by Kiran Jayasinghe
We woke up late in the morning. We had all slept in, wanting to catch up on the sleep we had missed in the past few days. Our first order of business once we woke up, was food. We decided to have breakfast at the hotel buffet again. This time, the three kids (us), had breakfast alone while Mom relaxed in the hotel room and Dad worked out in the gym. We had a similar breakfast as the day before, eating hoppers, eggs, toast, sausages, and pastries with our milk tea.
We met up in our hotel room again before we decided to run a few errands. We went to a couple of jewelry shops to look for some gifts, and items for ourselves, which took a long time. We also had to search for a replacement the back of my earring, which I had lost some time ago. These earrings happened to be from Sri Lanka (my grandparents bought them for me), so we went to the shop that the earrings were from and dropped them off to get a replacement made.
Then we went to lunch at our grandpa’s house before we went to swim. We had traditional Sri Lankan food, including rice, and several fish and potato curries. After lunch, we headed back to our hotel to relax for a while.
We had decided that we would try swimming with Killer Whale Aquatics for one practice, just to see how different it was from our practices back home, so we headed to their home pool after relaxing. Svara was not old enough to be in that particular group, so Simran and I tried it out by ourselves. By the end, we had decided that it was…interesting. Our first mistake was on the very first lap that we swam. Most swimmers circle swim as to not crash into each other. Swimmers stay on one side of the lane, depending on which direction they’re swimming in. In America, we usually circle swim always staying on the right side of the lane. In Sri Lanka, however, they swim staying on the left, as it is with several other countries. We got in the water and started swimming, on the right, as usual. The coach blew his whistle over and over, so we stopped swimming, just to realize that we were swimming on the wrong side of the lane! After executing several other mistakes like this, the practice went by in a flash, and we had learned many new things in our short visit.
After swimming, we went back to the hotel, only to quickly change, and get back in the car to visit our mom’s cousin on her dad’s side. We were still very tired, and after having some some food there, and talking a little bit, we drove back to the hotel and slept after another tiring day of vacation.
To see the previous day of our trip, click here.
To see the next day of our trip, click here.
