply suppressed memories of disneyland, and perhaps the most boring ride in the whole world: it's a small world. The bunnes cart was for some reason playing the "it's a small world after all" song. Uncle Dave's comment was: "walt disney is taking over the world." he might be right.

The last one is another completely random thing that I did at IWMI. The daycare kids were having a christmas party, and for some reason the guy who they had lined up to be Santa Claus couldn't do it. So, as usual, someone walked up to my desk with a problem that I alone could fix. They wanted me to play santa claus. I hadn't done it before, I'm to skinny, too young, and too tall for the costume. They didn't care, so I agreed. I'll head off the question that all of you are asking in your minds right now at the pass. Yes, there are pictures, being uploaded to my flash drive right now. I might even attach one to this email if I get them before I send it. I put on my santa outfit, grabbed the staff that they made me (who knew? santa carries a staff? I told them I'd never heard of this bit of santa iconography before, but they insisted) and my bag full of presents that the parents of the kids had wrapped for me to deliver, and walked down to the daycare. Oh, and I had a big pillow stuffed down my shirt. It might have been sticking out a little at the bottom. Pictures will tell. Most of the kids were enthralled, a few were terrified (I would have been, I'm sure), and a few were really giggly. I handed them their presents in between "Ho Ho Ho's" and "Merry Christmas's". All of the kids came and sat on my lap for photos. They handed me a plate of sri lankan santa food (a wadde, a rotti, and a piece of cake), and I jetted out of there. "Back to the north pole, there's lots of work to get done before christmas!" I was later informed that I left my santa staff in the daycare, and several of the kids were very distressed by this. "How will santa ever get his staff back??" I'm sure their parents were able to placate them.

I'm back in the US on December 16th, so give me a call if you want to hang out. As always, write me an email. I love reading your stories. Happy Holidays.

Luke

Exciting Things

Ok, well, the last several weeks have been really busy, but today I don't have too much to do, so I'm writing you an email. In this email are exciting things (I think). I hope you agree.

The ARM (Annual Research Meeting) was fascinating for me to watch and participate in a bit. People from all over the world with different water specialties converged on IWMI to give talks about their research. Many of the talks were pretty interesting, but the best part was hanging out with the people. I made friends with a group of Uzbekis who work at the Central Asian IWMI office who were particularly friendly. They invited me to come stay with them for a while, and told me that they will look into finding a problem in central asia that only I can fix so that IWMI will send me there. Sounds pretty cool! They said that if I do come, they'll feed me nothing but grilled meat and good russian vodka. Mark, my (sort of) boss told me that the last time he was there he doesn't remember much after about 9 pm. Luckily, I would get to experience Uzbeki culture first-hand before they left. The Saturday after the ARM was a Guy Fawkes party hosted by the Association of British Residents at the Hilton here. One of the head organizers for the ABR works for IWMI, so most of the staff was invited, and, the Uzbekis decided to stay for a real Sri Lankan party before leaving. I decided to go as well--for an entry fee of 2000/- for dinner, unlimited lion lager, and an evening with some good friends it was worth it.

I sat at a table with Mark (a whitman grad who works at IWMI who is a great guy), Samyuktha (the next youngest person at the office) and several other IWMI people. Across the room, the Uzbekis were seated with my good Iranian friends, Poolad and Miryam. Mark began the evening with a toast to the Uzbekis, where we all brought them glasses of some (apparently) really nice vodka that Mark had brought. This turned out to be a mistake in retrospect. The Uzbekis had brought at least a bottle each of vodka, tequila, and cognac (blech). They came to our table and toasted us every 15 minutes for the remainder of the party. It is difficult to refuse a drink when a smiling Ukranian hands you a glass, toasts, and then drains his glass. I made it home (Samyuktha's couch) around 4 am that night after a couple of night clubs and some interesting Sri Lankan nightlife experiences. I paid for my fun the next day (don't go to a party with Uzbekis without first seriously considering what you're getting into). If you want more info on my condition, I'm sure that my aunt Karen would be happy to tell you how I was feeling--I certainly haven't heard the end of it. An interesting experience overall, but hopefully not one that I'll repeat in the near future.

