OK, let's start with the obvious: who wouldn't love a city that sounds exactly like the word used to describe the sweetest stuff on earth? Just thinking about the name of Kandy, considered Sri Lanka's "cultural capital" as it was once upon a time the center of the kingdoms that flourished here, conjures up Nutcracker-worthy visions of sugar plums and cotton candy and rainbow-colored lollipops. And saying "I'm going to Kandy" makes my inner six-year-old immediately think I'm skipping off to Willy Wonka's secret chocolate factory, even though the mature, rational person inside me knows it's just a big city in Sri Lanka with no candy factories or magical Christmas fantasies in sight.

I mean, hey, if you needed to rebrand a city or town to sound way more appealing, woudn't yummy food be a great place to start? Who wouldn't want to visit Tiramisu, Ohio, or Butterscotch, Texas, or Caviar, Russia, or Smorgasbord, Sweden? I would. I would put all those places on my list, even if there wasn't a single smorgasbord in sight. (Smorgasbord, by the way, is one of those words that is so enjoyable to say, I wish I had more ways to use it in regular life. Maybe I should move to Sweden?)

Anyhoo. Here's the travel recap for those of you who actually care about what I'm up to and not my thoughts on renaming towns-seeking-tourists with names that sound like they belong in Candyland.