After wandering around Viharamahadevi Park we decided to head to the nearby National Museum. On the way we stumbled across this monument commemorating Boy Scouting in Sri Lanka. They also had a similar monument for Girl Scouts.
It's always interesting to see where organizations have sprung up. I'm pretty sure we saw signs for the Rotary Club in Sri Lanka too.
The museum was housed in a beautiful, huge mansion (palace?). I love this style building with all white exterior with intricate details. The museum has a really unique entrance policy. The first three rooms are open free to the public and then if you want to wander through the rest of the museum, you pay the entrance fee. The museum was only open for about another hour by the time we arrived, and this coupled with the lack of air conditioning or basic air movement making wandering through these rooms terribly unpleasant we decided only to stay and see the free rooms.
I can't imagine living in one of these houses in reality because the hot, stagnant air was really miserable. It wasn't as bad as the Dutch Museum, but still too hot to really enjoy.
We wandered around the grounds and found the cafeteria, so we stopped for a well deserved break. Sometimes finding food in Colombo was challenging. Most areas didn't have many restaurants so we often delayed lunch by several hours until we managed to find one.
Two huge wrap around patios.
The writing in Sri Lanka is really pretty, despite us having no hopes of deciphering it. This might be one of the prettiest languages I've seen, and while it looks vaguely similar to Arabic, it's much more loopy and round.
The museum had exactly what we'd been hoping to see for a while. This shows the various hand and leg positions we'd seen in Buddha statues. It unfortunately didn't explain the significance of the poses, but at least it identified them.
Check out the rest of our Sri Lanka travels:
If I had paid any amount of attention during art history winter quarter, I could tell you something of them, but alas, I didn't (big surprise).
ReplyDelete