I'm going into town. Anyone need anything?

One year in the Sri Lankan atmosphere is basically enough time for any item to become unusable. That said, each time I come to Sri Lanka I have to restock everything. If I want to bake I have to repurchase everything from vanilla to flour. If I want to run a teaching program I have repurchase everything from pens to paper. SO My bookstore bill came out to a pretty 2,100 rupees. What did I buy?

• 3 pencils (students come to school so often )
• 1 pencil sharpener (for the aforementioned pencils)
• 3 markers (poster making tools)
• poster paper (guess why)
• 2 packets of lined paper (students sometimes don’t have paper)
• 1 O/L past papers book
• 2 star sticker cards (the 3rd and 4th graders love them - but on occasion have lead to some stampedes in the classroom)

Next, we discovered a new favorite tea shop. Dickwella is swarming with shops tailored to tourists so it’s always nice to go somewhere that feels more like pre-tourism infestation era. The best part was the airflow (there were a bunch of fans and the door was basically a wall open to the street so the wind came in too). An odd attraction elsewhere but an understandable one in the humid Sri Lankan weather. So my father and I went home armed with tea buns and gnanakatha (Sri Lanka’s gingerbread man — look up gnanakatha malli).

That’s all for now... teaching updates yet to come.
Samalya