So one day a month I get a day off (work-life balance…what’s that?).
It’s always the last Sunday of the month when operations is on its monthly break and the office staff who work Monday to Saturday are also off. Us expats shut up shop and attempt with all our might to trick our body clocks into sleeping through our usual daily wake up time of dawn. Just for the record…gin helps!
Last Sunday two of us decided we just had not seen enough off the wee peninsula we are living on so we jumped in the ‘Landy’ and went to be tourists for the day.
After a quick bite to eat from the local bakery and with burning mouths from the HOT sambol you get with your roti (basically just raw crushed chillis…divine!) we decided to visit the local library. Now I had seen this impressive building from the outside which had been burned down during the war and had been rebuilt and apparently restocked.
When you arrive you are greeted by a terribly friendly guard who asks you to turn off your mobile phone and take off your shoes!
I have to admit rather cynically as we went in I was expecting a beautiful but slightly empty shell of a building so I was absolutely shocked when far from seeing empty shelves I was confronted with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books.
Rows of encyclopedias, books on religion, politics, history, geography, even an entire section of cookery books! It felt slightly surreal being barefoot in a library but nonetheless we padded around for ages having a giggle at some of our slightly more obscure findings…
Just off the coast line there are several small islands and to get there you drive over a causeway. It’s a bit of an adventure because the causeway is literally a few feet above the water level and not really wide enough for cars to pass one another.
Needless to say it was absolutely pelting down with rain the day we decided to cross so the water was high and practically lapping the tyres of the car plus there was some kind of temple festival just finishing so we met head on the busloads of pilgims coming back over to the mainland…
Anyhow after some slightly hairy edging slowly past one another we eventually crossed safely and went for a drive. The islands are a slightly odd place because the ‘islanders’ who live there are from Jaffna but have a definite ‘island mentality’ of being just slightly different to the folk on the mainland. The folk on the mainland, when asked about the islanders, simply shrug and with a sly wink dismiss them as ‘not quite as civilised as the mainlanders’.
I guess not so dissimilar to any island / mainland divide the world over!
As we explored the islands we kept driving past shacks on the side of the road selling what looked like pink popcorn. Not being able to resist investigating we pulled over. An old gnarly fisherman, who has one of those faces which just screams ‘I’ve got a story to tell’, stepped out from behind his stall and in unbelievably crystal clear English said “Good morning, how do you do?”.
Amusingly that was about the limit of his English but through a bit of sign language and my Pops’ way of speaking the local lingo (English but just v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y and VERY LOUD!) we were reliably informed that far from being popcorn it was sea water boiled shrimps!
Now I know the rules ok…wash it, cook it, peel it or don’t eat it….prawns left outside + hot climate = food poisoning….etc etc. So let’s face it this basket of shrimp had dodgy belly written ALL over it. But I reckon sometimes you’ve just got to take your chances and get down with the locals!
With there not being a dickybird chance of this lovely but slightly grubby stall holder having a nice antibacterial handwash in his pocket I did (briefly) think twice as he peeled one of the big prawns and handed it to me….yes, I ate it!
My friend by this point was being given a handful of the salty shrimp…yes, he ate them!
From the look on his face I couldn’t resist and tried one. They were absolutely delicious, SO moorish and totally addictive. We decided to throw caution to the wind and promptly bought half a kilo.
Heading back over the causeway we stopped at the local ‘beer shop’ and bought some of the local brew then back to the house for a Sunday afternoon movie and movie snacks of beer and salty shrimp.
After a day away from the office I think it’s called ”relaxing”, that evening (with total sodium overload from gorging on my shrimps) as I set my alarm for dawn I might even possibly have had what people with slightly more normal lives call ‘the Sunday night blues’??!!
p.s we lived to tell the tale post-shrimps…all those family camping holidays have obviously set me up with a strong constitution!
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