Sunday 11th December 2022

Today we went to Uncle Raymond's house in Hendala. Uncle Raymond is granny's older brother. He is married to Aunty Clair and their children are Tania, Romia and Rayhan. Uncle Rayhan lives in Uncle Raymond's house and is married to Aunty Trishma (who daddy and mummy also met for the first time today). 

Orien and I mostly chatted to Uncle Rayhan and Aunty Trishma. Turned out that Uncle Rayhan works for the Civil Aviation Authority as the director of Air Transport and Economic Regulation (DATER). He's a lawyer and it's his job to approve airlines and their flights and loves planes like Orien, so they had lots to talk about.  He was going to be given a very exclusive Qatar Airways Plane (with the world cup livery) from Qatar! 

Aunty Trishma is from India and doesn't have a Sri Lankan passport because you aren't allowed to have both Indian and Sri Lankan citizenship. She didn't want to give up her Indian passport. She has been living in Sri Lanka for 10 years now.  She can't speak much Sinhala but says she can understand it quite well when others are speaking.  Then I found out that Aunty Trishma had a 789 day streak on Duolingo.  She started learning French during lockdown and she's nearly finished the whole thing!

Uncle Raymond was looking quite frail and was very quiet. He uses a walking frame now as his knees are not good. He's 90 .

We tried thala guli and  fish cutlets for the first time (they were the best of the whole trip) and had a delicious rice and curry lunch.

Sunday 18th December 2022

Today we went to meet Aunty Bernice (Granny's sister) and her daughter Sonia who is here on holiday from Bangladesh. Vasanthi (Aunty Winfred's adopted daughter) and her husband  came too. We had lunch at the Pegasus Reef Hotel. Afterwards we  all went back to Uncle Raymond's for a quick stop.

Tuesday 31st January 2023

Aunty Tania who lives in Australia came to Sri Lanka for Uncle Raymond's 90th birthday (which we unfortunately missed as we were on our tour of the country) but we popped in to visit her en route to Colombo from Jaffna.