Colombo

Sri Lanka wears many hats. Colombo is definitely the hat representing busy city life. As Sri Lanka's capital city, it is the administrative hub and epicentre where traffic is frequent and convenient. Colombo is the engine that drives the economy, sporting everything from bustling markets to gleaming skyscrapers. It is also a patchwork of peoples from around the island nation who come here to seek out their fortunes or maybe future.

We spent our first three days in Colombo to get a taste of the city life in Sri Lanka. Most of the time we traveled around the city by a kind of mini-vehicle called "braggings".

We got to know the history of Colombo and how complex, yet colorful, the city is by just walking around and observing different architectures of distinct style, historical background and religions. 

 

People living in Colombo usually have excellent command of English. Our tour guide Mr Danna, staff working in hotels, bragging drivers, shopkeepers in malls, bookstore assistants and even school students all speak fluent English. 

At the same time, most of them speak Sinhala, which is one of the vernaculars of Sri Lanka.  Sinhala is the mother tongue of the Sinhalese, which makes up the largest ethnic group of Sri Lanka. Sinhala is also spoken by other ethnic groups in Sri Lanka. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. Sinhala is in fact one of the official and national languages of Sri Lanka, along with Tamil.

Sri Lanka locals are basically very nice people with great curiosity. We discovered this when we were visiting some local markets or even when we were traveling on our coach, that we often gained a lot of attention from the locals and they actually waved at us sometimes. We are quite impressed by their nice welcoming :)

Besides, we also visited some other places like shopping malls, gallery, sea side and Dr Ansaldo treated us a great buffet dinner at Hilton Hotel and we got a chance to tasted different local dishes of Sri Lanka. The curries were just too SPICY!!