Well dear readers, I am back to tell you what has happened to me in the last few months of my life. LOTS... I am guessing you want details as well so I will start from Christmas and see where the path down rabbit hole of typing and a wandering mind takes me.
I am currently at my desk in my office and a game of dodge ball is being played in the gym next to me, it is a distraction but one game that I loved for a long time and students play it with wreck less abandon. Great fun even for the students who try not to take part in PE even they don't want to get hit.
So, back to Christmas...we were trying to sort what to do for the break was I to stay in Dubai and spend another holiday with people I worked with and although last year was nice have a disjointed holiday season? Well a few friends got talking and all of us were in the same boat and we all agreed that spending Christmas in Dubai was not going to work well and we needed to get out. We had a small dilemma in the fact that we were all tight with cash and did not want to spend a fortune on the holiday. We looked online for a bit and realized we could get to Sri Lanka for under $350.00 so we booked. side note to get to Vegas last summer I paid 450, so we thought it was a great price. We finished school and the next night we were set to head to Sri Lanka. The next day I spent lounging by the pool, chilling out and finally packing as the flight was to leave at 10pm that night. I got packed called up Brain and told him to make his way over to my place as we could have a few drinks before heading to the airport. Well I did my routine and checked my passport, all good there. Checked my luggage, all good and whatever I did not have i figured I could buy in Sri Lanka so I felt good there too. ok, so now where are the tickets...where would I have put them....hmmm turn the house upside down and can't find them anywhere....crap they are at school. No real concern as they are E-tickets and I can print them again. Get online and start looking at the tickets in my e-mail account and look at the flight time, yep 10 pm... look at the date...ummm crap it is the next day. Brian was already en route to come for a beer and head to the airport....Crap. Well I called the airlines and they tell me the flight is overbooked by 5 and the chances of getting on the flight that left that night were slim but if we went to the airport we could wait and see what came about. By the way we thought we would be smart and hire a driver to come pick us up from the airport in Sri Lanka and gave him the date that we THOUGHT we were coming in and he was ready to pick us up landing that night.
We get to the airport and get to the ticket agent and I put on my polite voice and tell the nice Sri Lankan man my story and that I knew it was my fault but I would love it if he could help me out. Which he replied since I was being so nice and was not demanding to get on the plane as the people before me had stated he would hold our tickets and see if anyone does not show and he would try to get us on the plane. we now had a 3 hour wait to have everyone check in and see if there maybe 2 spots for 2 Canadian men to come to Sri Lanka that night. We were in good spirits and were laughing about the whole situation. The whole time we are waiting there were 10 more people that walked up to the counter to try to do what we were doing and they all had to sit behind us and see if they could get on as well. I will stop here to thank my parents for giving me the gift of manners and being polite, some of the rude things that were said to get on the plane only got the person turned around and flat out told to go home as the flight was overbooked. THANKS MOM AND DAD.
I know the anticipation is killing you so I will let you know we got on the plane and we even got a emergency exit seat and the nice gentleman behind the ticket counter was actually holding them for us because he knew if we could get on the plane that it was designed for Sri Lankans to fly and not big white guys. This was a cheap flight but it was also a great adventure and we had not even left Dubai yet.
We arrive in Sri Lanka with little issues, the crazy thing on the plane was that they did not serve booze on the plane but allowed you to bring duty free on the plane and open up said drinks while sitting in your seat. We get picked up and go to the Intercontinental hotel in Colombo where we went straight back to bed as it was 5am and we had been awake since early the day before. We spent a few days in Colombo seeing a few things, driving around and having every person that was selling something on the street trying to ripe us off blind everywhere we went.
The last night we were in Colombo we went into the hotel pub where we listened to live music and had a few beers. To my surprise two small Sri Lankan men started playing Some broken hearts never mend by Don Williams. This song has been etched into my mind by my father playing it over and over again on any long trips that we did when were we kids and I think I was the 3 person in all of Sri Lanka who knew all the words to the song. We talked to the band afterwards and found out that they bought the CD in Switzerland and they loved it so much they taught themselves how to play the songs. Funny how you can travel all over the world and there are always small reminders about what really matters in life, family...
In the next blog we head to Kandy, Una Watuna Beach...and the last few months of Dubai life.
I will try to get it out soon.
