location: room 327, Hotel Suisse, Kandy, Sri Lanka
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Breakfast was family-style in the big colonial Hotel Suisse dining hall, though service was a little slow, especially when it came to delivering coffee. That first cup of coffee I had this morning was like some kind of joke, as it wasn't even as dark as tea. It was as if they just kept running water through the same old grounds thinking nobody would notice. There were also string hoppers, dahl, and all the usual Sri Lankan staples. The key to breakfast happiness was bread, although the sambar wasn't bad.
Gretchen struck up a conversation with Nicole, the woman from Ann Arbor who had come on this adventure with 80 year old mother Pat (and both had memorably thrown up during that first bus ride from Colombo). It turned out that Nicole was an attorney specializing in tax law for the indigent and people with special needs. You wouldn't think there would be much tax law that would apply to such people, but they do all the normal things with tax implications such as inheriting money, cashing out 401Ks, or having spouses who commit fraud or, in one memorable case, declare vast amounts of income that they never earned due out of a delusion of grandeur. Some of it was interesting, though, as with any profession, it all clearly seemed seemed more interesting to Nicole than her capacity to relate.
The big activity this morning was to drive to another traditional dance school, this one specifically "Kandean," and watch a performance of both dance and drumming. When we arrived, a group of students and other performers dressed in traditional Kandean outfits (which reminded me of pre-contact Aztec outfits) banged on drums and danced to celebrate this auspicious occasion. (As just some schmo from far way, this always seems over the top, but I suppose Western visitors are a rarity for these people.)
We took seats in a smallish performance hall and then received a bit of a lecture about traditional dance in Kandy. My expectations were low (I wouldn't've even been there had Gretchen not strongly hinted that I should come), so I was sure that the presentation was about to be as tiresome as the one I'd sat through at a traditional dance school up in Jaffna. Of course, dance doesn't interest me, so why should I expect to be entertained or even enlightened. (That was why I had strongly considered skipping this item on the itinerary.) But eventually the students, a group of several dozen preteens who had been sitting there crosslegged on the floor throughout the initial lecture, were called upon to dance. They did so pretty much where they'd been sitting. It was nothing special, but at least it was a performance. As always, the fourth-wall was broken down and we were urged to embed ourselves among the children and follow the dance instructions given by the lecturer. Gretchen and I declined to participate, but most of the people in our group joined the children and did their best to follow the moves. One in our group, a thin woman in her 70s who was from England via Australia, was particularly good at this, and it turned out that she had been a professional ballet dancer (or something like that).
And then the kids all sat down and several drummers in traditional Kandean (that is, Aztec-like) garb came out and did a drumming demonstration. They used traditional drums that they played with their hands, though they banged out complex rhythms in a way that indicated phenomenal short-term memory skills. In one part of their demonstration, you see, one of them, always the older one, would play a complex rhythm, and then the younger one would duplicate it precisely. I don't know how precisely, but it sounded pretty good to me. I even wondered what the original and the duplicate would look like when their waveforms were overlayed in a program like Audacity. Watching the drummers do their thing made my attendance at this performance seem worthwhile.
Towards the end, a performer who could balance numerous spinning plates on treelike metal frame came out and did his thing, though he had problems with one of the plates that was something of a distraction.
After the performances, we Westerners in the audience were offered a pile of school supplies that we could gift to individual students, which is a ritual I remember from the Rajasthan adventure that I found off-putting. Sure, the kids need school supplies, but us handing them out felt a little too much like patronizing colonialist largesse. I would've preferred that they each just get the supplies without having the image of some do-gooder white person from far away handing it to him or her.
And then came the refreshments, some not-particularly-appetizing desserts and tea.
Just before we left, Gretchen was telling one of the dance school staffers that she'd noticed that one of the student dancers was far better than the rest. So then then that dancer was summoned so that Gretchen could tell her that to her face, though there was a bit of a language barrier.
We then drove into downtown Kandy and got out to walk around near the Temple of the Tooth, a very important Buddhist temple we didn't actually go into because of their inhumane possession of a temple elephant. Instead, Jiva lectured about various things that didn't much interest me and then we were turned loosed for a few minutes to do things like briefly explore a nearby royal-women-only bathhouse.
