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temple like a thrift store
Friday, June 27 2025
location: room 3023, Galle Face Hotel, Colombo, Sri Lanka
This morning Gretchen and I went with her parents down to the big main semi-outdoor dining area above the beach for breakfast. The items available were a mix of different Sri Lankan and British colonial breakfast items. Superficially, the Sri Lankan foods tended to look like famiiar south-Indian staples, including rice (though not basmati rice), dahls, dosas, sambar, and idli. To this, Sri Lankans have added "hoppers," which are carbohydrates designed to be eaten with curries. The older of these is called simply a "hopper" (the British added that r, assuming it was there in their non-rhotic way of speaking), and it is basically a bowl-shaped dehydrated dosa. The other is the "string hopper," which is just a mass of pasta about the size of a palm pilot. Neither of those latter are as good as they seem and I quickly decided that a fresh dosa with sambar was the best form of breakfast for me.
Meanwhile, another member of our vegan expedition had arrived early, and she'd reached out to Gretchen's parents. Her name way Myra, and she came over to talk to us as we ate breafast. A big problem with her, aside from the fact that she stood there talking long after we'd run out of things to talk about, was that she stank of patchouli. People who wear strong fragrances, partcularly people in MLMs who promote essential oils, apparently have no idea that they way they smell affects the way things taste when they are around. I for one do not like my food tasting like patchouli, no matter what amazing things you think it is doing for your body.
The Galle Face Hotel has a massive salt-water pool down near the sea, though the beach itself is narrow and the sea, what with the currents and rocks, is considered unsafe for swimming. (Jiva had told us that the best beach had been taken over by the Chinese, who dumped a bunch of fill into the sea to build a container port about a half mile north of the Galle Face Hotel.) Gretchen and I went down to the pool and set up on some chaise lounges there (an attendant set us up with towels) and we proceeded to read, play Spelling Bee, and that sort of thing. Eventually I grabbed my good camera and walked down to the beach to look for things to photograph. There were a few crabs and kingfisher who seemed to be watching the surf from his or her perch. (He or she turned out to be a white-breasted kingfisher.) Eventually Myra (the patchouli lady) came down to where I was and we chatted about various things, including her kids, who are now in their thirties. With the strong wind blowing off the sea, her patchouli wasn't much of a problem.
Later Gretchen and I went on a walk over to a large Buddhist temple called Vinayalankararamaya that Gretchen wanted to see, passing along the shore of a downtown lake and marveling at the many house crows along the way. They're a small crow with a bronze-colored head and neck and are by far the most common bird in Colombo, displacing even most of the pigeons. We paid our admission fee, took off our shoes, and walked around the sprawling chaos of buildings. The center of it all was a silver-painted tower that looked almost like something from the Art Deco period, though it clearly predated (and perhaps influenced) that. Below that were numerous statues of the Buddha. There was also a large living tree that seemed to play an important role in the temple. But beyond that, the temple was a cluttered place that resembled a thrift store more than anything else. I suppose part of its function was to serve as a museum, though there also seemed to be an effort to impress the viewer with "wealth," or (perhaps) a poor-person's view of it. Its "collections" consisted of various similar items either set on the floor near each other or on shelves or in bins. The things collected were sometimes religious statures, but other times they were just stuff. In one place there were a bunch of telephones from the 1970s. There were also dishes of various descriptions, and in one bin was a pile of firearms. There were also large caliber rounds that looked like they might fit a small howitzer. The overall effect it had on us was anything but spiritual, and coupled with the intense heat and humidity, it soon had Gretchen feeling miserable. She didn't want to walk back to the hotel feeling this way, so instead we took a tuk tuk.
This evening for some reason Gretchen's parents wanted us to join them for dinner at the food court of a nearby shopping mall called City Centre. The mall was immaculate inside and full of sharply-dressed teenage Sri Lankans. Evidently there are enough wealthy Sri Lankans in Colombo to support multiple such malls, and the youth do there what they do everywhere, or what they did everywhere back before malls became something of an anachronism. A disproportinate number of the people we saw there looked to be Muslim, suggesting they are the people with the money.
Being in shopping areas with Gretchens' parents is seldom a fun thing for me. They like to slowly walk around looking at things, usually in pursuit of icrecream (which these days has to be vegan of course). My goals in a retail environment are completely different: I want to get in to get the thing I want and then I want to duck out. This evening I was hungry and wanted to eat, and that made this slow purposelessness particularly infuriating. We climbed all the escalators up to the food court at the top, stopping somewhere along the way for a very long time while Gretchen's mother went to the bathroom. And then we continued to the food court, where we had to look at absolutely all the options before doing anything. By this point even Gretchen was annoyed, so we broke away and got our own food from a burger place called Smash Burger (Gretchen thinks it is unrelated to similarly-named American burger joints). They had their own proprietary veggie burger they called the "Possible Burgr," so we got those and a side of fries. Both the burger and fries were okay, but the off-brand ketchup was far too sweet. We ate it over in a corner of the food court, as far as possible from an Indonesian food kiosk, which featured huge photographs of disgusting fried eggs. Some young (pre-teen) kids were nearby, running around at full tilt and screaming, perhaps because that section of the food court was relatively unpoliced. After Gretchen's parents finally joined us, her father reprimanded the kids, but they completely ignored him, which we all found very funny.
A white breasted kingfisher surveying the surf near the Galle Face Hotel. Click to enlarge.
A crab in the surf near the Galle Face Hotel. Click to enlarge.
A container ship off Sri Lanka's southwest coast. Click to enlarge.
A clever elphant sculpture near the Vinayalankararamaya temple. It looks to be made of failed bearing cartridges. Click to enlarge.
The numerous buddhas below the Art-Decoesque spire at the Vinayalankararamaya temple. Click to enlarge.
The random thrift-store collection of things at the Vinayalankararamaya temple. Click to enlarge.
Dinosaur, elephant, and buddhas at the Vinayalankararamaya temple. Click to enlarge.
A dog sculpture at the Vinayalankararamaya temple. Click to enlarge.
A creepy sculpture of an ascetic at the Vinayalankararamaya temple. Click to enlarge.
The tuk tuk we took back to our hotel was decorated in a goofy American patriotic theme. The driver obviously is unaware that the Americans who would like this unironically would never travel to Sri Lanka. Click to enlarge.
As we walked to the mall this evening, I noticed that this fancy tower looks like it might've been inspired by an establishing shot in the movie Idiocracy. Click to enlarge.
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