Kandy 2.0 - Sri Lanka

I made up for my short previous visit to Kandy by spending two more nights there. On the one day stay I tried to make a detour to the second largest hospital in Sri Lanka to see the differences and similarities to our German healthcare system. While in Germany it is quite easy to spend a day in a hospital and walk around the hospital with someone accompanying you, in Sri Lanka it is anything but that. Everyone was super friendly and I even spoke personally to the clinic director, who gave me explained that you have to get a certificate in person from the Ministry of Health. The effort of driving back to the capital, getting an appointment there and hoping that I would then receive this certificate was a little too much effort for me. Nevertheless, I will try again in rural hospitals and in the rest of Asia too.

Then we went to the touted “most beautiful botanical garden in Sri Lanka”. It was also beautiful, but I find the jungle here more appealing and visibly more diverse. I believe that the botanical gardens in Germany and Central Europe are uniquely beautiful thanks to the increased funding. But perhaps it is also because the biodiversity of the jungle cannot be artificially exceeded, while in Germany, for example, it is much easier to make the botanical garden more species-rich than the monocultural spruce forest.

After a portion of kothu in a small tin hut, which could never exist in Germany due to hygienic conditions, we finally went to the Ambulawawa tower, which unfortunately disappeared in the cloud bed and there was no visibility above 5 m. Nevertheless, the architecture was very interesting and strangely reminiscent of a lighthouse from the Italian Renaissance. As I was playing carrum with a few people in the evening, my stomach was wondering whether it was really the best idea to eat in a "snack bar" where dogs drink from the same sink in which the dishes are washed, the gas fireplace with a piece Newspaper is set on fire and then, still burning, is simply thrown on the floor with the dozens of other charred newspapers and you have to fish a moth out of the black tea. Even though the spiciness brought tears out of my eyes as I ate it and my gastrointestinal tract was obviously not happy, it was still so incredibly delicious that I would do it again at any time. Somehow you have to familiarize the immune system's memory with new microorganisms in order to... yeah, okay, maybe not. But it was really tasty!