My post-program travel has officially commenced, and it’s already going by too quickly! After being in Madurai for so long (well it was really only 3 ½ months but it feels like a lifetime!) I definitely felt myself expecting the rest of my travels to mirror Madurai (maybe minus the salwar and plus some beaches), but thus far each of these new experiences have brought a new palette of delicious food, different cultures, and different colored autos (which in Sri Lanka are called tuk tuks).
My travel companions are two students from my program, which is sort of magical because before studying abroad we had never even heard of each other before! (and now, we find ourselves meandering the streets of Sri Lanka and Malaysia and trying endless new food items together—pretty neat!)
My first stop was Sri Lanka for 5 days, staying mostly in Mt. Lavinia (a beachside town about 20 minutes outside of Colombo) and Colombo (the capital of Sri Lanka). My fellow travelling companions and I also took a day trip to Galle, which was colonized by the Portuguese and is home to the Galle Fort, a very popular tourist destination featuring a lighthouse and colonial Portuguese architecture.
Along the way, we stopped at a turtle hatchery run by the Sri Lankan government with the intention of preserving the widely diverse sea turtle population as well as a mask and puppet museum featuring traditional Sri Lankan puppets and masks hailing from Kandy (often referred to as Sri Lanka’s cultural capital).
*Obligatory food shout out: Sri Lankan food does have a lot of overlap with south Indian food (thank goodness!) and two of my favorite dishes consumed were egg hoppers and beef biryani. Egg hoppers, or egg appam in Tamil, is a sumptuous, bowl shaped, crispy dosa type with an egg cracked and fried in the middle. After breaking the bright yellow yolk with one of the crispy edges, one’s taste buds are treated to a harmonious combination of crispy, salty, peppery, egg yolky goodness (they are also 40 LKR which is excellent!). Biryani in India is prepared differently in each state, and Sri Lanka has its very own kind of biryani. The biryani I discovered from a nearby halal food stall was a mountain of yellow rice, crispy onions, curry leaves, sweet beef, and a hard boiled egg. Incredible!
The next adventure is Malaysia, which is especially exciting because it is a place I have never even thought about going to before and selected it with my fellow travel companions on a whim (what is studying abroad if not to learn about being spontaneous in a new place?) Currently, we have completed a two-day stint in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which featured a visit to the incredible National Islamic Art Museum, the Malaysian Music Museum, and the Textile Museum as well as a water light show at the famous Petronas Towers.
I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to see so many parts of the world, especially seeing the intersections and differences between these numerous cultures and identities and how often I can relate some of these back to my experiences in south India.