so this (that) was christmas

So this weekend I found myself celebrating christmas for the second time in Nepal, and for the 4th (or 5th) time away from family and home. By this stage i'm used to it, and while xmas at home (or normally in NZ) with the family is always a cracker, I have always enjoyed the ramshackle makeshift christmas's that I have had in Nepal x2, Colombia  and Japan with old friends and new. You can always guarantee good times, new friends, and something to remember

Christmas glove love 

being here as part of a school trip (yes...school) 10 years ago, with a large group, containing people who are still my closest friends was an incredible experience, after trekking in the mountains for something like 18 days we arrived to pokhara  on xmas eve (i think) all i remember is gorging on a 8 course meal by the lake looking at the himalayas, and then not being able to move for about 4 hours. This time, 10 years into the future, was pretty much the same. except we weren't in pokhara, and we had alcohol. i have wondered in retrospect why as a bunch of 15 and 16yr olds we weren't more concerned about trying to sneak drinks, while the teachers weren't looking...and the teachers were never looking. But in my mind maybe we were so excited and enthralled by being in a less developed country that there were more interesting things to do that to drink......(how times have changed??)

(about 14 hours after we started with the sherry coffees - Psychedelic Stupa housemates) 

Anyway, fast forward 10 years and me and my housemates at the Psychedelic Stupa threw, what i think, was a highly successful open house -walk-in-drop by-bring a plate party. there were shrimps on the barbie, sausages, dips, meatballs, salads, doghnuts, christmas cake and copious amounts of drinks, and other foods. Every assorted bideshi in town (including friends we made the night before, and  people other people met on streets) and a bunch of nepalis stopped by during the day for good times face stuffing and general merriment,  things really escalated just before the sun went down with cocktail hour and a quick game of hydrate and by the time the sun was firmly down it was time to clear out.

mainly aussies + frenchy + dutchies 2 and a yankeee

circa 4pm

saving the landlords we headed out for some live music, and some more barhopping, but all in all it was am awesome christmas. swapping presents between housemates over sherry coffees, singing christmas carols in bars with friends and preparing babaghanoush while listening to the pogues - that sounds like christmas to me

the christmas tree + presents + victory squid

to everyone at home i hope you had an awesome christmas and santa was good to you.. now t0o prepare for NYE 2010 - party bus to Pokhara

love love

(photos courtesy of my amazing P Stupa housemates K- Face and the Flying Dutchman)

xL

dear men on street corners the world over

or footpaths, or moto's or taxi's or whatever.

sorry, streetcorners, footpaths, taxi's in south america, south asia and probably in other places i haven't yet adventured to...

sorry, so Men...

don't "hi" me, dont" "nice ass" me , dont whistle and stare, or beep your horn and stare. its not appealing. no one in the history of the universe* has ever picked up a foreign girl by saying 'hi, hello, how are you, lady hi' while walking past them.

oh and while we're at it. I will not answer your questions -  whether I'm married, whether I have kids, how old I am, and where i live. so stop asking, because its not doing you any favours in the creep bank. Do you have kids, are you married? See , didn't think so......

next time, dont be so presumptuous and maybe, maybe i'll smile back.

so sort yourselves out and take a note from the australian male book, and just dont do anything,

regards,
L D

* unless they were an incredibly good looking Argentinian in a bar.

photo love III

View of the Himalayas on the way to Bhaktapur. When i asked my colleague which mountain it was, she said 'Everest', and was adamant about it. Apparently along with not being able to read maps, to nepali's  all mountains are mount Everest. the foreground is one of the smaller slumish areas on the way out of town. From what I have been told many of the slum residents are indians, who came for work.

Manforce Condoms......

the (not so) cold and other random things

firsty, I wont complain about the cold, for a number of reasons

the cold is
a. often confined solely to my office during day light hours
b. not a tenth as cold as what my Mongol Compadres are dealing with so far.
c. only going to get worse, so I dont want to bore my already small (and perhaps cold climate based) audience before winter really hits.

d. somewhat mitigated by these bad boys

another week at work, spent writing a report on how hungry people are in the mid west. I went to  a meeting about emergency nutrition for Nepal (ie what to do when the big earthquake actually hits), and there was a map of various interventions going on in the mid and far west  region to dea with food insecurity and malnutrition. not that you would be interested but you can see it here, anyway, after a depressing look at the facts, i asked my colleague despite all the interventions and work and money being pumped into the area, why the population are still hungry, stunted, and underweight and why do mothers not give their kids any liquid when they are sick.....while the latter I didnt get a repsonse for, apparently theres just no food. So despite all the efforts of the UN agencies, the INGOs, the MoH and the NGOs, .....theres still not enough food...

