Quik Thinking

For our last night in Sri Lanka, Anita and I decided to sleep in Negombo because it's actually closer to the international airport than Colombo is. But I really wanted to stop in Colombo on the way to have one last faluda before we left the country. When we tried to buy tickets for the train from Galle to Colombo, once again they had no first-class seats available. But having seen what second-class was like, we figured that third-class wouldn't be any worse and got tickets for the instead, thereby obtaining the trifecta.

As it turned out, there were a plethora of seats in third-class. Unfortunately, the only others in our car were a group of hooligans who acted like they'd never seen a woman on a train before. Ultimately I swapped seats with Anita so I was between them and her.

The faluda in Colombo was most enjoyable but afterward we had to wait a very long time for the train and it took far longer than we'd expected to reach Negombo. By the time we got there, none of the buses were running and we were forced to resort to a tuk-tuk for the third time so we could get to our hostel. We didn't have enough cash to pay for it and there wasn't really enough time to hit an ATM so I paid in USD and ended up with a lot of effectively useless rupees as change. 

Our flights were scheduled to depart only a couple of hours apart so we accompanied each other to the airport early in the morning. The tuk-tuk driver who was supposed to drop us off at the main bus depot actually dropped us off a block away and told us to wait for the airport shuttle to come by. Ever suspicious of tuk-tuk drivers, we went off in search of the actual bus depot and found the shuttle there. It was good that we did so because it by the time it left the depot, there was no room left on it and it shot right by the place we'd been dropped off without stopping to pick up any of the unfortunate people waiting there.

At the airport we discovered that everything was done backwards. We had to go through security first and then show our boarding passes. I didn't have mine yet but we somehow bamboozled the staff into believing that Anita's itinerary printout covered both of us. Upon reaching the airline counter, I was informed that they didn't use computers and had to look me up by name on a sheet of paper before handing me my boarding pass! Although the departure gates for both of us were right beside each other, they wouldn't let Anita through to wait with me because her flight wasn't for another two hours. So I blew her a kiss through the glass pane before stepping onto the aeroplane.