By this point I was pretty fucking hungry, so when we were led into the lobby of a nearby hotel, I assumed we'd be having lunch there. But no, that was just in case any of us had to use the lavatory. We then hiked many blocks, occasionally stopping to marvel at things, without any indication of when, if ever, we would be getting to the fucking lunch place. At some point we walked past a Hindu temple where a long line of people had formed to receive free food, and that food looked pretty gosh darn good to me.
But then finally we went up a flight of stairs to a place that sold icecream. I was about to lose my shit if we were stopping for some dumb-ass vegan icecream on our way to lunch. I told Gretchen I would see her back at the hotel and that I was leaving. But then it turned out that this was the lunch place, a place that specialized in "short eats." Short eats, it turned out, are filling and not-especially-healthy savory options. Many of them are deep-fried. Of course, given the mood I was in, none of that was a problem. For most of the other people in our contingent, the food ended up being far too spicy, as it's difficult for a short eats place to calibrate quickly for a group of whiteys. I, of course, had no problem with the level of spice, and wolfed down one greasy deep-fried option after another. After all that was done, I still had enough room for vegan icecream, which came on waffle cones. Gretchen took one bite out of hers and knew she couldn't eat it, and when I tried mine, I could tell what the problem was (it was a hard-to-describe symphony of flavor dissonance), but I managed to eat all of mine.
Back at the hotel, Gretchen and I quickly returned to the pool. Initially there were no chaise lounges available, but the pool guy set us up at a table and within minutes a place had cleared for both of us. (Meanwhile some mystery woman from some unknown European country had taken a mild shine to me and, in excellent English, asked at some point if I was German.)
I spent most of my time at the pool researching CSRF vulnerabilities, which ChatGPT had alerted me about when I'd described the crazy shit my ESP8266 system's reporting module can do. Eventually I returned to the room and altered some of the ESP8266 code so that blobs of encrypted SQL couldn't be used by someone intercepting them (not that that is actually possible) to perform queries they normally wouldn't be allowed to perform. (I did this by replacing an explicit tenant_id with a SQL-meaningless token that must be replaced by a valid value before the SQL, once decrypted, can be run.)
This evening Gretchen and I went out to dinner with her parents to Roots 'n' Beans, the one vegan restaurant in all of Kandy. (Though our friends from Australia via Cambodia had been there for lunch and found it kind of meh.) Gretchen used a ride-hailing service to get us a ride, though for some reason our car didn't come into the Hotel Suisse to pick us up, and she had to go out onto the street to find him. On the ride there, we passed a parade coming out of the Temple of the Tooth, with lots of people looking like Aztecs in that traditional Kandean garb we'd seen earlier at the dance school. Then I spotted it, for just a moment: the Temple of the Tooth's house elephant, a prisoner brought out for these events and made to wear a full cloth outfit despite the summer weather (though, because of the 1600 ft elevation, it's cooler in Kandy than in the other places we'd been). Knowing what we now knew about temple elephants, it was a sad sight to see.
Roots 'n' Beans was located in something of a strip mall, though the kind with street dogs hanging out in it it. The actual restaurant was tiny, with only a couple tables. Nobody was there when we arrived, so we sat right down and made our way through the menu. The options weren't great, but I ordered avocado toast for myself and Gretchen orderd some other bread-heavy (and not at all Sri-Lankan) dish for herself. I don't remember what Gretchen's parents got, but one of the things was a south-Asian soup. Gretchen's mother ordered a strawberry-flavored tea, and when it came out, she complained that the flavor wasn't strawberry enough. This was mortifying for Gretchen, as it was typical karen behavior of the sort she'd seen her mother exhibit before. I mean, who does that? But the staff somehow took that tea back and managed to pump more strawberry essence into it, and Gretchen's mother was placated.
Our meal converation was dominated, as is usually the case, by Gretchen's father as he monologued. Today his material was pretty uninteresting, focused as it was on the businesses in the Watergate (where Gretchen's parents have been living since 2016). By this point the cappuccino I'd ordered had arrived. It wasn't great, but when I finished it I ordered a second one (with Gretchen's urging).
