Day 8: January 26

Closer to noon, we made it to the beach in Mirissa. The beach here is pretty nice. There’s a small little lagoon without waves. But there’s absolutely no shade here. So we swam a bit and headed home; we didn’t want to sit right under the blazing sun. (I forgot to take photos again...)

Around 4 o’clock, we decided to go for a swim at the beach in Weligama, and in the evening we planned to go out for a fish dinner.

In Weligama, on the southernmost side, the beach turned out not to be so bad: there were lots of surfers in the water, but no boats or sun loungers.

It was shallow here and the waves were small — perfect for learning to surf. While I was waiting for Volchy, I watched the surfers and felt like surfing too.

I know that nothing good will come of me in terms of surfing; I’m completely unsuited to this sport. My arms are weak, and I can’t paddle effectively, which is very important in surfing. I’m also afraid of water and not a strong swimmer. But splashing around in the shallow waves seems fun. It reminds me of when I learned to surf in Portugal.

When Volchy came out onto the shore, he also agreed to surf, so tomorrow we’re planning to rent boards.

We were going to have dinner at the fish market. There’s a place here in Weligama where they sell fresh fish. You choose it, and they grill it for you. The setting is very simple, but in the evening it’s quite romantic — tables with candles are set right on the sand.

Before dinner we went to the center of Weligama and found something like a market, where they were selling all sorts of random stuff. We wanted to buy T-shirts so we wouldn’t get burned tomorrow while surfing. We managed to find the T-shirts with great difficulty, Wolf had already completely despaired, but then we found him a very cool T-shirt with wolves on it. It was really hard for me to choose anything — all the T-shirts were huge on me, so we picked the smallest one in a nice yellow color.

Happy, we went to have fish for dinner. To be honest, choosing the fish was quite stressful for me, but the waiter helped as much as he could and we ended up choosing two fish — butterfish and red snapper (the waiter said that’s what they were called).

They didn’t sell beer, but we noticed that many people came with their own. So we sent Wolf to the nearest shop for beer (luckily it was very close). Wolf came back with the beer faster than our fish was cooked. And then the fish was brought out. Hooray!

I’m not much of a fish connoisseur, but I really liked this one. First of all, it has practically no small bones, just the skeleton, and because of that it’s very pleasant to eat.

I liked the butterfish more (that’s the one on the left on the plate) — it has a lot of meat and it’s so firm. And Volchemu liked the red snapper more — its meat is so tender, it just melts in your mouth (too tender for my taste :) and it does have some small bones

We had a great dinner and went home.