First impressions are sometimes (often? usually?) way off base. My first impression of Kandy, Sri Lanka falls into this category. The place definitely grew on me during the time (25-30 May 2018) I stayed there.

Lodging Upgrade

As I mentioned in my post a few days ago, I stayed in a “homestay” in Kandy, which in this case is a large house in the hills. The owner lives on one floor and rents out rooms on other floors. On my floor, there were two “deluxe doubles” with balconies and a less deluxe double without a balcony. The balcony-less room was vacant the entire time I was there. When I arrived, a French couple was staying in the deluxe double to the left, and I settled into the one on the right. As I discussed, I was a bit put off to discover that the homestay’s cleaner-cook-handyman lived on an adjacent balcony to my own.

• Later on, I got to know the cleaner, a shy man named Jayantha who speaks very limited English. It turns out he’s an artist; he showed me photos of several of his paintings on Facebook, and also showed me photos of his sister, three or four brothers, and their families.

Late in the morning (I don’t do early mornings) of my first full day in Kandy, I noticed that the couple had vacated the other double. I pounced. I contacted the owner of Aronka Homestay, Jam, via WhatsApp and asked if I could switch rooms. He agreed, and I moved my things over immediately.

Now, I had a balcony I could really enjoy. (It’s actually the other end of the same balcony Jayantha lives on, but it wraps around the corner of the house, giving me a little more privacy. Jayantha only occasionally popped up near my end.) With the tropical heat and humidity, afternoon and evening thunderstorms are more or less a daily occurrence in Kandy, and I sat out there and watched a couple (no direct hits, sadly) roll by like I did when I was a kid. When the weather was better, I took my laptop out there (for brief spells; its battery is on its last legs) and did some blogging and travel planning.

If you watch the video, you’ll see that there’s a house under construction right next to this balcony. There was another building under construction right next to the balcony in the other room, too. Now, if we were in the U.S., noise from these construction sites would put a big damper on balcony enjoyment. Luckily, Sri Lankan construction appears to involve very little in the way of heavy machinery or power tools. We’re talking manual labor with hand tools, undertaken at a lackadaisical pace. It barely even registered.

The People

People here in Kandy are really friendly. And I don’t just mean the men — tuk-tuk drivers and “entrepreneurs” selling tours — trying to make money off me. I quickly figured out that the latter would lose all interest when I lied and told them I was leaving town tomorrow. And the former generally weren’t too persistent — just wave them off with a smile and “no thank you” and they buzz off.

No, even people who didn’t want anything from me, say ordinary locals waiting for a bus, would hold my gaze, not in a creepy, staring way but in an open way, and smile, or nod their heads. Despite Sri Lanka’s troubled history, people here seem trusting, and they’re not out to swindle or scam you. Even people like Sunil trying to make a few bucks off tourists provide something in return (dance performances, beers). And if I am paying inflated tourist prices for some things, or being out-bargained in the market, it’s only costing me a few dollars at most.

Every day, I walked along the paved paths running the circumference of Kandy Lake on my way from the homestay into town and back. I’d see high-school-age couples sitting chastely side by side on benches overlooking the lake, arms around each others’ shoulders. And families strolling about, with little kids feeding the ducks. It was really pleasant.

Getting Acclimated

Kandy, it turns out, is a one-horse town. It’s still a city, but a very small one. Running errands on my first couple of days here, I quickly got the lay of the land. The train station, bus station, post office, and most of the restaurants (In Sri Lanka, a “hotel” is an inexpensive restaurant; also, a “saloon” is where you get your hair cut) are concentrated along several blocks of a few busy streets downtown. Once I feel I can get around in a new place without getting lost, my anxiety level goes way down and I can relax and take it all in.

I bought a postcard, changed some money (I could have withdrawn from an ATM too, but I still have some excess cash left over from selling my belongings that I didn’t have a chance to deposit in the bank before I left Washington), wrote on the postcard, ate lunch, mailed the postcard, bought fresh fruit in the market, and stocked up on additonal food items at a supermarket I found. With all of these chores out of the way, once again, my stress level bottomed out and I began to enjoy this place.

