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worst PowerPoint lecture ever
Sunday, June 29 2025
location: room 3023, Galle Face Hotel, Colombo, Sri Lanka
We had another breakfast in the Long Room, and it was the same breakfast as we'd had yesterday. Now I was firmly onboard with Gretchen that I was sick of such breakfasts and wanted something else. A real dosa would've been nice, or perhaps British breakfast mushrooms (which is what I am used to getting by on when traveling in Eurasia).
Not long after breakfast, those of us who would be on the vegan voyage (and had arrived) gathered around a long table in a room called "the Library" and there Zach presented us with schwag (each of us got a bag, a water bottle, a bunch of cards about the Tamil and Sinhala languages, mosquito repellant, and other information cards). He then launched into a two-hour PowerPoint lecture on Sri Lanka. I was thinking this would be a bit of a snooze, but it was surprisingly engaging.
After a distressingly-brief break, it was on to the next thing. Our tour bus arrived, driven by a couple additional Sri Lankans, and we loaded up to go to a special lunch somewhere cross town. When we climbed into the bus, it had a strange smell that reminded me of old fibreglass insulation. Others thought it smelled more organic, and not in a good way. Danielle, the female half of a nice Australian couple who live in Cambodia, reportedly said it smelled like a bucket of used feminine hygeine products that had festered for too long in the heat. As we rode the short distance in the bus, I cranked up the air blowing on me to minimize the stank, but nothing could fix the problem, and at some point today I'd begun to feel like maybe I was coming down with something. Perhaps the insulation-like smell had me thinking I was inhaling actual fibreglass, and that was why it felt to me like someone had stuffed little wads of insulation somewhere back in my head where my nostrils connect up with the back of my mouth.
Our lunch was at the home of a Burgher, a descendant of one of the waves of European colonists (in this case, the Dutch). The Burgher was an older woman who spoke English with a cultured colonial English trapped beneath a thin layer of a Sri Lankan accent, and she'd made us a special Burgher feast of "lamprais." These were rolled up banana leaves containing various strongly-flavored curries, onions, and rice in dollops. Traditional lamprais contain meat, and the Burgher had managed to substitute in vegetable proteins and such to make them vegan. It ended up being a lot of food, but I managed to eat nearly all of mine, only avoiding a curry that I found cloyingly sweet. Other parts of the lamprais were fairly spicy, at least by the standards of most of the people in our entourage who were trying to eat them. (Gretchen's mother, in particular, was having a hard time and ended up rolling up the banana leaf and throwing most of hers away.) Meanwhile Gretchen was now completely certain that Sri Lankan flavor profiles are incompatible with her preferences; nearly everything in the lamprais seemed off to her.
As we ate, the Burgher lady held forth on various things, talking particularly about how important English is as language to be learned by Sri Lankans. (I got the sense that it was her first language, and she admitted to not being very fluid in Sinhalese.) But, she said, English teachers in Sri Lanka are terrible, and what the students end up learning is a horrible pidgin. She also talked about the famous French chef Anthony Bourdain, who came to her house to do a segment on Burgher lamprais (the kind with meat). He was lovely, she said, but he committed suicide shortly thereafter. The Burgher woman also told us some about her animal rescue, which mostly consists of street dogs and turtles). It's likely her involvement in animal rescue is how she came to the attention of a vegan travel company. By the end of our visit, Gretchen was clearly growing weary of the woman's monolog, but I was finding it reasonably entertaining.
After loading up again into that stinky bus, we drove to some sort of Buddhist monastic college, where were marched upstairs to an air conditioned classroom. At that point a monk in a maroonish-red robe that exposed his right should arrived and proceeded to give perhaps the most boring PowerPoint presentations I have ever seen. Part of the problem was the subject matter, which was Theravada Buddhism, a subject I don't find particularly interesting. The other problem was the monk's English pronunciation, which was so bad that he was difficult to follow. This might've been helped by the presentation, but it was crammed full of all sorts of lists and details that nobody in our position had any chance of absorbing. So I just tuned out the whole thing and focused instead on whether or not Gretchen's father (who was sitting in front of me) had fallen asleep.
