Sunday, February 28, 2010

You put the lime in the coconut


One of the many local food treats we get to enjoy is coconuts. Now where you are probably picturing the classic round brown coconut with thick white meat we get the coconuts before they reach this point, called a king coconut here. They are for sale everywhere, around $.18 each, sold in bunches. They are heavy. Our faithful trishaw driver brought us some yesterday and the bunch of around 9 coconuts must have weighed almost 100 pounds! They are also difficult to open, without the correct tool, that being a machete'. Chris makes good use of her sharper kitchen knives to slice them open, then usually banging them against the patio to split them and get to the meat.

The coconut water is very refreshing, you can Google the many medicinal uses for it. We enjoy drinking one after a workout. A nice treat is to pour the water into a container then put it in the refrigerator to cool.

After drinking the water we split the coconut and spoon out the meat, very delicious.

We also buy virgin coconut oil and Chris makes good use of this in pretty much all of her cooking, the flavor infuses itself into whatever you are cooking, wonderful. Great with salads as well. You can also take it for health reasons.

I'll take a picture of the oil we purchase and post it soon.

Book Corner - Finished Reading

2nd Chance by James Patterson
Fiction
Paperback 400 pages
Detective thriller

I swear up and down that I wasn't going to get into a James Patterson rut, but Chris picked up the book at the lending library for me and after the last book I read I was looking forward to a quick read. I call Patterson books cheat reading as he does have the many very small chapters.
I enjoyed this book.

It was not from the Alex Cross series.

Nawam Maha Perahera aka The Big Elephant Festival


The end of February brings the big elephant festival to town. The elephants are walked down "elephant pass" (Kandy Road) from Kandy, this is about a two week journey for the elephants. I happened to have seen one the elephants taking this journey with its handlers. Along with the elephants the tooth of the holy prophet (Buddha) is also brought down, this is a pretty big deal here.

Having a fairly good idea but not knowing exactly where the festival was taking place we left the apartment. By chance we bumped into our neighbor who gave us some round about directions to the festival and we were on our way.

I was expecting to see crowds of people walking towards the festival and no trishaws to be found, but neither was the case, no crowds of people flowing in any one direction and if we needed a trishaw it was just a matter of hailing one.

After a good walk we reached a point where we needed directions, one trishaw driver told us we were in the wrong part of town and another trishaw driver told us to turn right on the street we were approaching which we did.

As we walked down the road we could see the walls of a stadium and voices over a loudspeaker, could this be it? We were able to sneak a look inside the stadium, no, this wasn't it, that and there were to be seats for one million people!

We followed a curve around a bend when I could see trees with lights, police and lots of Buddhist flags, I think we found in.

As we got closer I could see lots of seat cushions lining the streets, thus one millions seats. Wish I had taken a picture.

We walked a bit further and we could see makeshift viewing stands, the word "Tourists" was painted in the ground. Someone from work mentioned there was VIP seating, we wondered how we could get a seat there, so Chris asked one of the attendants, he walked us over to one of the other viewing stands and there one of the attendants asked us for tickets, Chris told the attendant that we were with "The company" to which the attendant gladly escorted us to another viewing stand, the best seats in the house complete with red carpet and a roof! Also there was just a handful of people there so we sat in the front row. Later we were joined by other people from work.

The elephant that carried the tooth was wearing this big Elvis outfit, lighted and everything.
The parade went on for almost two hours. Dancers then an elephant, each elephant had its own unique dance or acrobatic troupe. Wish I could go on about any particular one but it did begin to turn into one big blur after awhile. All in all glad I went though.

Note: It was difficult to take pictures in the dark, some turned out all right, others not so well. I will upload them and the videos (Turned out better) and post the links.