This seems like a good place to talk about my work to bring this email back to a more serious note (and re-establish my credibility). At the office apparently I've become somewhat of a "Man Friday" (Samyuktha aka Sam started calling me this before I informed her of the postcolonial implications of this term {she's a theory person, so she understood} and now she says I'm a schmoozer). This is because I've started doing the following things: fixing broken things (like the office coffee machine), editing people's papers (like Dave's paper on emerging water governance challenges and Karen's Nile Basin Report, and some others), and more or less getting involved with everyone's work as much as possible. I now get a couple of editing requests per week (most water engineers can't write at all it turns out) and I get asked to fix things whenever they break. It's an interesting role to play, but I like reading everyone's papers, and I have always enjoyed taking things apart and putting them back together. In the meantime, I'm scoring big points with aunt Karen for editing her report, maybe even enough to make up for my night out with the Uzbekis.

I'm also making slow progress on my own governance paper amidst all of my other new jobs at IWMI. I should have a pretty good draft to submit after another couple weeks of bouncing it back and forth between the two guys who are editing that paper with me. It's an interesting process--the editing takes much longer than the writing. I'm not sure if this is because my writing isn't great, or because I'm used to turning in papers in college where editing is more of an afterthought.

Ok, now on to more interesting adventures. Last weekend I took a bus down to Unawatuna with Dave Stentiford, another whitman grad doing a fulbright here. Unfortunately, we weren't able to bring a waveski along, so we decided to rent boards instead. The only board that I could hire was a short (6'2") board. Those of you who have learned to surf probably understand the difficulty of learning on one of these boards rather than a 9 foot longboard. I wasn't deterred though, and after a couple of days of trying I was able to get a few good rides and was standing up pretty regularly. The surf was rubbish, but it didn't matter too much for my skill level. In fact, I probably would have been sad if I had missed out on great surf because I was learning. I don't have any pictures of this because it rained the whole time I was there. But, I do have some other media to share with you. On Sunday, at about 5:30 in the morning I got up, walked out to the main road from my hotel (a place called full moon, if you're ever in Unawatuna, stay there. It's $6 per person per night, with good food and decent rooms and hot water) and jumped on a bus headed along the coast. My destination was a hotel called Caballanas that rents boards. On the bus, this song came on. You'll probably recognize the first bit. I was rocking out, and getting funny looks from the whole bus. I also had the opportunity to explore the Galle Fort, an old portugese fort that has turned into a town. It's a fascinating clash of colonial style and modern business in a 3rd world country. Next time I go to Galle or go surfing I'll make sure to get some pics.

One thing that I haven't mentioned before is that I've started running on a regular basis with my Uncle Dave. We usually run for about 45 minutes several days per week, which is really nice for me. The pace is slow, and I'm running for the sake of running rather than for training for something, which is pretty nice. Our run takes us past the swimming hole, through some paddy fields (we run on the dirt bunds separating fields) across a buffalo grazing area, past the "dirty shop", along the road by the magic rocks, next to the angry lady's house, along the Hokandara murderer road, and back to the house. These are all landmarks in the area, and our runs include most of them on any given day. Last tuesday Dave and I were on minute 40 of one of our faster paced runs when we ran through the buffalo grazing area. As we turned the corner, both of us looked back to see a buffalo coming full steam after us. Asian water buffaloes look like this. I took off as fast as I could, remember my run-ins with buffaloes before. Dave, who was slightly slower than me fell behind. After a few second (felt like longer) I looked back to see the buffalo still coming, pretty close behind Dave. Fortunately the buffalo decided to stop soon afterwards, and all we got was a good sprint workout at the end of our run. Maybe we should get chased by water buffaloes more often...

