Sri Lanka | Galle
The walls of Galle Fort housed the majority of tourists in this part of Sri Lanka.
We ate at Galle Old Town, be warned though that restaurants only start serving food at 18.30. For around £3, two of us ate a selection of ten curries and rice. The stranger curries included cucumber, pineapple and banana. No doubt they were tasty, but it opened my mind to the fact that if you add fried onion, tomatoes and spices to almost anything it would become appealing. It wasn't often I would have a choice of ten curries in one sitting.
I compared this with most other evenings, which involved the difficult tasks of choosing a restaurant which looked clean and had the appropriate vibes, and then having to study the menu. This is all the more difficult when your body is crying for calories. Too few choices, you feel hard done by. Too many choices, intense effort is required to make a decision, and then you must live with the massive opportunity cost of how great everything else could be. Perhaps the solution is to engineer your day so you have no choice but to have all of the choices.
We continued to walk down the ancient streets, and were stopped by an elderly Muslim man who looked like a caricature or a friendly sage or preacher. He spoke good English, although slow and broken at times, and wore a face of constant relief. He was calm to be around. He explained how he was converting his home into a fast food shop, and that his day job was 'Professor in Gemmology'. I question which institution granted his professorship; perhaps he was class mates with Dr Dre, Professor Green and Professor Zeus. He invited us into his office, which was a small room with curious artefacts facts lying around and gave us a short tour on the various gems of Sri Lanka. I can't lie, some of it was interesting but at the back of my mind I was already planning my escape and the words I would use to reject the inevitable offer of buying something. He insisted that we try some of the local tea (Watawala) which was conveniently already boiled and ready waiting in metallic cylinders with small plates as lids. I declined his offer, despite my love of tea.
Sadly I am a firm believer in the strangeness of strangers, and at times it dilutes the joy of first encounters. Maybe it's a sign that my introversion is actually just suspicion on steroids or perhaps it's the hard wiring of 200,000 years of human evolution. I like to think the latter. In the end, we didn't end up buying anything because he wasn't trying to sell us anything. He was just a friendly old man who wanted to welcome us to his city, show us some weird gems and talk about his plans to open a curry-house.
I don't often like being wrong about things but this was one of the few times that I'm glad I was. Though let's be honest, if a tiny man who looks like baby-Yoda invites me into an 'office' adorned with artefacts which have no name and offers me pre-cupped tea my spider senses will be tingling - and not in a good way. There's a lesson in here somewhere but I'm struggling to find it. I think it's 'be outwardly welcoming and pleasant, but inwardly on edge and alert'. Or maybe, 'believe in the strangeness of strangers if you're in the ranges of dangers'. Wow, it rhymes too.