Eating

Eating is my favorite activity, I think. My uncertainty stems from the fact that much more often than not, I’ll opt to sleep in rather than eat breakfast, even when breakfast is provided free of charge. That seems to suggest that sleep, rather than eating, is really my number one. At any rate, I did well eating-wise in Kandy once I figured out that you eat out for lunch and eat in for dinner.

Living

Eventually, I got into a rhythm here in Kandy. I’d get up late, lather on sunblock, walk into town for lunch and maybe buy something else, and then return to the homestay to blog and to tackle logistical details for future portions of my travels. I can handle Sri Lanka as long as it’s in manageable doses, say 2-3 hours at a stretch, no more than twice a day (usually just once). Since I determined pretty quickly I wouldn’t want to live here, I don’t feel the same type of compulsion, as I did in Taiwan, to explore every neighborhood, hike every hill, eat every unique kind of local cuisine, ride every mode of transport, and so on. I spent hours every afternoon and evening in Kandy sitting at my desk (and, while the battery held out, on the balcony) typing away on my MacBook, and I’ve greatly enjoyed it.

I can’t imagine myself living here because I could never truly feel at home in a place where every time I go out, I’m the center of attention. I certainly can’t pass for a local in Taiwan either, and I do get some stares, but at the end of the day, people there don’t treat me any differently than they would a native.

• Being in Sri Lanka is more like my first experience overseas as an adult, when I studied for a semester in Fuzhou, Fujian Province, China in 1999. Back then, Fuzhou was still pretty third world, and very provincial. Every time I’d walk out on the street, I’d run the gauntlet of stares and laughs and “hello”s (and the occasional “fuck you,” not out of anger, but rather to see what kind of a reaction it’d arouse; amusement, in my case). Although I had a rough first 24-48 hours here in Kandy, it had nothing on the culture shock I experienced in my first 24 hours in Fuzhou, realizing that after two years of studying Chinese every single day in the U.S., I could still barely communicate, and that I didn’t yet know how to do basic activities necessary for survival, like how to ride a bus, how to change money, how to launder my clothes, and so forth. I remember sitting on the floor of my dorm room, jetlagged at 3am, sobbing with the enormity of it all. I rather quickly learned all of these things and overall had a really great experience those four months. But every time I went outside, it was exhausting, being an object of fascination for everyone around me, and there were plenty of days I decided I just couldn’t deal with it and stayed in my room. I could live there for a spell, but I knew I could never feel at home there. That’s how I feel about Kandy, and Sri Lanka generally.

I’ve been experiencing odd random moments of joy (and, occasionally, sorrow) during my travels, more so here in Sri Lanka. I touched on one of the latter in my last post, so I’ll mention the former here. On my last full day in Kandy, I thought I’d try to get in a little hiking, and maybe finally make it to the British Garrison Cemetery. Not long after setting out, it started to rain. As I wrote earlier, afternoon thunderstorms were a daily occurrence during my time in Kandy, but they’d all been near misses. This rain may not have been a thunderstorm — I never heard any thunder or saw any lightning — but it was a tropical downpour of the first order.

Rather than seek shelter, I decided this would be a good opportunity to test the parka I bought for this trip. I pulled it out of its bag in my newly purchased man-purse and put it on. One serious design flaw — it buttons up the front rather than zips, leaving a vertical line of wetness up the torso in heavy rain — aside, it performed admirably. My water-resistant adventure pants (lightweight, quick-dry khakis with legs that zip on and off, converting the pants into shorts) and waterproof walking shoes did not fare quite so well. For the boots, it wasn’t so much the rain pattering down on them as it was the rivulets, each a few to several inches deep, now running down the hills that completely drenched them.

So there I was, totally soaked from mid-thigh down, trudging up the steep hill back to my homestay (I quickly abandoned thoughts of hiking). A funny thing happens (at least to me) when you stop trying to avoid puddles and rills and just give in to the fact that your feet are completely waterlogged. Walking through those fast-rushing streams going down the hill felt… fun! It’s a wonderful feeling just standing in running water and letting it rush over your feet and ankles. I haven’t enjoyed that experience since I was a kid. (Unlike when I was a kid, I lingered only in the clearer streams and hurried through the muddy ones.) I highly recommend it. Particularly if you have 48 hours to let your socks and shoes dry afterward (I didn’t).