the new role of motorcades in my life

As Becky has just wittily told you - Colombo is a nice city. Particularly after having South Asia city experience of Delhi, Colombo seems like a paradise - it's clean, the traffic isn't too bad, and there are sidewalks more often than not. I've been walking a lot, because tuk tuks (same as auto rickshaws), while not that expensive, certainly add up. We live in a neighborhood that's pretty central to a lot of things, so walking often works. Our neighborhood is also pretty posh, which helps in the having sidewalks department. We actually live very close to the American ambassador's house. I've been hoping for a dinner invitation, but that doesn't really look like it's going to happen.

Every city, though, has its quirks and annoyances, as well as its great things. One of the quirks of Colombo is its militarization. Actually, I shouldn't call this a quirk, because it's a reflection of a very serious political situation, and has very serious consequences for a number of Colombo-ites. However, because this is a conflict that has never focused on foreign anything (except for India in some cases), I never actually have trouble with the soldiers. When they stop me and ask me for my passport, they're more interested in finding out where I'm from and in being excited about my crappy Sinhala. And it's amazing how quickly you can get used to seeing machine guns on every corner. Well, many corners.

But one way that this military presence exerts itself is in a ton, and I mean a ton, of street closings. Some of them are permanent, like the huge one near the place that I stayed for the firs two weeks. The road was closed every night after 10 (it is a VIP area, apparently. I don't know what that means, but I decided it has something to do with that house that has a guard tower, like, legit tower, with a soldier in it at all times.), and a permanent checkpoint a half a kilometer away meant that to go straight west to the ocean you had to go at least one or two kilometers out of the way, north or south, to go around whatever it was. I think some kind of police headquarters?

In addition to the regular closings, there are a lot of temporary closings: when big events are happening, when ministers are in the area, and for motorcades. My first motorcade experience was maybe the second week I was here. I was walking along a street, and a man told me I couldn't keep walking, that I had to stand and wait for five minutes. So I did, and soon enough a set of motorcycles, army jeeps with soldiers, and other jeeps came zooming through. And when I say zoom, I mean zoom. Its the fastest I've ever seen a vehicle go in Sri Lanka. Then I continued on my way. Yesterday, my roommate Leah and I accidentally walked into the middle of one on our way to the vegetable stand down the road. It went like this - "I wonder why there are no cars on this street? ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM. Oh look, there's the army." We were told, though, (maybe at our embassy security briefing?) that the army takes the clearing of the street for motorcades very seriously, and so it's not something to mess with. This is pretty apparent.

There was an editorial in one of the English daily papers yesterday about street closings. They had written an editorial a few weeks ago about how, basically, rude it is for ministers to have streets closed whenever they do anything, and that its mostly an ego trip for politicians that only serves to inconvenience regular people. Apparently the roads around Parliament are closed for a half hour twice a day every day when it's in session, to allow MPs to come and go.

Then, yesterday apparently the staff wasn't allowed into their building for most of the day because of some kind of road closing, and so the editorial this morning began with the sentence: "The police almost prevented the publication of today’s issue of this newspaper." They go on to criticize politicians, using some pretty strong language:

"An irate public has to suffer harassment and many indignities at the hands of herds of bovine security guards and gun toting khaki clad dregs exuding hubris.....VIP protection has come to smack of arrogance of power. No person with an iota of self-respect will want to be shoved off roads and held at gun point facing wayside walls until VIP motorcades whiz past him or her. People undergo this kind of demeaning and callous treatment day in, day out in the city."