ke garne? what to do ? as they say in nepal.

power/load shedding has kicked up a notch this week to now 8 hours a day (often a little more) of no power. which would be ok, if the power went out at night, but its usually out right when you need it, i.e shower time,  during the day at work, and in the evening. the noise of generators at work, around the streets and in the neighbour hood is now just background noise and I'm slowly getting used to the fumes.
so i'm sitting here, on my bed at 5pm sunday, diligently charging everything that can possibly be charged, letting the water heat up for a shower ,and preparing for 9pm bedtime when the power is scheduled to go out. its interesting how easily you get used to the power cuts, as they get up to 16 hours a day life will become far more interesting/challenging, and i'm prepared to be showering at 3am to get hot water, and waking up to plug in laptops, phones, camera's whatever else.  in the meantime, showering is more optional than mandatory, phones remain uncharged for entire weekends if you manage to sleep through any  window of power, and social activities suddenly get planned around power/no power.


listening to: Mazzy Star, Among my Swan. feeling like : Faithless , Sunday 8pm.

next on underthehimalayansun santacon, february to dubai, and Liz, K Dog and The flying dutchman host a christmas party.

love love
x

friday thought (for food) II

Doing some casual data analysis and discussion on a friday afternoon for some recently collected data on 3 districts in Mid Western Nepal (aka as a WFP highly food insecure region). Of the sampled 750 children, in (one) Jumla district almost 500 of them were stunted (i.e short i.e low height for age) and over half of them (400) were underweight (thin, really thin aka low weight for age) and about a third of that group were severely underweight.

so imagine, for those of your playing at home, in a kindergarden /preschool class of say 100, half of those kids are stunted, half are underweight and if you're lucky only about 4 of them will be severely malnourished. and another say 10 will be moderately malnourished. those are pretty alarming figures.

  lets just hope they aren't this dirty.

 overall something like 54% of all Nepali children are malnourished due to food insecurity, poor feeding habits and a whole host of other reasons that i'm not got to go into on a Friday afternoon.

Just another timely reminder that we are all pretty lucky to be getting 3 meals a day.

happy friday charolastras

xL

PS. my good friend molly (check her blog) has been up in the very region i mention talking to the people about food and livelihoods (i'm speaking in generalisations here)

photo love II

my respiratory system feels like i just got off a plane in La Paz and spent to long in an underground bar so I cant construct thoughts. photos for thoughts

K Mac and I jumping. at Swayambu. theres a theme

View to the south west (?) from Swayambunath - buddhist temple of note in KTM. 

sunset to looking north in the KTM Valley. thats Ganesh Himal peeping in the right. i think

this post bought to you honey lemon tea + berocca

xL

friday thought

So first off, I'm not a cyclist, or a bike rider, I might be at a stretch called a cycling enthusiast (as my dear friend Maca once claimed on a rental property application ) mainly an enthusiast because I enjoy the idea of cycling, but I dont do it as often as i would like (or back in Australia I didn't)....I also thoroughly enjoy the Tour De France, and the dulcet sounds of Phil Ligget and Paul Sherwen commenting me through the French country side and using the words echalon, tete de la cour etc etc and so on. I digress,

I have been using a bike (photo of bikephalus above ) as my primary means of transport, which has been great, with a few close calls in the last few days (clipping a few people, almost driving into a bus, a bus almost clipping me etc) lets just say a bike in KTM is not the best place to be daydreaming....anyway, as i was on my leisurely ride into Thamel for a language lesson before work today, I was labouring a bit more than usual up a very slight incline, my legs, as they say in the game, were like lead. just couldn't do it. A frequently mentioned enough occurence in the cycling world, however, I'm no elite athlete climbing up the Col de Tourmalet, I'm liz drummond riding to thamel on a mountain bike, and this shouldn't be a problem....and then as i was laboring up the incline (and no I wasn't even hungover), I saw an old dude, on a crappy old indian bike, with no gears, disc brakes and no suspension, carrying 20kgs of onions...and as I passed him, I wondered, does he ever wake up with bad legs, unable to push his onions, or gas bottles, or water tanks up and down the hills and bumpy streets of KTM? Any days when he would rather just be in a taxi? probably,

photo credit http://www.traveladventures.org/continents/asia/kathmandu-streets11.shtml


its pretty easy sitting in my office, writing reports and taking extra long lunches to go shopping, to forget about that sort of thing, so i'm glad i got a small kick in the ass on the way up that small hill this morning, to remind me why I'm lucky enough to be riding a bike in kathmandu by choice,  and not because I've got to get to the market to sell some onions.