I have been practicing yoga on a regular basis here, and the last week I've had an opportunity to attend some fantastic yoga classes here. A fascinating yogi whose name is paddy mcgrath is in Sri Lanka for two weeks and just finished teaching a set of classes in Colombo before her retreat next weekend (which I am attending). Her classes last from about 7:45 am until about 10:15 am and are really difficult. Lots of backbends and inversions, and then a whole bunch of poses that really require a lot of leg strength and stability. By about 15 minutes into the class I'm always dripping sweat--I always bring a towel to the classes now. Most impressive is that I'm more sore after a yoga class than I usually am after a good climbing session or a full day of kayaking. The result is that my back is getting really bendy ( I think I am on the verge of being able to drop into a backbend from standing), my hamstrings are getting looser, and I'm slowly developing some really good stabilizing muscles in places that I didn't know that people are supposed to have muscles. I'm also developing a really cool awareness of individual muscles in my body and how to control them. It will be very interesting to see what effects this has on my kayaking and climbing (and skiing!) Next weekend at the retreat I'll be doing a little over 5 hours of yoga each day, which should be pretty wild. Fortunately, Dave and Sam are coming with Karen and I to the retreat, so there will be several of us who aren't fantastic at yoga.

The last interesting story I have took place two days ago. Last thursday I received a phone call from someone who I had met playing ultimate here (his name is Richard). He asked if I was interested in making 10,000/- for acting in a commercial. I said I was, so he told me to call his friend, Christo. I called him, and he asked me if I wanted to come work on Saturday, and if I could come in on friday for a screen test. I agreed to both, and went to see Christo right after yoga on Friday. He arrived, looked at me, decided I was white enough for his purposes, and told me that no test was necessary. He said that I would be acting in a commercial for a foreign investment firm. The commercial takes place in a nightclub, so I was to wear my best nightclub clothing the next day. I have no clothing suitable for a nightclub, so I took a trip to Cool Planet (the local cool clothing store) and bought a sweet nightclub shirt and some stylish jeans. Not knowing what to expect, I showed up to the studio the next day after yoga. When I arrived, Christo immediately brought me to the back room where there was some free food and where the other actors were having their makeup done. Christo asked me what clothing I had brought, and I pointed to my shirt and my jeans. He fired a few comments back and forth with the director in Sinhala, and then told me that my shirt would not do for a european night club. Instead, he pulled an awful white turtle-neck sweater thing that was about 3 sizes too small for me out of a costume bag and told me to put it on. I did, noting that it was not anything anyone would wear to any nightclub anywhere to myself, and waited to be shuttled to the club.

The other interesting thing that I haven't mentioned yet is that all of the other people there were really young. Aside from one guy who I started talking to on the bus over there, nobody appeared to be over the age of 17 (this turned out to be a correct assessment). It turns out that this advertising company had received a request for a commercial in a european night club, and had sent people to the British and Overseas Schools (high schools) for their "foreign faces". I'll recap briefly: 10th graders, night club featuring mostly white(ish) people, wearing awful white thing, acting in a commercial... I decided on my way over there that I was just going to participate completely, do whatever they told me, and ignore the absurdity of the entire situation. It was that, or opt out on the spot. I started thinking about participatory observation and the strategy of the object to get myself geared up for the experience.

I won't go into the plot of the commercial, which was pretty interesting in itself, here, but it should be posted online whenever it gets produced. When that happens, I'll send you the link. Until then, you can call me if you want to know more about that. My job in the commercial was just to dance to the same song over and over again. about 60 one minute takes where they kept telling us to dance with more energy really takes it out of you. 3 hours later my job was done. In the interim, there were some funny things that happened:

1) they tried to make the club as european as possible, which for them meant as un-sri lankan as possible. This meant casting the least dark skinned SL's that they could find along with several half SL's. this did not have the desired effect, and the club still resembled Sri Lanka rather than the UK

2) casting HS kids for a nightclub scene is a bad idea, as most of them had never been to a nightclub before. This meant lots and lots of re-takes with comments like "boys, you have to at least get near the girls," and "don't just clap to the beat of the song, that's not dancing" (no, these weren't directed at me)

3) to improve out attitudes, the directors tried to treat us like movie stars (hah) which involved a break for soft drinks each hour. However, the soft drinks were brought around to us by a smiling man who told each of us to "enjoy your beverage sir/madam".

