Every morning, right after the kids get on the bus at 6:30, we hear the faint twinkling song come from the streets. The bread tuk-tuk, a small three-wheel autorickshaw has been converted to a rolling, sputtering bakery. It goes up and down the street playing the song from the "Small World" ride at Disney as it travels the streets of Colombo, pedaling bread and other assorted baked goods, cakes, cookies, and savory, handheld breakfast pies. Back home, in the States, the song may have come from an ice cream truck, in Brazil from one of the many propane vendors, selling refills of cylinders of cooking gas. Here, in Sri Lanka, it's bread. The "Small World" ride at Disney World is itself polarizing. Kids love it's simple, colorful cheer. Adults find it mindnumbingly irritating, for the song's insipid repetitiveness as much as anything else. Everyday in Sri Lanka begins this way, like taking a ride on "It's a Small World".
We've been in Sri Lanka for two weeks now, and of course there are worse ways to start the day. It has rained every day we have been here. I remember looking at the weather before we arrived and seeing thunderstorms forecast every single day in a 10-day forecast a wondering what that would be like. I remember looking at a weather radar with my dad once when I was younger. We were looking at the paths hurricanes take as they march across the Atlantic, beginning the race off the west coast of Africa as an amorphous, ominous blob. That blob is often red or purple, the darkest colors on a spectrum of rain where a drizzle is light green. I asked my dad what it was like there, in a place where the skies on weather radar were always covered beneath a blob of red or purple. "It's always a hard rain," he said practically. So, naturally, a place where thunderstorms were forecast every day would be rainy, and yet somehow I couldn't believe it until I saw it for myself, and...yes...there are thunderstorms everyday here, and, as far as I can tell, they can come at any time of day, out of nowhere, or mass along the horizon, or, often, in the middle of the night. Bright flashes and crashes of thunder have brought all three children into our room at least once at 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning in the past two weeks.
We traveled halfway around the world to get here. Jet lag was inevitable. Though, thankfully, it wasn't as bad this time as it had been in the past. We landed at Bandarnaike International Airport at 4:30 in the morning, before sunrise. The sun never came up. The world only lightened slightly, very, very slowly, remaining a deep blue. Even after we had been processed through immigration and collected our bags, the sky had only brightened ever so slightly, and we drove from the airport not being able to see much of our new home at first, merely glimpses of green trees or flowers captured in the narrow beam of the van's headlights.
The drive from the airport is long. Deep indigo blue landscape, jungle, lined both sides of an unnaturally straight highway connecting the airport to the city. We drove in silence, stalled by exhaustion, forced to make small talk with the nice gentleman who picked us up from the airport.
A few days after we arrived, my office hosted a scotch tasting. Elise asked me if planned to go. I demurred. Peter interjected; he didn't understand the importance of tasting tape.
Peter has been the slowest to take to his new surroundings. He was also the most reluctant to leave Jordan. He may still be fighting the move hard. He came home last Friday in tears, exhausted by his first full week of school. He is keeping touch with his best friend from third grade, Faisal, as best as he is able over text message and FaceTime, going so far as to hold virtual playdates with him where they talk about the newest Avengers movie and play Transformers together.
The bus picks the kids up at 6:30 for the long haul to the school far outside of central Colombo where we live. I rouse at 5:00 to get breakfast on the table, then wake the rest of the house at 5:30 to have enough time to wake up, cry, break down, brush teeth, get dressed, and make a half-assed attempt at eating the breakfast I had painstakingly made in a fog coffee had yet penetrated. I have only once relied on the alarm. Often waking at 3:30 (or earlier) ready to tackle the day. In fact, this morning was the first time I woke to the alarm clock. My eyes first opened at 3:30, then inadvertently I fell back to sleep, only to dream about an Olympic sport that was half basketball-half wrestling and actually a front for a child smuggling ring. Dreaming has been strange in Sri Lanka.
This is our fourth overseas move, and it is true it does get easier. But as we adjust more quickly to our new environment, we are also hungrier to explore and be settled. We've hired a housekeeper, Margaret, and a driver, Prem, who is immensely overqualified to be driving the orange Ford I bought, though we are not certain he can see. He most recently came to us from the Swiss Embassy after spending a decade as the official driver for the ambassador of Myanmar. I made it abundantly clear I was not an ambassador, nor did I own a Volvo or BMW, yet he still seemed to want to drive us anyway, so we hired him after he regailed us with tales of the Lost Country in the interior of Sri Lanka and a narrow, winding road and a cliff -- if from which you were so unfortunate to fall over -- three days would pass before you would hit the bottom.
Oh, and lastly, at least for tonight, there are parrots here.
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