Things got more interesting when the topic shifted to the subject of Isræl. Gretchen and her parents used to be super zionist to a degree that had me rolling my eyes and not discussing the matter for most our marriage. But in recent years, Gretchen has gradually shed her tribalism, realizing that the specifics of what vagina she'd come out of had nothing to say about her worth. Her parents have been on a different trajectory, but the ongoing genocide in Gaza has completely destroyed their impression of Isræl, and they are no longer supporters of that project. Fairly early in this discussion, Gretchen brought up a movie she'd seen called Israelism, which had resonated with her with its depiction of the indoctrination American Jews received back during her formative years, a pro-Isræli that causes them to dismiss the concerns of Palestinians while fully embracing the goals of the Jewish state. Gretchen then referred to her upbringing aa "indoctrination" without actually mentioning who did the indoctrinating (that would be her parents!). In response, Gretchen's father reflected on his youth, saying he hadn't felt indoctrinated at all. Indeed, he said, his mother back in Louisville had a decidedly anti-ultra-orthodox view, regarding the men with the black jackets and funny hats as "thieves." Left unsaid was the source of the indoctrination that Gretchen had experienced.
Then somehow the conversation turned to Uganda back in the early 1970s, where Gretchen's parents had moved soon after Gretchen was born. I don't know exactly what they were doing there, but it had something to do with Gretchen's father's training as a medical doctor (and supposedly Idi Amin himself briefly wanted Gretchen's father has his personal doctor). But then Idi Amin went crazy and expelled the foreigners, starting with the Indians and then inevitably moving on to the Jews. "They were pulling Indians out of cars and shooting them, Gretchen's father said, "So we had to leave." I then brought us into modern times, wondering when it would happen that people would be dragged out of cars and shot in Trump's America. "It's already happening!" Gretchen's father replied, and then he talked about the masked ICE agents grabbing people and taking them off to horrors unknown in the United States of America in 2025.
After our meal, things descended into chaos as Gretchen's mother insisted on going somewhere nearby for vegan ice cream and the app on Gretchen's phone failed to get us a ride back to the hotel. Gretchen was so irritated with her parents at this point that all she wanted to do was put them in a tuk-tuk so they would no longer be our responsibilty. So she eventually got one to take them. With them out of the way, we walked back to the hotel, a pleasant stroll around about half of Kandy Lake (it's a little larger that Woodworth Lake's 33 acres but significantly narrower).
Back in our room, I discovered, much to my dismay, that my access to my work email had been cut off. Not only that, but I could no longer get on the VPN. Something had happened, and that something did not look good. Had I just been fired in the most passive-aggressive way imaginable? If so, why? Was my vacation too long? Had something about my past been uncovered? Did something bad about my work come to light? I had no idea. I decided to bottle this information up and not tell Gretchen, as I didn't want it to affect the vacation she was having. I also quickly decided that if indeed I had been fired, it would be a net positive. It would open up my schedule, allowing me to do all sorts of things I haven't had time for, particularly at the Adirondack cabin. The income I get there is essentially a luxury and I don't even like the work.
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How we were greeted at the dance school. Click to enlarge.
Dancers in those Aztec-style outfits. Traditional dancers were always men, but these days boys might be interested in drumming but not dancing. Check out the gender balance below. Click to enlarge.
The students seated on the floor during the lecture. Click to enlarge.
Members of our group have joined the dancing students in this photo. The former ballet dancer is the grey haired woman with the spotted shirt. Click to enlarge.
The students dancing without our participation. Click to enlarge.
The traditional drummers.
The plate spinner setting up while the dummers drum.
The girl on the left is the one Gretchen (far right) had just commended for being the best in her class. Near the girl is Jiva and near Gretchen is Zach. Click to enlarge.
A myna bird bathing in the little puddle designed to remove sand from your feet before you get into the pool.
Roosting flying foxes (fruit bats) near the Hotel Suisse pool. Click to enlarge.
This roosting bat near the Hotel Suisse pool has spectacular testes. Click to enlarge.