Happy Friday peeps

xL

a haiku?

Office boredom does some strange things

a haiku on load shedding


Waiting for Warmth
winter load shedding means, cold
showers in the dark

photo love

 Some photo blogging to break up the text

Vitamin A Supplementation recipients.

 Nepal has somewhere between 94 -98% Coverage for Vit A, which they distribute twice yearly (along with a deowrming program aswell). The organisation I work for have been working in the vit A field for almsot 20 years, and are partially responsible for the incredibe coverage rates that is an international success story for Micronutrient programs. Without getting too technical  Vit A Deficiency leads to night blindness and  can effect immunity in young children, leading to edeaths from diarrheal diseases, measles and other treatable childhood illneses

From the rooftop circa sundown

getting Puja'ed for Tihar

Baby Chairman Mao at theVit A Distribution

 Bhkatapur Durbar Square

Birthday Girl+ Family (my colleague at the back) and a hilariously dressed little  boy at previously mentioned B day party

 Pub Crawl Fun

Enjoy

xL

traffic and other ramblings

life in KTM kicks on with plenty of activity physical and otherwise.  I was riding across to Thamel (the tourist area of town) after work yesterday, through probably the most amazing traffic i've seen since i got here.....it probably took 20 minutes for a car to get around a round about by car - fortunately on a bike you can weave around a little bit, ride on the side walk or get off and push, it still took me 15 minutes longer than usual just to get around the corner.  Anyway as I was starting my ride from the office (up on a hill)  , I got a pretty amazing sunset view of a few of the himalayas outside the KTM Valley. It was pretty , very pretty, those mountains, are big, and you don't get sick of looking at them. and I thought as I watched the mountains from the hill and  looked across the nightmare traffic, the rubbish , the pollution and haze and the beeping horns and thought  kathmandu, you could be fucking stunning.  but you need to sort a few things out.



my first though, get rid of those car horns. or enforce some fines. seriously. i thought i'd get used to it, and see it as white noise, but i'm still not immune. To the driver who was driving towards me down the empty 2 way street, as I was on the far far left (opposite)  of the road. I saw you. the 5 second beeps at 1s intervals, was a tad unecessary. I saw you and have no desire to get in your way. thats why I gave you the finger.

oh and my work - I guess I should mentioned this I will be 'working'  for NTAG - which is the Nepali Technical Assistance Group, for the next 11 or so months on various nutrition and health projects that they've got going on. so far its been interesting, if a little quiet but have been getting into disaster preparedness planning.....and the old micronutrient bag , hoping to get on a  field trip to the mid west in about 2 weeks, but who knows, things chop and change her at the drop of a hat. deadlines are a moveable feast, and then all of a sudden something is due at 2pm on a monday....which is convenient, when you felt like I did on monday.

they group is a great organisation, and I'm lucky to have ended up here, as opposed to where I could have been.  My project got changed from the one I applied to , which I am eternally grateful for as the last AYAD who was there had a terrible time. Theres a ton of expertise in the building, great project areas and some really lovely people...I just need to spikka tha bloody language.

the office is usually 10 degrees cooler inside than out, which will be great in the monsoon, but right now its down right unpleasant. i was, however pleasantly suprised today when i rocked up, prepared to layer up in clothes, to see there was a lovely little heater in my ground floor corner office. this lasted 5 minutes, when i discovered the amazing side affects of kerosene heaters - drowsy with a side of nausea and dizziness. needless to say I was extra productive in my afternoon web browsing.

later folks

oh and heres a little gem i found today
Kim Jong Ill Looking at things

a moment in the office

freezing office. check
report writing. check.
load shedding 2-5. check
whirring diesel smelling generator. check
dodgy internet connection. check
chiya (tea) check
and a dude on the street just fixed my flat tire for 30 cents.

Officially a lunatic

new friend Old Mate and I decided to organise a bit of a pub crawl this weekend. and were in the process of drafting a witty enticing email. unfortunately my computer malfunctions regularly and it managed to send 'all' , not forward 'old Mate' and my half written half baked un edited email got shared with anyone in KTM's email i could get my hands on. I officially look crazy.
see for your self and decide...lunatic talking to voices in her head or text book L Drummond .

nicknames have been used incase those mentioned dont want to be associated with a lunatic.

