May 17, Wednesday, Our First Day with Sarvodaya
Our first day with Sarvodaya began at 4 a.m. with the whistling calls of bird invisible in the blackness. We had a full Sri Lankank breakfast with Sambol (grated coconut), dal (lentils), red rice and slice pineapple and mango. After breakfast we rested and talked and hten did a tour of the orphanage near our hostel. During the middle of the day we visited the Colombo Museum, where we saw marvelous bronze images of Buddha, Shiva and Durga on the first floor and on the second floor saw carved masked, used sometimes to mock the great and famous and other times to cure a variety of diseases. There is also an extensive display of large and elaborate puppets.
And then in the early afternoon we stopped at the Galle Face Hotel, a hotel from the days of the British Raj where we ate a from a buffet of 20 Sri Lankan curries and three kinds of rice and a dessert table with 20 desserts on a veranday looking across a green lawn where the waves of the Indian ocean broke on the rocks below.
Then we came back and slept and woke up to another sumptuous Sri Lankan meal in the Sarvodaya canteen.
May 17
