Galle looking lovely
Shopping day! Galle has lots of shops, although it actually seems to be the same four shops repeating themselves over and over: there’s the lifestyle shop with lots of tropical/colonial housewares and probably some printed linen, there’s the jeweller selling giant bling rings and necklaces fit for a dictator’s wife, there’s the antique shop selling anything they’ve been able to find in old Sri Lankan houses, and there’s a souvenir shop selling cheap versions of the above along with Sri Lanka T-shirt and elephant print trousers.
I’m being a bit unfair: we also found a spice shop where cinnamon was a much better price. The jewellers are by far the most common of the shops, but always relentlessly traditional in their designs. I thought it might be kinda post-modern cool to wear a gold ring with a sky blue sapphire the size of a grape, but Maureen vetoed me.
Villa de massage
It turned out the door led into an exclusive villa with only three rooms ($250/night) that had no-one staying over Christmas at all. They’d cancelled, he said. He was one of the staff, and acted as caretaker while it was empty. And did massages on the side. The next guests will never know that we had an hour-long all-over Ayurvedic massage on their dining table.
The cancellation wasn’t such a surprise. Sri Lanka’s tourism has been tanked by the IS bombing in April this year. I checked the villa guest book: 3-4 stays per month until April, then only 1 stay every 2 months for the rest of the year.
To top off the day of luxuries, we dined at one of the nicest spots in Galle – the Fort Printers hotel. Not much to report about the meal, some pretty good seafood. Nice ambiance.
Galle lighthouse
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