under the himalayan sun: 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