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Christoph T. M. Krause
Tina – My Best Friend
My Bitch from Sri Lanka
Christoph T. M. Krause
TINA
~
My Best Friend
My Bitch from Sri Lanka
© 2020 Christoph T. M. Krause
Cover Design, Illustration: Christoph T. M. Krause
Christoph T. M. Krause, Heerstr. 394a, EU-D-Berlin.
Translation from German by Angelika Hinchcliffe, UK.
Publisher and Print: tredition GmbH,
Halenreie 42, D-22359 Hamburg
978-3-347-17257-9 (Paperback)
978-3-347-17258-6 (Hardcover)
978-3-347-17259-3 (e-Book)
This work, including its parts, is protected by copyright.
Any use without consents of publisher
and author is prohibited.
In particular, this applies to electronic or other reproduction,
translation, distribution and public access.
The publisher has all rights to use pictures
and illustrations, presented in this book.
Bibliographic information from the German National Library:
The German National Library lists this publication in the
German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographical data
are available via Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
CONTENT
| Preface |
| Holidays at Last |
| The First Cultural shock |
| We are Heros |
| A Trip to Wonderland |
| Fruit Market in Kandy |
| Tina |
| Tina, my Best Friend |
| Royal Botanical Garden |
| The Powder |
| At the Vet |
| Bureaucracy |
| Tina’s First Adventures |
| Visiting the Zoo |
| Evil Intentions |
| Sigiriya |
| Departure |
| Our Flight Home |
| After Landing |
| A Long Life |
| Epilogue |
| The Box (Drawing) |
This book is dedicated to Tina, Mickey, Beauty und Roxy
~ Preface ~
1990 was a positive and fateful year for Germany.
The world around Germany changed as well. New states were founded, others were dissolved and revolutions bore their fruit.
For me, it was a year that changed everything in my life. I went on an adventure trip to Sri Lanka and found my love for a dog.
From this point on, my life changed drastically and turned into something completely different. However, it also introduced certain dark elements. A life-threatening disease was only one of several strokes of fate.
All these changes started with a small dog, who I brought home from Ceylon.
8 years later I turned my passion for dogs into a job, which I still carry out successfully to this day.
All that was possible because of what happened one day in March of 1990 in Kandy, Sri Lanka.
In this book, I finally get to tell this very personal story.
~ Holiday at Last ~
For many years I took exotic trips to Sri Lanka.
As soon as you get off the plane and arrive on the runway via the gangway, you are overwhelmed by the humid climate of this beautiful fairyland called Ceylon.
Mystic and exotic like India, Sri Lanka, which is how it was named in 1972, is reminiscent of a drop located on the south coast of India. It is only about five degrees of latitude away from the equator.
In practical terms, this means that the seasons are not at all comparable to what they are like in Europe. There are only monsoon seasons that bring a lot of rain and non-monsoon seasons during which there are droughts, even though they are moist and humid.
“Rain” during monsoon season means, that the rain pours down from the sky like rivers, flooding everything that was not prepared for it.
Due to the sewage systems in towns and villages being broken most of the time and neither receiving maintenance nor repairs, ever since the British installed them, they can’t collect large quantities of water. This results in pedestrians often having to wade through knee-deep water in order to cross any regular road.
A region without any seasons means that you get to experience something fundamentally different than what the average Central European is used to.
We grew up with the temperatures as well as the brightness of the day changing constantly. In summer it gets light early and it gets dark late and it winter the opposite happens.
We require heating, in order to protect ourselves from the cold in our homes and we have known since we were children, that it is necessary to adapt our clothing to the temperature.
This experience almost seems to be “God-given” and irrefutable; ask yourself if you have ever wondered, whether this could be different, before you went to such countries.
Of course you know it and so do I. I’ve known it since Geography class in school. But experiencing it is an entirely different story.
Now you travel to Asia and wonder why the pavements get “folded up” at 6 pm in the evening (provided there are any!).
You wonder, why it gets light at 6 am and dark at 6 pm all year round, without any noticeable change or shift in the course of the year!
It was a cultural shock for me.
I once spent the night of Christmas Eve in a hotel pool right by the Indian ocean. It was about 30 degrees and in the background you could hear the song “Holy Night” in German. I have to say I truly felt as if I was in a film and a wrong one at that.
The temperature is essentially always the same, always around 30 degrees Celsius, all year long.
A Central European is not made for such conditions, even if he believes in it at first or longs for it in his dreams.
I, for one, found out that these experiences made me appreciate the different seasons. I enjoy them because they correspond with my nature.
Of course we don’t like the cold and wet days in autumn and winter at first, but as soon as we have experienced the opposite, even once in our lives, we start to think and feel differently.
However, that is something that everyone has to experience themselves.
I’m certain that there are people who deal well with it and therefore love it.
~ The First Cultural Shock ~
Heat and humidity take hold of the newcomer