The Martin's Blog

Tom – Tried a new fruit this morning, it is called a mango steen.  The white part, surrounding the seed, is what you eat.  It is sweet and delicious.  The outer fruit and seed are bitter. 

Wrote the diary for the blog this morning and then took Helen to exchange our Fibretec picture for some Fibretec shell serving dishes.  We then went to the bookstore to pick up the Sri Lankan cookbook that I had ordered for her.  Ranjan took us out to an Indian restaurant in the Taj Sumara Hotel for a farewell dinner and also presented Helen with a silver ring and two pendants.

Helen – Is it REALLY worth the effort??  Tom makes the day sound calm, when in reality it was nerve wracking!!!  The furniture logistics were a nightmare!!  On Friday, Chandra the son of the Antique store owner, called and said that he was not able to get the bookcase into his van (only the two chests and the bottom and doors of the bookcase) so the bookcase would be going to the shipper tomorrow.  They couldn’t use a truck (lorry) for everything because trucks are not allowed to go through the city due to security (another bus was bombed Friday – 24 killed).  He said he would be at the house to show me the pieces he had and also to pick up the extra weight we wanted to ship back home.  As expected, he came late and therefore I was not able to go to the shippers with him to check on things there and get our paperwork done.  He told me not to worry that he was going to take the bookcase to the shipping warehouse on Saturday, call us when he was outside of Colombo, and we could follow him to the warehouse.  We paid him with our Visa so if anything happened, we could stop payment.  The next day we waited for his call, knowing that the warehouse closed at 3 and it would take from 1-1.5 hrs to get to the warehouse, we thought that he would be here at the latest by noon. 

About 1 o’clock, we began calling his cell phone and it said that the phone was turned off.  Then we tried the store and that phone was also turned off.  Panic set in, Ruki raised the anxiety level with talk about how we should not have paid him until we were at the shippers, he probably took all our stuff and we would never see it again.  I kept calling for at least two hours and nothing.  About then I called the tourist police to ask someone to go to the store to have them call us (the store is almost two hours away!!).  I had some problems talking with the police on the phone and they said that they would call us back.  Meanwhile I found Chandra’s residence number and finally contacted him at home.  He became upset with me for asking why he didn’t contact me and said that the truck was on its way and they would call me around 2:30.  

Feeling better about his honesty, we ran our errands to Fibertec, bookstore, and  had lunch at the Commons.  We returned early and waited for his call.  At 3:30, I called again, now he was upset with me for doubting him, said that we could cancel the transaction and he would return our belongings on Sunday.  I put Ruki on the phone and she got the information about the shipping company, people and phone numbers, she was informed that we could still go to the warehouse because they were waiting for the truck and would remain open until it got there.  Ruki then called the warehouse and spoke to a man who reassured her that our belongings were there and he named most of the things there.  Since it was late, we decided to go the next day, Sunday. This would give us a chance to repack our suitcases again to get them into the weight requirements for our flight to China.