Hey Peoples,

In MCAT's absence, I decided to fill her large and comfortable shoes
and get the
party/organised and started for the upcoming weekend. Old Mate (new
mate)  , who is literally filling MCATs shoes by sleeping in
her bed, suggest a pub crawl on saturday afternoon and night. kick off somewhere
between 4.30 and 6.30 at OLD MATE (Fake M Cats's)  place - who has kindly
volunteered tequila and small puppies. the party train will then
direct itself to thamel's seedy underbelly, in conga line if
necessary,

OLD MATEs a doctor and thus organised and wants to take suggestions as
to pubs and venues to find ourselves....

sorry i'd i dont know you...i just collated email addresses from
various group emails going around kathmandu,

and always pass it around,




happy friday - oh...and if your in downtown nepal....join us at Old Mates 

friends, parties anything

como andas friends,

If I knew how to say this in Nepali i would, but really, my battle with the nepalese language is so far proving to be an epic battle. while i managed to pick up (what i though was) decent spanish fairly quickly, this could mainly be attributed to the 10 years of french, 7 years of latin and 3 years of italian that my combined school and uni education contributed. Nepali, however, you are a whole different kettle of fish. i have heard various people tell me that its actually a relatively simple language, but i'm yet to see this . after close to 4 weeks of classes i'm still asking the Didi at work to learn me how to cook and getting some fairly simple sentences completely wrong...and i still start speaking random spanish when getting annoyed at taxi drivers trying to rip me off...

since our rafting adventure, the week has been a fairly run of the mill  mish mash of work and play mainly centred around some serious devouring of food. monday night saw a girls movie night without a movie and a bucketload of food, tuesday was a ayad related dinner in some highly nice restaurant where K Mac JD and I stuffed ourselsves silly with Thakali curry (as far as i understand thakali's are an ethnic group from Jomson- where i was lucky enough to trek 10 years ago...lucky because now there's a round up the kali gandaki valley making the formerly quiet and peaceful walk somewhat less peaceful...think great northern walk from brooklyn to syd along the Old freeway). the curry was put on top of a normal breakfast, and workplace cold and boredom lead me to a mid morning snack of aloo and anda (curried potato and an egg), followed by lunch, followed by dinner. i think i ate a weekly ration of carbs in about a day. and then repeated last night with a meal at our lovely landlords. 

the flying dutchman and KiKi and I had been skeptical of this guy, as he was always poking his head in the door and had once or twice made some strange commments and locked us out on our first night here, but as it turns out, he's quite a nice person and has 2 orphan kids living with him. oh and his wife can cook. oh she can cook.  saag, aloo, cauli, dhal bhat, rice pudding radish, all delicious. and carb loaded. 

random non blog related image: boudha

in the mean time i had been trying to combat this excessive consumption with a jog or two, but apparently this thing called the KTM Lurgee is bound to catch me - a cough caused by the fecal and other particles in the polluted air. nice. despite the fact that i am leading a fairly health life, my lungs feel continually like its saturday morning after a friday night at oaks with baxty and rao dog. 

I got invited to a two year olds birthday party. which lead to more face stuffing, more booze and more social encounters of a nepali kind. compared to the epic 15th b'day party i attended in Huancayo, Peru. this was average stuff. but seriously, the party had more attendees than my 21st, more food than you could poke a stick at and more free flowing booze than burg ball 2003. dudes were knocking back bottles of whisky by 7.30pm.  When i got the invite to the party at the crowne plaza, i thought it was the real crown plaza, a 5 star hotel on the other side of town. my lovely coworwker (whose childs birthday it was) assured me her family owned the hotel. i got the wrong end of the nepali stick. the real one is owned by the old royal family. or something. interesting side note, the guy who drives one of works USAID trucks, used to drive the king around. true story. apparently the king liked chicken.

the actual party was quite nice, free wine and food is never a bad thing, but as anyone who has worked overseas has probably experienced there was a significant amount of awkward silence + awkward conversation being made ' oh...do you like this food. yes i like this food. do you like chilli? ' with everyone waiting for the appropriate time to leave.

