Time for more cool stuff...

I think I am up to 22

22) Kathmandu is a rabbit warren and if you duck down alleyways and take a random left and a suspiciously closed looking right there is a whole world to explore! (I met a French guy who, along with a fab book called "kathmandu the hidden city", took me exploring)

23) Turns out Monasteries are fun places to hang out on a Friday night and when monks chant they sound like didgeridoos.

24) When you are in a monastery on a hill on a Friday night, and you look out over Kathmandu, all you can hear from the city below is people singing and dogs barking...seriously those are the only two sounds of Kathmandu

25) Hindi movies are far racier than you would ever imagine. I saw my first one a while ago and quite frankly, I was shocked!

26) I've re-learnt never to judge anyone or anything. The politicians here talk no sense and the child labourers who spend their days working in brick kilns or breaking rocks can have impassioned debates on 'meaningful participation' and can make amazing radio programs (I'm working on a project with street kids / child labourers).

27) In the dairies here (or at least the one near my house) you can buy all sorts of milk based products cheese, yoghurt, curd...but you can't buy milk! You can stand at the counter and drink milk, but try and take some away with you and all hell breaks loose!

28) The old women here rule the roost, totally!

29) One of the dangerous items you need to remove before flying here are teeth!

30) Summer comes here practically the day that people predict it would and when it comes the sky is such a brilliant blue and you forget what it feels like to be cold.

Election Day

So election day finally arrived. This is the day everyone has been talking about since 2006 started. This is the day that caused the Maosists to call a 7 day national Bandh (meaning no traffic on the roads, no shops open, no restaurants running) for the 3 days before and the 3 days after the elections. The seven parties boycotted it. The Maoists killed candidates. Stories of people being coerced into being candidates and then backing out the next day have been filling the papers every day for the past fortnight. The only candidate who didn't back out in the town of Pokhara was a dog. This was also the first national elections in 7 years in Nepal and according to most of my Nepali friends, it was a total farce. But the king and the government stuck to it and yesterday it happened. Honestly, I am not sure how it all went, having poisoned myself with my own cooking (go G! and her first attempt at using her kitchen) I spent most of Wednesday running between the toilet and my bed. But when I did step out gingerly into the streets and hobble my way to my colleagues house for lunch, I think I passed a polling booth. I only know this because I ducked into a street and among the kids skipping and singing and playing cricket there were about 16 heavily armed soldier guys. Not a voter in sight though. I heard today that turn out was around 20%, although in some municipalities no one came out to vote and there are rumours of between 2 - 6 protestors being shot. People are already predicting what will happen next, they say the numbers who supposedly came out to vote will miraculously jump up, the election will be called a success, the king's first year of autocratic rule (he took power last February 1 and said he needed 3 years of autocratic rule to bring democracy and peace back to the country) will be legitimised and the people of Nepal who are caught up in all of this and who have lost a week of wages because of the Bandh will go back to work wondering what the point of it all was. I wonder where the international election monitors were....at least we made it on to the BBC.

changing direction

Admittedly, I have not met many non-Nepali people whilst I have been in Kathmandu but those I have met have been so inspiring. It seems that Nepal attracts people who have, without quite knowing why, been drawn here and now they are here they can finally breathe again (despite the insane amount of pollution) and start life again and never plan to leave again. Take Jane, Jane is in her late 40s, worked in London selling photocopiers, owned a flat, made good money. One day she was trudging through the rain across another miserable, grey business park somewhere near Stratford (east London, not upon Avon). When she finally reached her destination, soaked through and pissed off (her new suit ruined) it turned out that the person she was meant to meet wasn't in. Jane stood there for a while, rain dripping off her nose, running down her neck, she looked around her, at the buildings and the greyness and her ruined new suit and she picked up her mobile, dialled her boss and quit. Just like that, she quit and now she is living in Nepal.
I know I have a bad reputation for encouraging people to quit and leave and run out of London yelling "don't stop til you can see the sky again"...and I know this is not always the answer, and having left London I miss it and I know I'm not ready to turn my back on it yet. But man, you've got to have respect for Jane, for saying you know what this isn't the way I wanted my life to be, for giving up the money and the job and the security and all the things we tell ourselves we need to be happy and getting on plane and landing in Kathmandu and feeling happy and alive with nothing.

And then there is Nara. Nara is another wonderful Australian lady I have spent many laughter filled evenings with. She is so alive and full of spark and has really found her smile in Kathmandu. Nara has been hospitalised with food poisoning, has huge marks all over her legs from a bad case of bed bugs, has a dog that (is lovely) but regularly tears up her apartment or pisses in her bed, has no money and yet she is so happy here. Now, she is desperately trying to find a way to stay here and live in a mud hut, on a hill, in a village, on a patch of land that a Nepali family (who have practically adopted her) have given her. Yay Nara!

Simone's birthday

I've told you about Simone right? She is the lovely, lovely Australian lady with the laugh that comes up from her toes and resonates out of her tiny frame. She is the one who took me under her Christmas wing and who I jived the New Year in with, who I feared the first time I met because we were the only two in a yoga class and she was bendy and shaven headed and looked like she came out of the womb in the lotus position (turned out, as these things often do, that she is the least fearsome and most humble beautiful lady). She is also the one who helped me navigate my first gompa (buddhist holy room) and who has helped me explore meditation and Kathmandu.

So a few weekends ago it was Simone's 27th birthday and she wanted to go to Pashnupatinath. Pashnupatinath is a holy Hindu temple, on the banks of a river whose source is the Ganges. It is also the place where Hindu's cremate their dead. I didn't really think about it much before, I knew that they were public cremations, but it is really hard to think about or picture a public cremation. And reading this you are probably wondering why I went, why Simone wanted to go, weren't we being disrespectful... The thing is, as with everything in Nepal, cremations are really open and really public. Pashnupatinath is full of old people, young people, couples, children, everyone all come to watch the cremations, visit the temple, pay their respects, just sit, I even saw one guy reading a newspaper. And it was so strange being that close to death, with life all around you. I won't try and be all philosophical, because it will only come out sounding trite but I saw the whole process, the body being brought to the banks, the family performing the purification rights, building the pyre, placing the body on the pyre, setting it alight, watching the fire turn everything to ashes, and then sweeping those ashes into the river before the next family start the process all over again...and it made my head reel. In one moment it makes death less scary, less isolated and lonely because there are people everywhere and I couldn't help thinking that when I die, I would much rather be surrounded by people shouting and crying and talking and living. But then in the next moment it brings death right to you, no niceties, no dressing it up as anything else, the family's grief is right in front of you, and there is no getting away from it, the seemingly peacefully sleeping old woman was a mother and a grandmother and a sister and a daughter and she had a life and now she is dead and now she is smoke and now she is ashes and now she is the river.

Kathmandu Belly

Three things I have realised recently following my first real bout of Kathmandu Belly (a near cousin of the infamous dehli belly) ...

1) It is like having your stomach possesed by a crazed kicking, gurgling, spewing, angry demon
2) It makes you appreciate your western style bathroom and wish you'd never tried to cook food in your own kitchen (I think I was the source of my demise from iron stomach lady to sickly westerner)
3) It gives you lots of time to catch up on your sleeping, reading, cable tv watching and blogging

So this is why the following rush of blogs to the head (tee hee)