Oh! Colombo 

To me it was a great achievement to finally go over to Jaffna. The drive was fabulous, scenic and the roads wonderful. Not knowing what to expect Jaffna certainly surprised me with its sort of modern city and cleanliness of most of its areas, especially the shops and eating places. The beauty of the surrounding islands and beaches are breathtaking and hopefully will remain so without monstrous hideous hotels coming up, like in the south of the country, and ruining all of it. Being progressive is good but raping the surroundings is sinful. 

Whilst I was enjoying Jaffna and its surroundings, down south had been a height of activity with the Fairway Galle Literary Festival in full swing. It certainly has upped its game, said Trixie who enjoys going over to the Festival. The place had been packed with the learned literary lot as well as the wannabes who had also decided to purchase tickets for a few lectures and readings and had annoyed the literary enthusiasts by chattering and taking the odd selfie. The town was abuzz and thanks to the expressway lots seemed to drive down to Galle for the day and take loads of pictures to show the world that they have read a book or two. As Trixie pointed out, reading fashion and gossip magazines do not count as being literary and followed her statement with a giggle and the comment that it is better than not reading anything at all. Social media was plastered with all the goings on at the Festival, including criticism of hoppers that had been served with vegetable curries at an exorbitant price as well as the fish and chips that were served in a paper cone where all dived into the chips to look for the fish and found two fried sprats at the bottom. Clever marketing tactic, in my opinion, and no one should complain since sprats are fish after all. 

With this Festival getting bigger and better there are many invites flying around for cocktails, high teas and other sorts of social do-das that actually make it inconvenient for the socialite who has to attend all these soirees, especially the ones with the bigwigs, to make it to the actual literate part of event. Some social climbers even did a quick dash from Colombo for a soiree or two only to hob knob with the current favourite hierarchy. 

All in all, with jazz, fashion, food and much more to be enthralled by the literary festival has been a great success and kudos to all who made pots of cash disguising themselves and selling literary goodies. Make hay whilst the sun shines and, thankfully, there is now another annual outing to be looked forward to, apart from the big matches and fashion hoo-has that go on. Congratulations to the organizers. Make the Festival even better the next year.