Arrival

Okay, so I've been here a week, and let me tell you, that's really hard to believe. I've only got a little time, but I'll try to be thorough and start from the beginning. (Therefore, I may not get to everything).

So. I spent Tuesday night with Ben (my brother) in Boston. It was an awesome time, and we had sushi, beer, and sake together. Sweet.
I woke up at 8:00 or so Wednesday morning, and met two other ISLE students plus the coordinator at Logan. Together, we flew to Chicago to meet the rest of the program. The adventures started right away for some people, because their flight was delayed in getting to Chicago, so they arrived 10 minutes too late to join up with the rest of us on our flight to London; of course we spent half an hour on taxing around and waiting, so...well.

Anyway, we took off for London at 7:00 or so, and the flight seemed excruciatingly long. I didn't bring a book, and I can't sleep on planes, so it was a lot of me being tired, and studying the Sinhalese alphabet. Wheeee!

We arrived in London early the next day, and spent most of that day kicking around the airport. I got about an hour of sleep, and after that I was feeling much better.

The next flight was a straight shot from London to Columbo, Sri Lanka. I had the good fortune of sitting next to a buddhist monk for that leg of the journey, which was really cool. We talked about a good number of things, many of which were quite thought provoking and I'll definitely be thinking on them during my stay here. He was the head of his order, and had just returned from a trip to a US monastery. In any case, if you're interested in hearing more about that, I may post once I've had a chance to digest what he said. He asked me not to repeat what he said, at least not attached to his name, because some of it was outside of the mainstream buddhist thought. He told me that if I find that it's agreeing with my philosophy, and it becomes what I think, I could of course tell other people about what I think.

The foood and service on Air Sri Lanka is awesome, btw.

We arrived in Colombo at about 6:00. I hadn't slept again, and they wouldn't let us sleep until the nighttime. We met our driver and the program director (who's basically an exact replica of Roger Jackson, but Sri Lankan [or perhaps Indian?]) at the airport. They presented us with lei's and we drove out into the city. My first impression of Columbo: barbed wire and crows. Everywhere. Crows swarm the city like pidgeons in Western cities, and barbed wire seems to be the "white picket fence" of Colombo. Police and road blocks were everywhere. For those of you that don't know, Columbo is the capital, and as such it's a big target for the tamil tigers. In any case, we just passed through on the way to Kandy, our final destination. We ate rambutans on the way, stopped for tea, and I fell gratefully into bed at 8:30 at a hotel in Kandy.

We stayed there for the next couple of days, then moved in with our families.

Gotta go. Post!