4) the directors told us that westerners dance with their hand's in the air the whole time. This lead to some pretty funny dancing all around

5) the main director came over to me after about half of an hour and told me to stop moving my head around so much. when we reviewed the first 30 minutes of video, I saw what he meant. The yoga that I had been doing for the last 2.5 hours had freed up my spine so much that I looked like a bobble-head doll in the video. This was especially noticeable because I am at least a head taller than all of the half Sri Lankans that they casted (and the 15 year olds).

Apparently, songs like this and this are what they play in UK nightclubs. The second one was remixed so it had less of a beat, which changed tempo after about 15 seconds.

Overall, it was a completely baffling experience. It was made slightly better by what happened afterward. After I changed, several people asked me for my phone number, and said they would give me a call about more acting opportunities. Furthermore, a woman asked me if I was interested in modeling, handed me her card, and said that she'd call me in the next couple of days. If any of you are interested in being models in Sri Lanka, there's probably room for you. I think they have a very difficult time finding white people here who will do acting or modeling. At the very least, it's a good way to make some money on the side of my IWMI internship, so I'm happy about it.

This next week I'm joining my uncle and some other IWMI people on a tour of the former war zone to look at irrigation systems in place there. It should be really interesting to see parts of the country that no foreigners have been to in a really long time now. I'll go straight from that trip to my yoga retreat, and then return to Colombo a week from Monday. It looks like I'll be in the US from December 16th until the end of January, and then back to SL for another several months at least. If you want to come ski with me in CO, I'd love to have you.

Once again, I'd love to hear from all of you, so either shoot me a quick email about how you're doing or give me a call on skype (lukesanford). Thanks to the people who have been writing me, I really enjoy hearing about what you've been up to.

Luke

Boating, Debate, etc.

Ok, so it's been a few weeks since I last wrote, so this one might turn out kind of long. Update emails do tend to get longer and longer the less frequently I send them...
I haven't done much traveling since the last surfing trip to Arugam Bay with the Australians, with the exception of another surfing trip that I joined them for this last weekend. However, lots of cool things have happened in-between. The week after I got back from my Arugam Bay trip I made several new connections here. The first was with a group who wanted me to teach womens throwing clinics every two weeks, starting that wednesday. Because of my ongoing "mission to convert the world to ultimate frisbee" (as one of the australians put it) I agreed to teach the first clinic that wednesday. However, that wouldn't be the only teaching of ultimate that I would do in the next couple of weeks...

The Sri Lankan ultimate team is traveling to this tournament in Manila this coming weekend, and they need a lot of coaching before they can hope to be competitive with many of the teams there. As far as I know, I am the only person on this island with the background to teach them the type of stuff they need to learn, so I've been doing that as much as possible. That means last week I woke up at 5 am 4 days in a row to go teach early morning practices on long throws and cutting technique and offensive flow. Anyway, there's been a lot of teaching of ultimate recently, but the team is really enthusiastic, so I'm motivated. At the wednesday womens clinic, I was in for a bit of a surprise. Not only did 8!! people show up (that's a LOT for here), but a photographer for the Colombo times also decided to drop by and snap a few photographs of the clinic. Then, on sunday, I got several text messages from team members telling me to pick up a paper because it had my photo in it! They chose to interview some people on the team who had some very interesting things to say about ultimate, and unfortunately, my name didn't make it into the paper with my picture, but I don't mind too much.

Another interesting connection that I made in the last few weeks is with Dave Stentiford, a Whitman grad who was a senior when I was a freshman. I got to know him some through our mutual interest in kayaking, but we lost touch for several years. However, through the connections of several mutual good friends (thanks Clint) we discovered that we would be in Sri Lanka at the same time. He's doing a fulbright teaching fellowship here in a more remote part of the country, but he's stuck in Colombo for now because his facility is not quite built yet. Fortunately, that has allowed he and I to hang out a lot, and given me an opportunity to meet the other fulbrighters who are all my age. Dave and Karen had all of them over for dinner one night, and they all expressed their jealousy over my living situation and also over the awesome research opportunity that I have here. Interestingly, after spending a couple months with only people significantly older than me, all of the 22 year old recent graduates seemed much younger than me. They certainly act younger--I currently go to bed around 8:30 pm each night and wake up around 5 or 5:30 each morning, and work 9-5 on a regular basis.

