Pokhara

Whenever people strike up conversations with me in Nepal, they pretty much ask three questions, always in the same order: 1) What is your name? 2) Where are you from? 3) Have you visited Pokhara yet? Pokhara is like Nepal's version of a lakeside resort-type city. They don't have much clean water here, so a big lake like Phewa Tal is pretty exciting. It's the one thing I missed out on the last time I was here, so I was super happy to finally make it this time around.

After a long and somewhat uncomfortable bus ride (wherein "air conditioning" apparently means "a few electric fans"), Christina and I arrived at our lovely hotel and set off for the lake. We rented an extremely heavy and difficult to paddle wooden canoe and tooled around the lake, visiting the island temple and taking in the beautiful scenery and fresh air, which I had sorely missed after two straight months in Kathmandu.

Phewa Tal, so green, leading up to beautiful green hills

The next day was pretty busy, and started off with setting out for paragliding. I've wanted to do this forever, but in all the excitement forgot to take gravol beforehand. Damns. So we drove up a huge hill, hiked to a cliff drop-off and I was strapped to my Macedonian guide and a parachute. The instructions consisted of, "ok, when I say run, run." I'm like, "...off the cliff?" I cannot even express to you how high this cliff was dudes. But I was surrounded by super buff and hardcore international paragliders, and my desire to not look stupid outweighed my desire to, y'know, live. Luckily the parachute started lifting us before my feet reached the edge of the cliff.

Me and my guide, coming in for a landing.

So it was super cool and kinda like being a bird. You can see the whole valley, and the lake, and it was incredibly pretty. However, to stay aloft, we had to circle over a thermal air pocket. And after half an hour of thermal circling, I was really regretting not taking that gravol. I asked if we could go straight for awhile, and the short answer was no. He asked me if I wanted to land and I was like "yes, please!" as I tried mightily not to vomit from hundreds of feet in the air over rice fields.

My knees, waaaaaay above forest and farms

The rest of the afternoon was spent on a tour of Pokhara. We saw a temple, the river, a gorge, a dam, some waterfalls, some medieval houses, and an underground cave with a temple inside. This tour usually takes three to four hours. Our guide took us through it all in just under two. I think he was in a hurry to get home and enjoy the Dassain festival. Seriously, he didn't even stop the car for the medieval houses. It was like "look to your left. Onwards!" Still pretty cool stuff though.

My favourite part: the cool underground cave, very
Indiana Jones-y

Later, because the town was so empty for Dassain, we had a huge bar to ourselves to have some drinks and play pool. It was probably a good thing, since we were so bad at pool that one game took us over an hour to play. Up at the crack of dawn the next morning so that Christina could leave for a trekking trip and I could catch the bus back to Kathmandu, and thus ended our whirlwind trip to Pokhara. All in all very satisfying and now I can finally say that I've been there to all the curious Nepalis who ask.

Stories with no accompanying photos

But these stories are just so so Nepali!

Story the first: The other day I was walking home from work when I was hit by a bus. Ok, no. I was hit by a microbus. Ok, no. I was hit by the dude hanging out of the door of the microbus. It was hard enough to nearly knock me down though, and at first I was sure the bus had hit me. Dude clearly had been looking behind the bus at the time, and continued to do so when they passed me without slowing down in the slightest, with a look on his face that clearly said “watch it, murkha bideshi (silly foreigner)!”

Story the second: More microbus adventures. I was sitting on a microbus on my way to work yesterday when a woman got on with two small children. There was clearly no seats as the seating for 15 was already occupied by at least 30 people (you know the aversion Canadians have to physical contact with strangers? Nepalis do not have that. In fact it seems to be an ice-breaker). I was going to get up to offer my seat when, wordlessly and with a huge grin, she plopped her 3 year old daughter onto my lap and her young son onto the man’s lap behind me. As no one else seemed to think this was the slightest bit strange, I went with it, and spent the bus ride trying to ignore the small child continuously staring into my face from 4 inches away.

Story the third: It is dog mating season. All the stray dogs here are loud and annoying at the best of times, but they are nigh intolerable right now. There is barking and growling and yelping at all hours of the day and night, not to mention all the blatant dog-lovin’ on every street corner. And? They get stuck together when they’re done! Like, by their naughty bits! Did anyone else know this happened? And I don’t get why from an functionary perspective. They seem very upset when they’re stuck, yelping and rolling around and biting each other. The story here is that the gods were so offended by the shamelessness of the dogs’ mating habits that they cursed the dogs to be stuck together until 100 people observe them. Those gods are cruel sometimes.

Indra Jatra Festival

Last weekend was the Indra Jatra festival. It's something to do with various gods and goddesses, but the exciting bit is that the Kumari (living goddess) leaves her palace for like the only time all year to get pulled around in the massive chariot. We went to watch the festivities and it was lots of fun, until some creepy old dude kept telling Eva how much she looked like his girlfriend. Eva's 18, btw, making it extra super-special creepy.

Me, Henga and Rajiv, in front of Bhairab. Beer is pumped out
through his mouth, as a blessing. Dudes riot to get a drink.

