My Second Christmas in the Tropics

It's my second Christmas in Sri Lanka and I can honestly say that it feels Christmassy to me this year. There are a lot of lights around Colombo, and the shoppers are out in full force. Some of the stores are even doing "midnight madness" sales. It's hard to believe that buddhism is the predominant religion, but I guess buying transcends all boundaries.

I'm using this holiday season as an opportunity to reflect on the past year, think about where I'm at with it now, and look at what I hope to do in 2008. I can't believe I'm leaving Sri Lanka in 10 days; on one hand it seems like I just arrived and on the other it feels like I've been here for years. I have mixed feelings, but the bottomline is that I'm excited to get back to Geoff.

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!!!

Love T

Santa Claus (Sri Lankan style)

Christmas lights on the beach

Getting Back on Track & Olympic Déjà Vu

Hi All

Yep I am well and trully back in town now from my retreat...a bumpy start to the week back at work but settling in fine now.

It seems that the Olympics can bring out the best and the worst in people and places...in 2010 Vancouver will be hosting the winter games and I can't help feeling a certain sense of déjà vu from being in Sydney in the lead up to the summer games for 2000...gross over runs in projected costs, outrageously priced tickets, construction woes, IOC pressure on small family businesses that happened to have the word 'Olympic' in their names etc etc. and now the latest...the unveiling of the 'Olympic Mascots' to very mixed reviews from the local daily paper:

' "Why not just use a 7-foot Wookie and a couple Ewoks while we're at it?" wrote one reader, alluding to characters from the Star Wars movies. Many readers suggested Miga was similar to Pokemon's Hello Kitty'.

Have a look and make up your own mind on these:

http://www.vancouver2010.com/mascot/en/index.php

Meanwhile the local left-of-centre free newspaper has been having some fun of their own with the mascots including cartoonist Rod Filbrandt's "Rejected 2010 Mascot" series with some local jokes thrown in but I think you will get the general idea:

Love to all

G

Heading Home from Retreat...

Hi All

Well I sort of ran out of time before heading of to my annual meditation retreat in the USA and in the process I forgot to mention to a lot of people that I was going....ooooops and sorry all at the same time.....

Well here I am sitting in the Westfield shopping mall in San Franscisco using the free internet terminal and checking in on my emails....

All a bit surreal and somewhat jarring at present or maybe it is the uber strong 'Peets' coffee that I have just ingested that is providing a bit of an edge to things???

Well what to say...a great retreat and I am heading home with lots of internal homework as per usual...but all good. Nice to catch up with some old faces and make a few new friends as well at the retreat and always a few suprises along the way.

In reviewing my email inbox, it has been suprisingly boring in scanning through it...the world stands still in some ways.

Anyway off for a wander around town for now and flying back into Vancouver tomorrow evening.

Love to all

G

Beaches and Bombs

The last week of November 2007 will go down in my books as one of my high times and one of my low times in Sri Lanka.

My friend Francis visited for a few days. We went once again to the hill country, and as an added bonus, we got a car and driver and had some time on the coast. It is beach season again...hooray! I know that many of you think that it's always beach season in Sri Lanka, but with 2 monsoon periods, inter-monsoonal rough seas, etc, the window of opportunity is not as wide as one would imagine. From November to March the seas are amazingly blue, the weather is great, and the water is a constant 28 degrees. We made it to Unawatuna, a nice little half-moon bay near the fort city of Galle.

Shortly after Francis left Sri Lanka there was a "Hero's Day" speech made by the leader of the LTTE. As a result, two suicide bombs went off in Colombo, the first killing one person and injuring two others, the second killing 17. The scary part about this was that up to this point, most bombs have targetted the military, and the government. The bomb that killed 17 was targetting civilians in a market area in a central suburb of Colombo. The past week has been filled with checkpoints, random police searches of neighbourhoods, and the arrest of 1000 Tamils (without charge) who were subsequently released.

"You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both, and there you have the facts of (Sri Lankan) life" T

A walk on the tracks in the hill country

Unawatuna Beach

Unawatuna Beach take 2