On friday night I went bowling with some of the IWMI people that I work with and met up with Dave S and the fulbright crowd afterwards. We had an interesting time exploring Colombo nightlife. The bowling alley was very much like a club--it had a live DJ mixing songs in the bowling alley and lots of lazers and flashing lights. It was too loud to talk in the bowling alley, but nobody was dancing either. Weird. Then, we went to a nice sushi restaurant where everyone else had dinner (I had already eaten). I mentioned that I had just finished my oral thesis defense (woohoo!) and the fulbrighters decided we needed to make it a night on the town. 2 Kareoke bars, an upscale place that served me a half shot of whisky for the price of 4 beers, and a chinese restaurant later, we decided that Colombo doesn't have much of a nightlife and went to bed. It was clear that both of the Kareoke bars were covers for brothels, and the Chinese restaurant was probably a cover for something, but we weren't sure what.

At this point, I should say a little bit about my oral thesis defense. It went really well, I'm officially graduated now, hooray! I took what is probably the least formal oral exam ever. I had to start the exam at 6:30 am my time, so I woke up at 5, showered, ate some breakfast, grabbed a cup of coffee and walked up to the computer room to re-read my thesis wearing only me sarong. When 6:30 rolled around, I called my adviser on skype, threw my feet up on a chair, and answered their questions for about an hour, after which they left the room, talked for 30 seconds, and then came back in and told me that I'd passed. So, any of you who were waiting with baited breath to see if I would actually ever graduate from college (ahem, mom) can finally relax.

The next interesting thing that happened here is that I made contact with the University of Colombo debate team. A while ago I sent an email to edebate (the debate listserve) asking if there was any debate here, and a few emails later I was in contact with the person in charge of the team here. Last week, I took a trishaw into town to meet the team and see if I could learn about debate here and maybe help them out. So, I asked a bunch of questions, watched a practice debate, listened to others' oral critiques of the debate, and then talked to them about what I thought they could have done better. My conclusion is: debate here is what I imagine debate was like in the US about 60 years ago. Many of the concepts that are really familiar to me (perm and counterplan theory, critiques, talking fast, splitting the block) haven't appeared here yet, and many concepts that I consider to be outdated (whole rez, can't kick arguments, have to only go for T the entire round) are very mainstream. It was a very interesting afternoon, and the team has invited me to come to the rest of their practices before their tournament in India in December. I've agreed to help them out as much as I can until then.

This last weekend I joined the Australians for another surfing trip to a spot called Hikkaduwa, which is the center of surfing culture in the US. If I walked down the beach or sat and watched the waves, I was approached by a sri lankan about every 15 minutes asking if I wanted to come to his place and smoke some ganja. I resolved to tell all of these people that smoking is very bad for you and makes you a worse surfer, which usually got them to leave me alone. The surf was fantastic again. It was a little bit crowded, but David, Alice, and I stuck to the left handed break off the reef, and most of the surfers out there preferred the right, so we had most waves to ourselves. There are a ton of good pictures of this that I'll upload in the next couple days and send a link to so you can see how cool the surf was. Here's the one pic that I have uploaded for now:



which shows a medium sized peeling left. There were a few barrels to be had on the bigger waves, but I missed out, despite my best attempts to duck into tubes that weren't there. One of the highlights of this weekend was when John (12) and I rented boogies boards and went a played in the 5 food beach break for a couple hours. I didn't have fins, but did manage to drop into some really big barrels. Unfortunately, the exclusive result of getting barreled was a spectacular wipeout in the relatively shallow surf, and we came in after about 3 hours of getting absolutely demolished by dozens of waves. The other really cool thing about surfing out on the reef break was that there were tons of sea turtles swimming around out in the surf. Every minute or so one would stick it's head above the water and look around, see me, and dive back under, or, you'd see one silhouetted in a wave that you had just paddled over.

