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