Fairly early into this 90 minutes of torment, Gretchen picked up on how bored I was. She could also see that everyone else in the room was bored as well, and she agreed that this had to be about the most boring lecture she'd ever witnessed. Later when I discussed this with Gretchen in detail, I said that this lecture hadn't been quite as painful for me as watching a local theatre performance of Waiting for Godot because I knew I was not alone in my suffering. When I'd seen Waiting for Godot, it seemed like everyone else had been enjoying it, which was deeply alienating and even made me question my intelligence (at least with respect to processing performances). This time, though, it was clear Gretchen and others were suffering as much as I was. And the thing about shared suffering with Gretchen is that she's a great person to be with when we're both vehemently hating an experience.
At some point the monk finished the first section of his lecture, but before moving on to the next, he backed up into his slide deck and reiterated all the points he'd just made. It was excruciating. About an hour in, Zach and Jiva, sensing a brewing mutiny, called him out into the hall to perhaps tell him to speed things along. This didn't help much, but eventually it was over. At that point, someone brought in a tray of tea cups and we all had hot Ceylon tea.
Unfortunately, our learning about Theravada Buddhism wasn't done for the day. We all loaded again into that stinky bus and drove to a Buddhist temple, which we were allowed to enter and photograph. It lacked the clutter we'd seen at that Vinayalankararamaya temple and instead had a nice ordered menagerie of statues representing beings from the live of the Buddha. It also featured a massive reclining Buddha that would've been thirty feet tall had he decided to stand up.
After we'd absorbed all of that, we were taken to an upstairs mediation room and given a crash course on meditation, with an emphasis on being in the moment. This aspect of Buddhism seems genuinely useful, unlike what little I picked up from the PowerPoint presentation. But then the monks who'd led us in meditating introduced the idea of us coming up and each receiving a string tied around our wrist. This, when combined with an ancient (and, I'll admit beautiful) chant, would supposedly protect us from black magic, thus revealing the whole enterprise to be one based on ignorant superstition. After a string was tied around a wrist, the recipient was expected to bow low before the monk and say "sadhu" three times in a row. This sort of worship is, in my view, one of the skeeviest aspects of religion, but we were told to do it, so I dutifully bowed my head and repeated the stupid word.
After one more ride in the stinky bus, we were disgorged at least a half mile north of the Galle Face hotel, near the entrance to the Chinese-made port city. Near there, I spontaneous came up with a pretty good idea for an Indian clothing store featuring traditional and western clothes. It would be called Sauree/Not Sauree. When Carli, the woman from Rochester (who happens to be a lesbian Oberlin graduate) heard that, she said something about it being a "dad joke," but Gretchen thought it was a cut above that.
From the vicinity of the Chinese-made port, we hiked past some tide control structures (where recently-bathed crows were drying off) to the Galle Face Green, a narrow public park along the sea where people gather to picnic and fly kites. Interestingly, there are concessions in the park to sell food, drink, and knick knacks, but they're all sunken into a trench so as not to block the view of the sea. Somewhere along here, I saw someone with a king cobra in a basket, to which he was playing some sort of droning wind instrument. When I did a double take, the snake guy tried to get us to come over, but Gretchen shouted that the snake just wanted to be free.
After brief (and separate) visits to the pool, we had what I thought was a pretty good buffet-style dinner in the long room. But I saw Gretchen was barely touching her food, and she admitted that this was because Sri Lankan flavors made the food unappetizing. I could kind of understand her problem with curry leaf, which imparts something of a burnt rubber flavor. But the warm spices she objected to, they just seemed like what one normally encounters in Indian food.
Gretchen's parents in front of me getting sleepy during the most boring lecture ever. Click to enlarge.
A structure over some railroad tracks in Colombo. Click to enlarge.
A unicorn at the Buddhist temple we toured. Click to enlarge.
A Buddhist demon. Click to enlarge.
A sleeping Buddha at the Buddhist temple we toured. Click to enlarge.
The Chinese-built port viewed from where we learned to meditate. Click to enlarge.
Crows drying themselves after wading into tide constrol structures near Galle Face Green. Click to enlarge.
An egret with south Asia's tallest building (a radio-tower-cum-rotating-restaurant) in the background. Click to enlarge.
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