Day 4

First time in a very long time that the alarm actually woke me up - that was some much needed sleep.


We went up to the 10th floor breakfast area and they catered for all.


A full English buffet, fruit, breads, pastries, cereal and omelettes. They even had 3 different curry dishes if you felt inclined.


We did order tea and coffee but as we have encountered before service can be a little “slow” so we had to ask again.


We need someone to come in and do a time and motions report - you don’t need 6 different people to make 1 cup of tea!!


We then picked up our cricket tickets before heading off for some shopping.


As we didn’t want to get too hot and bothered before the cricket we decided to go to a shopping mall.


There must have been 100 shops in the first we visited and 99 of them were mobile phone related - weird.


We then went to another mall and not only was there a better selection but the air con was better too - phew.


We found one souvenir shop and quite frankly it was the best one I think I’ve ever been in - I’ll bet they couldn’t believe their luck that we trotted in.


After some serious spending we decided to get a tuk tuk back to the hotel.




Bloody hell.


It’s the closest you can get to real life Mario carts and for the excitement alone it was worth the £1.20.


Pick up for the cricket was at 12:30 sharp.


We had a bus that was only 2 days old - it broke down.


D’oh!!


So they managed to get another bus eventually and we got to the ground just as it opened - another Sri Lanka delay.


We went up about a thousand steps but the view was worth it.





We could sit outside or in an air-conditioned box - only 1 choice in the heat of the afternoon…





We stayed in the box for the first couple of hours, drinking beer and watching the cricket until Joss got too cold - I swear she might be the first person to go to Sri Lanka and come back with frostbite.


So we went outside, drank more beer and watched England get a lot closer to winning than they deserved - Sri Lanka were awesome.


I have to say that Joss wasn’t fully focussed on the cricket.




It got worse.




The redeeming part to this was that when I raised the phone to take the picture, both the policemen sucked in their guts and stood taller - well it made me laugh.


We left the ground and managed to get on the first bus back to the hotel.


We couldn’t face looking for a meal at 11pm so we went to the Chinese supermarket for supplies and ate them back in our room.


Been a helluva day - despite the result I loved everything about the cricket and there are still 5 more matches to go - although tomorrow is a day of leisure which means one thing - a lie in …..








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