Random Festival

We took a taxi this morning through a mostly closed Colombo to a department store where they had what is probably one of the few soft play areas in Sri Lanka, in which we could leave Jacob to play while we bought a few bits and pieces for people at home.

On the way, one side street was packed with people celebrating a Hindu festival. We haven't seen many Hindu temples here, although there are a one or two which the Buddhists attend as well. There was even one just next to the venerated Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, which quite a few Buddhist pilgrims also seemed to pop into after seeing the tooth relic. Buddhists seem happy to access spirituality through other people's styles of worship also - something that sounds quite healthy for multicultuarism in a Buddhist country like this, at least in theory...

Anyway, it was the full experience, with face-pierced celebrants, and lines of men and women pulling extravagantly painted floats depicting a variety of gods. I'm not sure what this young lad thought of his role in the whole thing:

But we couldn't stay long enough to find out any more, as of course all of this was no competition as far as J was concerned compared with the prospect of a small windowless area in a shop covered with coloured plastic mats, a "ball pool" of small plastic balls, and a medium sized indoor coloured slide.