Sigirya

I removed all my fingers and toes, don't wanna hold anything to close!
I wanna change, I wanna listen
My selfish ways have reached their limit
Are we alive, or are we finished?
Let's move along and not diminish

YES as you see, Biffy Clyro hype has not left me yet ;)
Gayathri and Aruna must be wondering what I'm typing all the time, and they even encouraged me to send a traveling report to a local newspaper, so I decided to write my next post in english so they can read it and make up their minds about my writing skills! :D
Maybe that is the right method to keep me from typing hundreds of lines that nobody will ever want to read. There's just so much going on and filling up my mind with things I formerly wrote into my private blog. I'll try to select a bit.
Today Aruna and her husband, who is also having holidays until Monday, took me to Sigiriya! Another place I thought I was going to see some time in August, but instead I went to see it in my first Sri Lankan week, wow. I can only say a huge "istuti"!
Sigiriya is a World Heritage Site, magma rock, the leftover of a vulcano that eroded away. It soars something like 350 m above the plain and is still full kind of an archaeological secrets. What's sure is that it is really old and has always been a special place to the people of Sri Lanka. There are huge gardens with a lot of ponds and fountains around it and on top of it. There are beautiful ancient murals and a very smoothly polished Mirror Wall, caves, leftovers of statues and interesting tools and things of daily life in old times. Most of the buildings and artwork were built by King Kasyapa around 500 A.D. who had his palace on the summit of the rock. Climbing the rock was tiring, but absolutely worth it! The view is amazing as you can imagine, and it was so much fun to me to jump from stone to wall to stairs in the wildly blowing wind high above the ground up there, to cool my feet in the pond where the king used to take his bath and to smile at the jungle underneath and the big Buddha statue in the distance, just because.
Pictures tell more than words:

Is there any need to say more?

We had lunch and Aruna, sounding all like my mother, forced me to eat as much as I could because we were planning to climb another rock; a rock in a forest of beautiful Na trees that was supposed to be glittering all in pink because it consists of pink quarz stone. But unfortunately the colour was gone, somehow burnt by the sun - or we just gave in too quickly and should have climbed all the way to the top.
Similar bad story on our way back home when we stopped by in Dambulla to vistit the old temple, but it was already closed. The new Golden Temple with the world's largest Buddha statue was worth a visit nonetheless.

Can you imagine, people here don't know Pink Floyd! Unable to believe that, I showed Gayathri "Another Brick in the Wall", but she never heard it before. Same with "Wish you were here" and "The Dark Side of the Moon" - obviously Pink Floyd with its worldwide fame didn't manage to spread its music to a small tea-loving island in the Indian Ocean, where guitars are rare and quiet temples numerous. But well, as long as Justin Bieber managed... ;)
But Mika made his way to Sri Lankan ears, thanks to Hannah Hellmann!