Sri Lanka, Day Two: The Sizzle

Today was mainly family stuff - visiting the in-laws to be during the day (there were a lot of them) and also joining them at a steak restaurant for dinner. Wedding things might not give you a tourist view of a place, but it does a native one which in many ways is even more handy - knowing the layout of a place more than the centre for example, or seeing how native Sri Lankans deal with the everyday in their home town - these are insights that one might not necessarily get as a tourist.

The most striking thing I learned was how nice the people are here. Our hosts aside (who were actually wonderful), the people on the ground were amazingly smiley, polite and all round nice wihtout being overbearing - the kind of attitude that unfortunately seems to only come from a country that had been through a war relatively recently. Another shocking observation was how incredibly clean Colombo was; enough to shame those of us who call Karachi their second home. The cynical side of me wondered if these behaviours would stand the test of time, but for now I just accepted that brown people can actually do a decent job of their homes if they want to.