Some flowers around Iwura today

Today, Matthew, I'll mostly be....

It's 0541 in Dubai so 0711 here and I'm now safe and sound on the terrace. The puppies have been petted (and then ignored as they tore my dress - do dogs need to get their nails clipped? I'm sitting on the terrace having unpacked and had a bit of a chat Bryan and wandered around looking at trees and the progress. I am now relaxed. 

It is slow but steady. I can't help feeling that it should be possible to do more than one thing at a time but it does like everything is very time-intensive. It's going to take Brayen and Yuliya a few hours to get to Colombo and update my visa. I couldn't bear queuing at the airport after  what was not a great flight as there was a drunk man shouting on the plane.

The outside washroom remains enormous but is being transformed into what will be a "tower of flowers". If the workmen actually turn up today we may even finish the external tiling. And then everybody goes off for a few days for Easter. 

I'm giving myself today off to relax (listen to the Archers, write this, have a shower outside, read my book, do yoga, eat fruit, get chilly and put on a jumper), watch this episode of Corrie (my dirty little secret!) and then tomorrow I'm going to do a day of work. I'm looking forward to it as I've got some interesting things to prepare. There will likely be quite a lot of noise as it's Easter and there are likely to be lots of celebrations. 

Matt arrives on Saturday so I will have delicious food and cocktails  and we can drink the bottle of champagne I bought and read books and talk nonsense and do yoga and get to know each other and plan out the garden and hang out. Hurrah! I might even really try to get the dogs to chase the crows this time. They are so cheeky! Oh, yes and we might do a video for a TV show. Hmmmm.......

Progress is made...

Today was great. The men have agreed to do the work, the massage table is under control, most of the rubbish is gone, the canoe is clean and the garden is getting into shape. I quite enjoy the sweeping of the leaves but picking up all the rubbish is less fun. Tomorrow I'll get one of the local kids to finish it off and put all the bits of wood together, bits of rocks together, bits of plastic together and so on. Very little doesn't get reused - a guy turned up earlier to pick up Shiny's water tanks and he ended up taking all the bottles, plastic and creepy picture of a blue lady with naked top units.

I do have photos of some of these things but I have clearly done something stupid as

1)Harry's camera is saying it has no memory left even though there's only a few pictures on there
2) when I put the drive from the camera into Picasa it doesn't take.

It doesn't seem a huge shame given how bad my photos were and in any case....

Tomorrow we shop. For everything.

I can't wait until it's all ready and people can come and enjoy it. And take pictures of course. 

My neighbours gave me a fish

Yesterday morning I was sitting in the garden trying to puzzle out what the big, blue containers my neighbours were working on were for. We got to "chatting" (my Sinhalese isn't very good yet although I can pretty much count to 10) and I asked if I could go around their side. I was desperate to get a good nose around the house and grounds as well as interested in saying hello. They seemed to understand and be happy enough so I wandered around, with some trepidation.

One of the local kids pointed me in the right direction for the gate and I walked past a very nice house with immaculate gardens. As we got closer to the lagoon the garden became a little more wild with coconut trees and a lot of fishing equipment around. The old man came to greet me and show me the way. I stayed to smoke a cigarette and get to understand that the old man lived there. The other three were a father and two sons in their late teens/early twenties. We smiled and nodded and tried to communicate. Eventually I excused myself and went home, after inspecting the chickens with the old man's wife, to my terrace where I watched the men continue their work.

In the afternoon they came back from work and I from Columbo. They called me over to the fence and handed me a whole, big fish that they had just caught. This is lovely but, of course, difficult as I don't know whether to offer to pay or not, how much to offer if I should and how to communicate any of this. I decided to try to pay, once, and made the universal gesture with raised eyebrows. They shook their head and smiled and so I thanked them again and left.

Now I had a fish but no ability to gut it or cook it. So I called Brayen and offered him a fish. He picked it up, brought it home, cooked it, shared it with his family and brought me some to eat. It was delicious. The plan now is to explain to the fishermen that I'd love to buy fish, prawns, crab etc. off them, that I'm going to learn the words so I can do that and that I must be allowed to pay.

I can't wait to come back and have a kitchen in place and learn how to cook the food here.

In the meantime, I think I've worked out what the blue containers are for but, as with most things here right now, I'm probably wrong.