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
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