October 7, 2001

OK, I’m in Sri Lanka 🙂 In fact, I’ve been here for slightly over twelve hours already … and it’s kind of strange and kind of like coming home. But let’s begin at the beginning – the trip was much less eventful than I’d feared it might turn out to be :p Nobody wanted to throw me off the plane and they didn’t even want to search my baggage though I had lots of wires, electronic equipment etc. If I’d known that I’d have brought more electronics than I did with me :p The bad part was that they didn’t have any power outlets on any of the aircraft’s that I traveled in (at least not the economy/coach section <g>) and so I couldn’t watch DVD’s all the way as I’d planned 🙁 I did watch half of “Finding Forrester” till I had about an hour’s battery life left but then decided to conserve the battery in case I needed to refer to my notebook for anything.

While the flying time itself was only about eighteen to twenty hours split over three different flights, I think I spent about ten more hours waiting for connecting flights, sitting on the tarmac while repairs were made to the plane etc. I tell you that I felt as if I’d been totally put through the wringer by the time I got out :p And actually the whole immigration and customs deal was kinda anti-climactic since they didn’t bug me too much at all – and I’d thought they might think I was trying to smuggle something in because I was returning to Sri Lanka after four years with just carry-on luggage :p

Didn’t do much during the evening as I was feeling the effects of jet lag. Didn’t go to bed either since I needed to stay up till night-time over here so that my body would adjust to the night-day cycle over here. There are power-cuts in effect in Sri Lanka at the moment – three hours a day! Jeeze! That really hits the point home that I”m in Sri Lanka :p If there were power cuts like that in the US, somebody would be in big trouble … and I don’t mean the consumers :p But this is part and parcel of life in Sri Lanka – just like the army encampments and dugouts with guns sticking out around the airport because it had been attacked a few months back by terrorists. Ah well, terror is a day-to-day occurrence in some parts of the world – I guess you just get used to it after a while …

Hmm … I just realized that I should put some sort of a time-zone stamp template on Blog to show which time-zone somebody is in since if I’d set my notebook to the Sri Lankan time, this post would have said 6:40 am or something instead of 8:40 pm at night EST but then I realized that I hadn’t switched over the time on the notebook yet. So I guess all is good :p Well, gotta go do things, meet people etc. I’ll post an update again when I get some time 🙂

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Posted by Fahim at 8:33 pm  |  No Comments