|  |  Last week I said I would be going to Jaffna, but following my couple of days working in Hikkaduwa, I decided to come back and spend three weeks on the building project at Lesana Gama. The work is becoming more bearable now, although the toilet pits don't appear to be getting any deeper and the sun doesn't seem to be getting any cooler. My body doesn't ache anywhere near as much as it did after the first couple of days and I can feel myself getting fitter. I'll be back in the UK tanned and toned!
Money's getting tight now so I decided to stay in the cheapest accommodation I could find. At 250 rupees (about £1.70), I thought I had the deal
of the century. Until I saw my room. The toilet's cistern ran constantly and the water never filled up, so I couldn't flush it and if I used it the smell became unbearable no matter how much water I poured down. There was no window panes, just a wire mesh over a hole in the wall - besides the security issues I was more worried about the mosquitoes that could easily get through and have a feast on my blood (I learnt a very good trick the other day whereby if you stretch the skin around where a mosquito is biting, it can't retract it's sucker so explodes because it has so much blood inside. Not done it yet.) Then there were the cockroaches and spiders.
Behind the guest house, ironically called the Lovely, was the jungle so there were quite strange noises every night, which took some getting used to. The only thing separating myself and the trees was a very loud railway, so I was woken every hour by a passing express train. Plus, to really wind me up, the bed was lumpy, I had no sheet and the pillows were like slabs of concrete. It wasn't the worst place I've slept whilst in Sri Lanka (that was on a concrete slab in an outside toilet), but it's the longest I've had to put up with such dire conditions.
I have since moved into a decent, clean place above a shop where the owners are teaching myself and a guy called Robert, from Manchester, how to speak Sinhala. I'm currently working on who, what, when, where, why and how with
verbs and the different endings, which I think is quite good and comes in handy on the building site when you are working with the masons and
carpenters who can't speak a word of English.
 | | Buddhist temple in Kandy |
This weekend I'm going for the start of a huge Buddhist religious festival called Perehara which is based in Kandy. The town's roads are closed at 4pm for ten days because of the huge procession that passes through the town. This will be one of my final injections of culture. |