There were two low-lights to the weekend. The first was that I broke a paddle while riding on a wave. Normally I would have expected to break a paddle gettign tossed onto the relatively shallow, moderately sharp reef that my feet were getting a little but cut up on. This was not the cause of the paddle breakage. Rather, I was cruising along on a wave, planted my paddle to do a cutback, heard a snap, transitioned edges, and tried to take a stroke on my right side and caught nothing but air. A quick glance revealed that I was missing a paddle blade. I decided to take the wave as far in as I could so that I wouldn't have to try to paddle in without a paddle blade on a tippy waveski. By the time I got to the beach, a kid on the beach had already recovered the paddle blade and handed it to Alice, who was waiting for me there. The extra unfortunate part of this story is that it was a custom, carbon fiber paddle that David had won at a raffle. I have really bad luck with raffled paddles! Now I'm looking for a way to get a nice replacement paddle for cheap. Ben? Whitewater club connection?

The second unfortunate part of the weekend was that I got really sick on Sunday night so I couldn't surf on Monday. No idea what it was, but I had really bad stomach cramps, and threw up a couple of times. The australians went to a pharmacy to get something to make me feel better, and came back with some Panadol with Codene! I guess they aren't too worried about narcotics distribution here! I'm mostly recovered now, but still feeling a bit off this afternoon with a few stomach cramps. I had to cancel my womens clinic and my debate meeting this afternoon.

There's a really interesting thing going on this week at the office. This week is the ARM, or Annual Research Meeting, during which IWMI researchers from all over the world give talks on different water issues. I've been attending talks, and have learned a bunch of cool info from people who have an incredible variety of cool accents and backgrounds. It's really cool to meet all of these people. I get to hang out with them for the rest of the week, woohoo!

I just got a cool haircut that makes me look just like my dad when he was my age, if you want to see it, log onto skype and give me a call. Or, send me an email about how your life is going, I'd love to hear from all of you. There'll be an email in a couple of days with a bunch of pictures, I promise

Luke

Surfing

Last Saturday I hopped in a car with a nice Australian family that I had recently met to embark on a week-long surfing trip down the coast to some of the best southern surf spots, then to one of the best surf spots in the world (apparently) called Arugam Bay. During our 4-5 hour drive down there we stopped at a place called Hikkaduwa for a mid-day surf. It was my first time on a waveski, and the surf was 6-8 ft with the occasional 10 foot set. Yikes. Our party consisted of David, the dad who is 6'6" and a brit turned aussie, Robyn, the mom, who paddled out with us through the big surf, Alice, an 18 year old girl who is working her way through the IB program here at the Overseas School of Colombo, and John, a 12 year old surfer dude who also paddled out into the big stuff.



As I climbed out of the car and grabbed my helmet Alice informed me that you lose "so much surfer cred" if you wear a helmet. I wore it anyway, figuring that A) being on a waveski, and B) this being my first time on a waveski, meant that I wouldn't have any surfer cred to begin with. Alice, John and I all paddled out together. John made it out past the break easily because he could go under waves. It took Alice about 30 minutes and me about 45 minutes. Really the only thing that kept me charging at big walls of whitewater was Alice in front of me doing the same thing.



You can pretty easily paddle over smaller crashing waves, but as the waves get bigger, you flip over, and assuming you can't roll consistently (a fair assumption for me at this point--waveskis are hard to roll) you get knocked off your board. You then pull your board back by the leash that attaches it to your paddle, climb back on, and try to paddle out again. Repeat 50+ times and you're where I was after 40 minutes. Seeing Alice make it outside finally provided the motivation to push through.



Immediately after making it out, a beauty of a wave rolled in and I took off on it, seeing how one of these waveski things felt compared to a kayak. Conclusion: they are fast. Much faster than a whitewater boat, much faster than a boogie board. here is a picture of my first ride on a nice small wave.