this weeks lessons

a. nepali people don't like walking (which was suprising...the mountains aren't conducive to other forms of transport). apparently a 15 minute walk was 'quite far'

b. nepali people think i will get lost wherever i go ' oh its ok i can just take my bike' 'no..you wont know where it is' 'you could show me on a map' 'no no, you will probably not find it'. it turns out no nepali person can show you anything on a map, and this is inclusive of where they live, and where the office is, and how they get to work. 

c. nepali people wont say no. they just wont say anything 'couldn't i just put my bike in the car?" ' you can take a taxi tomorrow, sit sit, we go now'

moutnains and clouds in bhaktapur, where does the cloud end and the mountain begin. thats half the

 fun

view at the last resort -of the swing and bungee jump (or however you spell it) canyon thingo. bliss

enough ramblings from me, coming up next 'liz looks like a lunatic' and weekend shenanigans

peace mis amores

x

rafting good times

 wicked weekend away with my compardres K Mac and JD. Decided to avoid spending the weekend hungover in KTM (which is always fun, if not counterproductive)

Kathmandu, is a great place (so far...i haven't been here long enough to hate it) but it is seriously polluted. riding home on my bike at the end of the day i usually come home feeling like i've eaten a litre of lead or just sucked on an exhaust pipe for 20 minutes. the traffic is a bit of nightmare anytime after about 10am. which is easy enough to avoid on the back of a bike......anyway, we left the valley, and headed for the tibetan/china border (or 100km from there) for some rafting.  good times ensued. the drive out was quite spectacular, with more himalayan views etc. its nice to be able to get a glimpse of Nepali life outside Kathmandu without getting to far form the city.

anyway, I digress. rafting was amazeballs. s much fun, the water was freezing, but i kept reminding myself that it was probably the last time i'd be getting underwater until i take another rafting trip, a trip to thailand or when i finally go home....plus it was likely to be the shower temp i can expect through winter...

we managed to not flip the raft but we all goat soaked in tibetan water, though the more villages we floated through, the harder I attempted to close my mouth through the rapids, seeing the sewarage run straight into the rivier had me fearing the big G.

team extreme rafting feat. american girl , JD , Winnie our new aussie friend, Me Feat. Rangi Changi boardies and K Mac.

lead succesfully by the Nepali Roger Federer

day 2: more extreme rapids Class IV and more awesome sun and fresh air.

on the cards for this week ? momos, emergency nutrition work, zumba, bikram yoga, salsa and i dare say a few beers,

xL

sorry about that

it was a little abrupt...

so basically I decided to write a blog, because every man and his AYAD- ing dog has one, and i thought Nepal might provide some interesting anecdotes for friends family and any cyberstalkers out there to hear. Also, i have had considerable idle time at work so i thought I should, in the words of Dave Chapelle (sp?) diversify my bonds.

my office is quite pleasant, with plenty of sugary tea( I can feel my teeth falling out, incidetally a recurring nightmare of mine). goats outside the window, and some himalayan views from the office. though I'm in a dank corner on the ground floor so I'm more goats and people doing laundry than Ganesh Himal and city vistas.

this morning I managed (hopefully) to transfer some skills, in the form of basic handheld GPS use for data collection to a bunch of Nepalis. Firstly, this was not a google mapping exercise, no 'directions to...' and secondly, I didn't know I had this skill. but apparently 12 hours a good manual, and some basic google searching with a fancy (if outdated) handheld GPS thing (which is apparently not designed for novice use-thanks J Dog)  is all you need. Anyway, these guys are out in the field for the next 3 weeks doing data collection and survey...they were rather alarmed that the accuracy of the GPS was only on average, within 10 -15ms of the exact point.  Rightly so, without going into any detail, i am starting to have my doubts about ensuring data collection integrity...or something.....if one house has the exact same location as a house 15 meters away...well maybe you catch my drift...

either way its a boring drift.

Life so far in Nepal has been balls out fun. Got my new wheels bikeaphalus and have so far managed to avoid being ridden off the road or hit by an oncoming bus. work has been interesting if a little slow, but work at the Box Factory back home prepared me for idle time...

adios muchachos

xL

Check out my riiiiiide

welcome a mi casa...or mero ghar

What up people?

Hi there, after no demand, and a few days mulling it over, i figured the world needs to hear more about what i think .

right now i'm thinking i am way under qualified to be showing nepali people how to use a GPS tomorrow.
i need some bhuji mix, after 3 weeks we finally ran out. i thought i'd never see the day.
and
c. i really need to put some decent clothes on so i can get to dinner.


more to come

xL