sasri2016 – Travelling back to Finland from Colombo

Had an alarm waking me up today at 00:01. It was a darn hard to get up, after only 4 hours of sleep. Though yesterday's dinner was totally worth it, that wake up did eat some from my sleeping time. Have to tell you about it... I wanted a restaurant from as close to hotel as possible. From reception found out that there is a restaurant at the rooftop of hotel building. Nice! No need to go dancing in the rain, to get to the restaurant... ehh, well I did need to go a little bit in rain, because rooftop restaurant is not covered. Security officer of hotel escorted me to restaurant and a waiter of restaurant then helped with umbrella for me to get to buffet room to see their list. Chef came to introduce foods and to reply to my questions (which I had quite many). I found food that I wanted, even though prices were quite expensive, but I still had rupies left and not many places to use them anymore, so it was fine. I didn't want to take dinner to my room (which would have been the obvious choice, while having a rooftop restaurant and thunderstorms right among us (I don't say above, because clouds were really low and thunder was straight over Colombo). Chef and waiter agreed to my suggestion, to bring a table and chair under one corridor roof, which was only place in restaurant's serving area, where it didn't rain. So I ended up being only customer in rooftop restaurant, having great food and amazing lightning show all around me. It was kinda better show than many movies are! And I had the pleasure of enjoying a great Spicy Vegetable Broth with buns as an appetizer and Indian Biriyani with chicken (raita and Chutney included, of course). Though I didn't get my pineapple fruit juice, until they had already brought the main course to the table, I really enjoyed this fantastic event.

Back to wake up. This hotel was surprisingly good. This was first hotel to actually make the wake up call. I had ordered it in two other hotels during my stay, but never got the wake up call. That is really lousy work from reception. I had ordered a taxi from hotel to take me to the Bandaranaike airport. It's about an hour drive, so I ordered it for 01:00 o'clock. Driver was there ready, when I made my checkout and we got to the airport just fine (it took pretty much that 1 hour, even as there was almost none traffic, so during the day, it would have needed more time for travelling to airport).

Other option for my layover in Colombo, would have been airport hotels (there seems to be some) or staying in Negombo, which is much closer to airport, than Colombo. But because I founded a good sale price for this hotel “Supun Arcade”, I thought it's better to go there. Another reason to go there was that I knew that I could use PickMe to easily get to places I already knew about, if I wouldn't take so much sleep. Sale price of that room would have been 57 €, but I had collected hotel.com's rewards and used them, so I paid only something like 12 € for that stay.

Now I am at the airport, already checked into flight and waiting in lobby to get into plane. It's going to be rough way back home:

1. 4h 40 min flight to Abu Dhabi, then 1h 25 min layover in that airport
2. 5h 30 minutes flight from Abu Dhabi to Berlin Tegel airport, with 2h 25 minutes layover in Berlin airport
3. 1h 55 minutes flight from Berlin to Helsinki airport
4. then taking a bus from Helsinki airport to railway station
5. next to take a Onnibus from Helsinki to Turku
6. and about at the beginning of night, I should be arriving at Turku and then to take a local bus to my home and to finally meet my sweetheart.