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Monday, July 23, 2007
coming around
Been having bizarre dreams that are a combination of scenes from nepal mixed with harry potter. The new book is perfect and that's all about all I can think to say. I'm still jetlagged and adjusting to real food but have had enough rest so that it's time to start the job search. Just contacted Kaplan in Nashville to teach the SAT and eventually the MCAT and if that doesn't work I might pop in to the restaurant where I worked in High School for what I now realize was exhorbitant pay, to see about a job. It's conveniently located all of 100 yards from Harrison and I's apartment. Speaking of the apt, it's tremendous. At least an order of magnitude better than where we were living last summer in Hanover. It's about twice as big with exactly half as many people, and after Nepali housing seems opulent. I'll post some pics of it up when I take them which might be never, or today. In a few minutes I'm going to try and post all 422 photos from nepal on shutterfly and I'll post the link if it works.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
made it
home and happy. ate cow for the first time in a while. feels good to be back. time to sleep for a bit.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
en transit
1st scheme of the day:
wedging my foot under the scale at the kathmandu airport so our baggage wouldn't be overweight. (don't judge me, they're full of your presents)
2nd
finding an unprotected wireless internet connection in the passenger lounge at the delhi airport.
things are going well so far. now for the 6 hour wait before we board the 12:15 am flight to chicago Saw a brief glimpse of the himalaya during the flight south to india. most beautiful things i've ever seen, i was literally close to tears for a second. time to grab my first of the 33 teas I will drink waiting for this plane.
wedging my foot under the scale at the kathmandu airport so our baggage wouldn't be overweight. (don't judge me, they're full of your presents)
2nd
finding an unprotected wireless internet connection in the passenger lounge at the delhi airport.
things are going well so far. now for the 6 hour wait before we board the 12:15 am flight to chicago Saw a brief glimpse of the himalaya during the flight south to india. most beautiful things i've ever seen, i was literally close to tears for a second. time to grab my first of the 33 teas I will drink waiting for this plane.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Mi casa es mi casa
Might be the last post from Nepali soil (mud). Been a tremendous adventure despite my griping. If all things go well, I'll be disembarking at 8:50 a.m. July 19th at the Na$hville airport. yeehaw. for real. packing tonight. can't wait to see, or call, or at least email at a reasonable speed, everyone.
wish me luck.
wish me luck.
Monday, July 16, 2007
the day before tomorrow
posted Garden pics on facebook.
http://rutgers.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2188557&l=fb8ed&id=8815627
Total shot count for the trip is around 450. Dan and I are just gift shopping in the rain today. yesterday I bought presents for most everyone, 90% of which are made of Yak hair by the way.
Very ready to be home after:
53 days
16,000 miles (round trip)
13 troy tons of daal bhaat
64 cubic feet of dug dirt
~200 Nepali words learned
1000+ pages of reports read
10 total words ever understood spoken (yelled) by the house grandmother
1 toothbrush
http://rutgers.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2188557&l=fb8ed&id=8815627
Total shot count for the trip is around 450. Dan and I are just gift shopping in the rain today. yesterday I bought presents for most everyone, 90% of which are made of Yak hair by the way.
Very ready to be home after:
53 days
16,000 miles (round trip)
13 troy tons of daal bhaat
64 cubic feet of dug dirt
~200 Nepali words learned
1000+ pages of reports read
10 total words ever understood spoken (yelled) by the house grandmother
1 toothbrush
Saturday, July 14, 2007
just wasting time
that's more of an Otis Redding quote than bitterness/anger by the way. I really appreciate the comments guys and now I'm just resigned to let the time pass until we get on the plane. Daniel was in the room when I came back in the evening; said he'd spent the day walking around. We have money (thanks mom) and I guess I'll do my own thing today. I think I'll go back to the garden.
a hot stupid no-good poop day
woke up tired and sweating. something like 100$ unnacounted for from trip funds. daniel ran off enraged , haven't seen him in... maybe 6 hours now. impenetrable strike today, hideously slow internet, the power has gone out 3 seperate times as I've tried to type this and check email. I'm still tired and sweating. I think something good happened today but I can't really remember right now.
Friday, July 13, 2007
curiouser and curiouser
I'm sitting on a bench on a stone ledge under what else but a mossy oak by a koi pond in the Garden of Dreams. Just outside of the trek shops and cafes of Thamel is a nondescript white archway that just says 'GARDEN' and a ticket booth with a sign '160 Rps. Foreigners, Wireless Internet 30 Rps. 1hr.' So needless to say I went in and found a combination flower garden, arboretum, hedge maze, bamboo grove, of fountains, high walls, and butterflys. The name on the admissions ticket is Garden of Dreams.
I found a statistic the other day that something like 90% of the street children in asia sniff glue or solvents and I mentioned it in passing to Daniel. Today he mentioned that while lost in Thamel he ran across 4 different packs of preteens cracking themselves out on epoxy.
