Shops tend to be on the very small side (compared to stores in the US and Canada, for example) and rather stuffed with items for sale.
Take this shop, for example. If you look carefully, you’ll notice that there’s about a foot-wide passageway between stacks of package. Some of those packages hold lace and trims of various colours and designs, along with the loose lace and trims elsewhere in the shop.
This picture shows a shop that sells clay goods and other housewares. The clay items to the left are clay cooking pots with lids. To the immediate right of the woman exiting the shop are some clay cookers – the fire goes below the cooker, with an opening on one side to feed the fuel into the fire, while the pot goes on top. My mother-in-law has one. 🙂
In this next picture, you see a shop called "Hotel De Galaxi". It’s not a hotel in the Western sense of renting rooms. It’s more of a cafe, but it’s common to call them hotels here.
Kiosks for key cutting, shoe repair, and so on are fairly common at the side of major roads.
I took this one when we were going over an overpass. You can see the shops made from makeshift materials.
Some people walking down the railroad line. Notice that, on both sides of the track, building are constructed within feet of the tracks. Typically, this land is government land, but people have to live/set up shop somewhere, so they’ll use whatever available piece of land there is.
Tags: Sri Lanka, life, poverty, buildings, kiosks, shopping, clay pots, lace, trimmings