After an hour or so, a huge set of waves came in and both alice and I were washed in over a relatively shallow reef just down-current of us. I'll have a couple of nice scars on my right foot to show for it. time to head down to our place at Mirissa. The house that we stayed at was a nice house right on the beach in the sheltered area of Welligama bay where all of the fishing boats land. After a nice curry dinner (too hot for the aussies but perfect for me) and a fancy bottle of wine all of us crashed early in anticipation of our surfing the next day.

The next morning I woke up at about 5:30 am and walked down the beach looking for some hoppers (a local food) and a tambili (a very nice drinking coconut). I found both, and a nice fisherman whom I talked to for about an hour. He informed me that the rest of his family had been killed in the tsunami while he was out fishing, but that he had a new wife who was expecting a daughter. He invited me to come on his fishing boat for a day if I would help him work. He said that the day before he had seen 2 blue whales and another type of whale, and that he'd probably see more today. I declined, but told him I'd come looking for him if I was in the area again to take him up on the offer.

I returned to the house, had breakfast with the family, and then hit the surf. We surfed in Welligama bay after checking out a point break in Mirissa with a bunch of rocks that looked ominous. I had told the family that I got to surf so rarely that I would often stay out in the water for 8 hours or longer. They didn't believe me at first, but when I took a short break for lunch and paddled back out they had decided to take shifts surfing with me so that they could rest in-between sessions. I was learning the waveski fast, but the break wasn't great, only yielding 2-3 second rides before closing out. That didn't stop me from tucking into a closeout barrel before recieving a good thrashing. There's nothing like getting a little time in the green room...

We all rested that evening and had another delicious curry dinner with another bottle of wine. We planned to drive to Arugam Bay the next day which is a long 5 hour drive up around Yala national park. Robyn had to return to work the next day and was returning via train, which is apparently a little nice than the bus trips here. She advised us to go check out Yala on our way over to Arugam bay to try to see some elephants. To this John replied: "Mom, you don't get it, this is a Surfing Trip!" I like seeing wildlife, but I secretly agreed. The surf was good enough I didn't want to miss a day. Plus, I've already seen a lot of elephants. The plan was to go for a surf the next morning before dropping Robyn at the train station, but the surf was too big and David wasn't going to let John or Alice paddle out. I was ready to go take a beating, but (perhaps luckily) I didnt' get a chance. When we arrived at the train station a everyone but me had to use the bathroom and all came out saying numbers. Alice said "1", John said "6" and David and Robyn both agreed "4". When I asked what they were talking about, Alice happily filled me in. "It's a system for rating bathrooms. I'm happy to stay anywhere where the bathroom is above a 5." "What qualifies as a 5?" I asked. "To rate a 5, a bathroom must have a toilet." When I asked what the alternative was, she said "a hole in the ground. The one in the train station is literally only a hole in the ground. Not even a nice tile place to put your feet. No sink." I didn't get to check it out, but joined the family bathroom rating system for the rest of the trip.

The rest of the day was occupied by driving to Arugam Bay, which was a long haul. We got a flat tire about 300 meters outside of Arugam bay and had to change out for our spare (full sized, fortunately). That killed our chances of surfing that night, but we all went for a sunset swim and body surf, which was really nice. We decided to stay in one of the more expensive hotels in the town ($12 per room per night) and walked off down the beach to find dinner. Interestingly, everywhere in Arugam bay has the same menu, all of which appear to be modeled after the menu of the european run "Stardust Hotel". Fortunately, all of them offer some very good curries as well as fruit plates and fruit drinks. I woke up early the next morning and did the 15 minute walk up to the main point break there where I discovered about 10 surfers out just after sunrise getting good 10+ second rides on beautiful 6-8 foot waves. I was joined after a bit by David, who also woke up pretty early and had the same idea that I did. We walked back together to find Alice and John still in bed. We woke them up for breakfast and headed off in search of a less crowded break called "Peanut Farm". The town of Arugam Bay in broad daylight:



