Cinnamon Grand & Diving in Colombo

My mom took off very early Thursday morning. I've had three very full days since she left. I guess that's not really different from when she was here. The difference is, I'm no longer staying at a five star hotel and my agenda isn't dominated by lunches and dinners with her friends. That's not to say she dictated my agenda. She has a lot of great friends and I enjoy spending time with them which is why I accepted their invitations. However, there are a lot of them and they love to entertain.

I'm now staying with some of the aforementioned friends, and they are taking great care of me. I do, however, miss a few things about the hotel, Cinnamon Grand.

I miss the amazing breakfast buffet - the egg station, the waffle station, the McDonald's style hash brown discs, the fresh fruit juice bar, the Canadian Cricket team, the hot chocolate, and the great service.

I miss the powerful, hot showers. Boy, do I miss the showers. Especially now that I'm diving everyday. The shower I had when I arrived in Colombo after 26+ hours of traveling was easily one of the best showers I've ever had.

I miss the mall next door with it's grocery store, food court, Dialog store (where I get my phone and internet cards), ayurvedic product shops, foot massage place, and the Dilmah store.

I miss Chagall and the people that work there who did my hair, makeup and dressed me for the wedding and homecoming.

I miss the lobby which is like Grand Central Station. If you sit there long enough, you'll see everyone you know in Colombo. It has great food and live music and it was just downstairs.

I miss the really cute shoe shine boy that my mom tried to feed everyday who always had a huge smile and would call the elevator for me.

I miss being next door to friends that live in the neighboring apartment buildings and running into them in the lobby.

Mostly, I've been diving since she left. I decided to get re-certified while I was packing to come here. I did some research online and found a diving school in Colombo. To make myself feel better about spending the time and money to do something I already did, I decided to get my advanced diver certification at the same time. I did nine dives in four days.

Tuesday was my first day of diving and it was one-on-one with my instructor Paris. Paris is Greek and has a dive shop in Greece. He spends his winters working some place warm. This year it's Colombo. It was a good day of diving. I did peak buoyancy and underwater navigation exercises. The latter required me to do some arithmetic at the bottom of the ocean in my head because the pencil broke which proved to be more challenging than one would think. I saw some pretty fish, but I also saw a lot of plastic bags and a very large adult diaper.

Thursday was the crappy day. Literally. My mom left at 4am and I had my last Cinnamon Grand breakfast (sigh) with the Canadian Cricket team and rushed off to go diving. There were four of us diving, two of whom had never dived before. Things were off to a bit of a slow start, but we finally got in the water and were getting ready to go down when we noticed that we were floating in swirls of brown foam and particles. Paris urged us to go down, so we could get out of the shit. Yes, shit. My dive buddy was having issues with her equipment, so I had to wait with her at the surface until it was sorted. We finally started our descent and then she had problems equalizing. So, we had to come back up to the surface -- the last place on earth I wanted to be. I was avoiding the swirls as best I could and trying to unsee the particles sticking to peoples hair and suits. I can be a bit of a germophobe. I'm not at the can't-use-a-public-toilet level (ahem - Dilini) or I would have imploded here, but I can be a little unreasonable about what touches my pillow. What I learned from this experience is that I have the ability to shut it off in extreme conditions. I am very grateful for that. One of the other divers couldn't handle it. She got so nauseated and grossed out that she couldn't do our second dive, which thankfully was in cleaner waters. At the end of the day, I took a cold, low pressure shower at my new home. Oh, how I missed the abundance of hot water and the Grohe shower head at the Cinnamon Grand.

On Friday, I did three dives including underwater photography. That was a blast. It was just me, Paris and Jehan, one of the guys that works at the dive shop. At the end of our second dive, we came up to a solar eclipse. The clear blue sky was dark in the middle of the day. The solar eclipse creates strong currents and visibility wasn't that great.

Today was my last day of diving in Colombo. Our first dive was a deep wreck dive. We went far out to sea and the seas were rough. I got seasick when we stopped the boat. I was fine when we went under and the dive was great. It was my first wreck dive and my first time diving to 30m. But, I just wanted to go home and we had one more dive and needed to spend an hour at the surface on the boat before we could start our second dive. That was a rough hour let me tell you. I vacillated between staring at the horizon and holding the acupressure point for nausea and staring at the water trying to make myself throw up. In the end, I didn't throw up and I decided to do the second dive because being on the boat was hell. It was a great dive and I'm really glad I did it. I felt better when I came up, but I was freezing. I was very thankful to be back on dry land in warm clothes when it was over. Afterwards, I met Aunty Mano, Aunty Rohini and Aunty Premilla for lunch at the Mt. Lavinia Hotel which is quite the setting and the food was great.

Now, I'm packing for the Maldives -- I leave tomorrow morning! Dinner plans at the Cinnamon Grand and will probably go out afterwards...