That's gotta hurt

While on our little trip up to Kandy, we went to see a local group that performs traditional Kandyan dancing. Now I'm all for a good cultural experience, but I have to say I wasn't all that impressed. I'm not sure if it was the style of dancing and the music or just the performance itself - our driver even admitted that most of the good dancers were out sick that day. Sina and I felt like it was somewhat like Samoan dancing only not really as good at all.

But then after the dancing inside on the stage, everybody moved outside for the grand finale. That, my friends, was another story altogether. You've heard about it, maybe even seen video of it before somewhere, but nothing as good as our footage. And you should try seeing it in real life!

For Our Mothers

Happy Mother's Day!! This blog is for you.

Ruby's First Day of Preschool and Ballet

Schoolbag in hand she leaves home in the early morning
Waving goodbye with an absent minded smile
I watch her go with a surge of that well known sadness
And I have to sit down for a while
The feeling that I'm losing her forever
And without really entering her world
I'm glad whenever I can share her laughter
That funny little girl

Slipping through my fingers all the time
I try to capture every minute
The feeling in it
Do I really see what's in her mind
Each time I think I'm close to knowing
She keeps on growing

Sometimes I wish I could freeze the picture
And save it from the funny tricks of time.

Elephant Orphanage

Here's the elephant orphanage - really quite a collection of them with around 90 or so altogether, including lots of full grown ones, some younger ones, a few very small babies, and even a three-legged one thanks to an old land mine.

This one was only a month old (underneath the big one, wise guy - look closer).


For a couple dollars you could feed a bottle to one of their 3 month old babies. As we bought our ticket, Sina said, "maybe we'd better get two - who knows how fast these guys can suck down a bottle of milk!" Sure enough, he drank it in about 3 seconds flat.


We missed the time of day when the whole herd walks down through the little village next door and down to take a bath in the river below, but I'm sure we'll be back to see that before long.

On the way out of town we did see a huge flock of egrets or cranes of some sort roosting in some trees by the river. This photo doesn't really do the scene justice, but imagine each of these being about two or three feet tall.

Lakshmi

On the way back from Kandy is a place everyone calls the elephant orphanage. More on that in the next post, but it's a pretty cool place in terms of saving poor, orphaned elephants who have no home, no job and no stimulus package to help them out. (I know, it sounds like the beginnings of a great Dickens novel.) Anyway, like any good tourist attraction, just down the road from that is a small, private operation better known as a tourist trap, where you can hand over some cash and they take you out back to their own little elephant herd. This is where we first met Lakshmi.


Now if you remember your 5th grade biology class, you'll know that Asian elephants are the smaller ones. So if your elephant is named something like Lakshmi and not something like Indougou, it would be one of the smaller variety. That being said, their tusks are pretty big.


And their teeth are even more amazing. We were told by our very informative guide that an elephant has only four of them. Two on top and two on bottom. But when each tooth is this big, do you really more than that? If only we'd gotten a good picture of the toothbrush...


And that's right, Lakshmi took us for a ride through the jungle. Did I mention how big she was??


If you look close you can see the equal parts terror and giddiness on Sina's face, the sheer joy on Ruby's face, and the enormous determination on mine as I held onto the chain, and all the rest of the family holds on to me.

Here we are headed off to the rice paddy to do some work for the day.


And the big finale - Lakshmi was a bit of a show-off with the curly trunk and all. It was really, really fun, and Ruby's still talking about Lakshmi a week later.

The Gardens

It isn't Kukenhof, and while there we realized, we just prefer Europe to pretty much every other continent in the world (as long as we can afford regular trips back to the US to go to Target!)

The Temple of the Tooth

We spent a day in Kandy, which is a famous pilgrimage site in Buddhism as the place where the Buddha's tooth rests. The story goes that after the Buddha died and was cremated, a tooth was found intact. It went on a bit of a road trip of its own, but finally ended up here in Kandy for good. Pilgrims can buy lotus flower arrangements outside the temple to leave inside.


Here's the outside of the temple. The Tigers set off a bomb at the entrance a few years back and killed quite a few people, so they have quite a bit of security going in, and then you have to take off your shoes (not like at the airport, this one's actually for non-security reasons). Ruby thought that was pretty fun. They had one shack where all the locals left their shoes, and another shack just for the foreigners' shoes. As in, "let's find one more way to shake money out of the foreign tourists".


This is a moonstone. Our guide was actually a muslim, and his english wasn't always too clear, so I'm not sure we quite got the whole story, but apparently if you walk on these it brings you good luck, so we went in for a triple dose!


Here is part of the original temple built to hold the tooth.


This statue was a recent gift to the temple from Malaysia


And here is where most of the lotus flower offerings end up. Way in the back at the top of the picture you see a spot of gold - that's the big gold case that holds the actual tooth. We were hustled past it pretty fast - I guess we didn't look much like pilgrims about to unload a lot of cash into the offering box.