Managed to get a pic of the goddess past all her handlers.

Monsoon!

It is wet.




That is all.

Real professional there, Em

Sometimes we pretty young things here in Kathmandu like to go out to "da clubs" (as the kids, I believe, say) on weekends to dance around and blow off some steam. Lots of fun, and an opportunity to meet some really interesting people (...). So last weekend we called some friends who are involved in the party scene here in Kathmandu and headed out for a night of shakin' our booties.

This week, a colleague comes past my office and says to me "you're famous". I am, reasonably, confused. He clarifies "you're in the paper, in the society pages, with all the pretty girls". ! Yeah, here's the page, from the Himalayan Times "About Town" section:

That's us on the bottom, Henga, me, Joanna and
Lily. The caption reads "ready for some rock 'n' rollin"!

I then slunk off to quietly die of embarassment. We're also all over partynepal.com

Teej!

Update:

We also went to Pashupatinath temple on Sunday, where we saw hundreds of women lined up to pray for the Teej festival. It was a sea of red and gold, and music and dancing. So gorgeous!

A small section of the line of ladies,
praying for their husbands

This weekend was a woman's festival called Teej. I was simply told to wear red to work on Friday, so I wore a red nepali-style corta. Turns out that this festival is not so much about celebrating women, as it is for women to honour and pray for their husband's long life! It involves fasting and everything. Some of the people at work joked that years would be added on to my future husband's life because I participated.

Friday was the day before fasting though, so it involved lots of food, singing and dancing. This was the boardroom at my office:



They pulled me up to dance, at which point I kind of swayed and clapped awkwardly and then sat down again. It was still lots of fun though.

Amusements, and not-so-amusements

Hello my loved ones! Miss me yet? Y'all better. Anyways, I've been here in KTM for a couple of weeks now, and you may be wondering how I'm doing. The answer is: pretty good. Perhaps not as crazy awesome as I was the last time I was here, but that is to be expected, as this time it is all about work.

How is that work going, you ask? Also pretty good. Turns out I'm working pretty much directly under the country director, eek! This means I'm on my own, since he's so busy all the time. I'm trying to be proactive and seek out work with different departments, but it's slow going for now. Hopefully I'll settle into my role better soon.

In other news, the other volunteers here at the house are quite nice. A few of us went out this past weekend to a Nepali amusement park! Really it was more like a carnival, with a ferris wheel and one of those viking ship things. Also the ghetto-est games ever! We played one where you rolled ping pong balls into holes for points. I won (I shit you not) some mothballs as my prize. Adriana did a bit better. She won 2 clothes pins. There was also a "haunted house". This consisted mainly of following a small child through darkend tents while he waved his flashlight around and went "woooo-oooh-aaah!".

Boot Ghar! (Nepali for haunted house)

The Journey

S'up everyone? I've arrived safely in Kathmandu, after 3 long and arduous flights through various parts of the globe. Some comments:

Frankfurt:

You could see some of Germany's many windmills from the plane, which was pretty. Way to be environmentally conscious, Germans! Also, employees ride around the terminal in bicycles, and haagen daas serves stuff like coffee and pastries there. There was a suck factor though with them not wanting to tell me my gate until 10 minutes before boarding time, and some really ostentatious rich Germans who I think were laughing at a group of women in burkas.

Qatar:

Same as last time, but I did manage to sample some exotic local food:

It's the Emily special!

Of the three airports, I'd say Pearson was actually the nicest, which is sorta depressing in a way.

Anyways, more about actual Nepal laters!

Hello again!

So, if you're reading this, you're probably aware that I will soon be returning to lovely Kathmandu. As such, I will be returning to blogging as well. I've decided not to blog specifically about my internship, as I'm a bit worried about confidentiality rules, but please do not take this to mean that I'm not working hard. I suspect, in fact, that I will be working so hard as to make this blog less frequent and less interesting than last time, but que garne?

Anyways, for my return to blogging I thought I'd post some lists: top 5 things I miss about Nepal, and for my proud Canadians, top 5 things I missed about Canada when I was in Nepal.

Top 5 things I miss about Nepal (besides people):
1. The liveliness -- everyone seems to live life much more in the open than in Canada, hanging out on streetcorners and lounging on steps everywhere. Most people who are outside in Canada seem to be on their way somewhere.
2. The amazing food, and tea.
3. Feeling a little bit like a rock star walking down the street, with everyone wanting to smile and wave at the foreigner, and little kids calling out "ha-lo!" and giggling.
4. Motorbiking.
5. Pure novelty -- all the landmarks, music, holidays, etc. are new and exciting, and how often do we experience things for the first time past the age of 21 or so?

Top 5 things I miss about Canada when in Nepal (besides people and kitties):
1. Diet coke! Oh, sweet nectar of the gods, why are you not available there?!
2. Consistent electricity, hot water, and heat.
3. There is something to be said for familiarity and routine, and being able to do things such as grocery shopping easily.
4. Also, the flip side of the above rock star comment -- anonymity is also nice sometimes.
5. TV -- sad, but true, sometimes there is downtime that needs to be filled. Ditto, high-speed internet.