I live in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Sometimes I get down on my city, but recently I went to Chennai and I feel better.

In my lifetime none of the skyscrapers above existed and I kinda liked it that way. Now Colombo is Dubaifying into shopping malls and traffic. But people like the malls and cars, and I use both so who am I to say?

A big way Colombo changed is that China reclaimed an entire block of land from the sea called the Port City. Right now there's not much there but dust and a few recreational activities. I think it was a dumb idea but it was our idea, China just helped us execute it. The port itself also expanded to basically double.

Colombo is literally and figuratively the Western part of the island. Our biggest festival for centuries has been Vesak, the Buddha's birth, but the heathen New Year has crept in and this year there were a lot of fireworks.

Part of Colombo is called Slave Island, as the Portuguese used it (to hold African slaves in transit) or Kompanna Veediya (Company Roads) as the British (I guess) did. Colombo is still where the giant sucking sound connecting us to Western capital comes out. After the collapse a few years ago the rich people and parts of Colombo have more than recovered, if they ever really suffered, but the rest of the country and people have not. We're still a slave island in more ways than one.

Colombo is the biggest city in Sri Lanka, and also one of the best place for bird-spotting. It's surrounded by wetland and a lot of it just is, and some has been turned into walkable parks. Even just on the way to school we see kingfishers, storks, pelicans, and sometimes even crocodiles.

This isn't a long post, but if a picture is a thousand words, I think it'll do.