Peanut farm turned out to be an adventure. It was a nice right hand break, but there were lots of rocks. I don't have any pictures because we had to paddle out to the break, but the shoreline was rocky, and most waves took you right between two large rocks that jutted out of the water when in the trough of waves and over a shallow section that looked scarily up at me through about 6 inches of water on most rides. As soon as I caught a wave my only goal was to go really fast so I didn't wipe out over the reef or get tossed up on the rocks on shore. I was almost entirely successful with this strategy. The family was waiting for the large parts of waves to break, and then taking off past the jutting rocks and away from the shore rocks. I decided that some rocks weren't going to stop me from having a good time and took off at the big peak. This led to some fantastic rides, and only two scares. The first was when I launched off on an enormous wave and looked 10 meters in front of me and saw one of the rocks that I had been easily avoiding because the waves were smaller. I turned as hard as I could for the top of the wave where I could get off, launched, got a few feet of air, landed upside down, and rolled up about 5 feet from the big rock. The whole family was watching as this happened. The dad said that was close, Alice gave me a long disapproving look, and John paddled over to tell me that was "wicked cool".

Nobody saw my other close call. I took a really long wave that eventually closed out. I tried to turn off the wave, but it pushed me all the way in to shore and up between a couple of rocks. I got the board (which I was still seatbelted to) out of the way of the rocks, but the resulting shift in weight tossed me right up among them, and I scraped about a third of the skin off the back of my hand. I paddled in after that, deciding that sometimes discretion is the better part of valor, and that I would probably eventually miss a takeoff and end up on the shallow reef if I kept surfing there.

The beauty of surfing safaris is that the best surf happens early in the morning, but once you hit lunch time the wind has come up and the waves aren't nearly as good. This means that a day's schedule looks like this:

5:00-wake up
5:30-paddle out
7:30 david paddles in because he's tired
10:00-the rest of us paddle in
10:00-1:00 breakfast then lunch at the same restaurant, a game of chess, etc.
1:00-4:30 siesta, read, watch a movie, etc.
4:30-6:00 swim, surf if the wind has died down
6:00-dinner
8:30-sleep

After our lunch and Siesta, Alice and I paddled out to the main point for a surf, surfed right through the sunset, and had to paddle in when it was too dark to see the waves coming. Here's a picture of Alice on a wave from that evening.




I was able to convince the family to get up at 5:00 the next morning despite the kids' affinity for sleep to get the main point before it was crowded. Walking down the beach at the crack of dawn or catching a wave as the sun comes over the horizon is an indescribable feeling. At first the surfers were wary of us, but as I improved and they saw the skill of the others I was paddling with they started getting more interested. I met a guy from London who has been surfing in Sri Lanka for 6 years now and has dreads down to his waist. He makes money by taking photos of vacationing surfers and selling them. Brilliant. I met another dude from San Diego who had been doing a similar thing. His beard was long enough that he tied it in a knot to keep it out of the way.

Over the next 3 days I improved by constantly wiping out in spectacular ways. If I was trying to do an aerial I would go over the falls on my head. If I was trying to do a re-entry I would go over the falls on my head. If I was trying to do a floater I would piton in to the water at the bottom of the wave and get tossed. If I was trying to do a cutback I would simply flip over trying to turn back towards the wave. By the end of the third day I was sore and tired, but successufully doing most of the forementioned moves, except for cool aerials. I caught air on a couple waves, but never landed it. There weren't any great pics of me trying to do any of these moves, but here's on of me setting up for a re-entry:



By the end of the last day, 3 different people had asked if John was my son (I was 10 whe he was born), several more if Alice was my wife/sister, several people had told me that I was brave to be paddling the waveski after seeing a particularly bad wipeout, I had gotten a couple of "gutsy move, dude" comments, and I was feeling like I had the hang of surfing a waveski. If you are a kayaker on this list, come visit me, I'll take you to Arugam Bay and we'll go rip it up out there. Easily as much fun as any day of paddling whitewater. The drive back to Colombo was long (8 hours), but greatly helped my confidence when it comes to navigation as I was able to get us back without any wrong turns. I really liked my australian family, and hopefully I'll get to surf with them again soon. Or, maybe I'll take them kayaking and show them what their inland brethren do for fun on the water.

Anyway, I've loved hearing from you, keep me updated on your lives. Give me a call on skype, my SN is lukesanford.

Cheers,
Luke