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Well, sorry I haven't been more regular about posting. Internet access has been sporadic here. Anyway, I'm about to start an 8 day tour of Sri Lanka's "cultural triangle," which consists of Anuradapura, Sigiria, and Pulunaruwa. I'm sure I'll have a lot to say when I get back. In any case, my stay with my host family has been really good. In the beginning, I think we were sort of sounding each other out. I was being really careful not to offend them with cultural mistakes, etc. Anyway, things are a little freer now, and we can joke with each other a bit. My Amma is really nice. She tries to avoid force feeding me food (which is a difficult thing for her to resist doing, culturally). My Appachi is quieter, but very nice.
I also had the oportunity to meet loku maama (older uncle), who's a doctor. He speaks really good english, and taught me how to fake my way through Sinhalese using english. Basically, you say the noun, followed by the verb to make the sentence structure similar to Sinhalese. Like: "Ball eka throw karanne," or "butterfly eka look karanna" eka means "the" and karanne means "do". So basically its Singlish. The equivalent of "I want to go to el hospital."
Almost every educated person in Sri Lanka is bilingual with english. The first two years of college here, the classes are taught in English. It's a little humbling, considering how much trouble I'm having with sinhalese. It's amazing how much I've learned in a week and a half though. Our professor really knows how to teach a language.
what we've done in short: Gone to 2 orphanages, seen elephants, gone to the temple of the tooth (aka maligawa. Google it. It's awesome.), seen another temple carved into the rock, gone into Kandy.
Also, my laptop needs to stop giving me electrical shocks. It's supposed to work with 240 volts, but there's definately too much current running through it, and if I plug it in it becomes like an electric fence. Needless to say, I won't plug it in until that's fixed.