Last winter I read a book, much better than its title implies or just as good depending on what you're looking for, called Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9781401359669&itm=1
Written by 3 young U.N. staffers: a doctor, lawyer, and secretary, the book was a pretty big deal when it came out because it didn't mince words when describing the failings, incompetencies, and occasional negligence of the UN as seen by the authors. They were in Cambodia for the first democratic elections, in Somalia during Black Hawk Down, and Haiti which is always in some chaos or other. A few days ago I saw a woman at the bakery cafe that made me do a double take even though I didn't know her. I put 2 and 2 and 1 together and came to the conclusion with 96% certainty that she was Heidi, one of the authors of the book. Today I saw her at the Bakery Cafe and introduced myself and she confirmed my suspicion. Apparently she's here as part of the huge UN presence gearing up for the elections in the fall. She said hello and goodbye and wished me luck and that was that.
I found a statistic the other day that something like 90% of the street children in asia sniff glue or solvents and I mentioned it in passing to Daniel. Today he mentioned that while lost in Thamel he ran across 4 different packs of preteens cracking themselves out on epoxy.
Last winter I read a book, much better than its title implies or just as good depending on what you're looking for, called Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9781401359669&itm=1
Written by 3 young U.N. staffers: a doctor, lawyer, and secretary, the book was a pretty big deal when it came out because it didn't mince words when describing the failings, incompetencies, and occasional negligence of the UN as seen by the authors. They were in Cambodia for the first democratic elections, in Somalia during Black Hawk Down, and Haiti which is always in some chaos or other. A few days ago I saw a woman at the bakery cafe that made me do a double take even though I didn't know her. I put 2 and 2 and 1 together and came to the conclusion with 96% certainty that she was Heidi, one of the authors of the book. Today I saw her at the Bakery Cafe and introduced myself and she confirmed my suspicion. Apparently she's here as part of the huge UN presence gearing up for the elections in the fall. She said hello and goodbye and wished me luck and that was that.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Strange Sights
Yesterday there was a random, I think it was maoist, demonstration in the street by the internet cafe in Baneswore. It's probably safe to say that Nepali communists are about the most unintimidating breed of revolutionary imaginable. There were maybe 20 underfed teenageers in Avril Lavigne shirts waving their skinny arms and chanting slogans around a burning tree branch in the road. It was business as usual beyond the 'roadblock' and after a nice meal at the UN haunt restaurant, Bakery Cafe, Dan and I saw a huge cow licking the leather seat of a motorcycle and just started laughing hysterically while watching it for at least 5 minutes.
Today on the way back to Baneswore we passed a caravan of bare steel bus chasis being driven by guys in what looked liked barber chairs percvhed in front of a naked engine block, with nothing else but wheels and a gas tank on the whole vehicle. 5 of them passed by in a strangely nonchalant pack.
Again, we had to get off the bus and walk to Baneswore because of a flaming (in many senses) demonstration. This time it was tires burning in the street, and a guy in all black who was maybe 4' 11'' wielding a broken piece of bamboo making his 'mean face' and trying to puff his chest out. Motorcycles were just driving right between the tires, but the buses were too big to run the 'roadblock' without getting fiery tire goop stuck to them, so we had to hoof it . On the way to baneswore we met another VSN volunteer who informed us that the whole intersection and its shops were closed due to a larger demonstration. So we hopped a taxi past the tires and are now in the tourist mecca of thamel. there ya go.
Today on the way back to Baneswore we passed a caravan of bare steel bus chasis being driven by guys in what looked liked barber chairs percvhed in front of a naked engine block, with nothing else but wheels and a gas tank on the whole vehicle. 5 of them passed by in a strangely nonchalant pack.
Again, we had to get off the bus and walk to Baneswore because of a flaming (in many senses) demonstration. This time it was tires burning in the street, and a guy in all black who was maybe 4' 11'' wielding a broken piece of bamboo making his 'mean face' and trying to puff his chest out. Motorcycles were just driving right between the tires, but the buses were too big to run the 'roadblock' without getting fiery tire goop stuck to them, so we had to hoof it . On the way to baneswore we met another VSN volunteer who informed us that the whole intersection and its shops were closed due to a larger demonstration. So we hopped a taxi past the tires and are now in the tourist mecca of thamel. there ya go.
Monday, July 9, 2007
what it's come to
this morning when my our house grandmother wasn't looking I took a fist full of dhaal bhaat and pitched it out the open door behind me and over the balcony. I swear I can taste the mud from the paddy and the bare feet of the people who picked it.
I jhuto'd the peanut butter
While doing research for my soon-to-be-neglected-in-a-dusty-file Nepal Health Report I came across a pyramid chart showing the caste hierarchy of Nepal, which was nominally outlawed in 1963 but is apparently doing just fine without legal sanction as this story shows. Last week, I was lovingly hugging my ever present jar of crunchy peanut butter, also know as my dietary salvation, when the grandmother of our house start yelling at me, pointing at it, and yelling "Jhuto!" which means ritually impure. Without noticing I had put the butter knife that I had just used to make a sandwich back into the jar, rendering the entire thing 'contaminated' so that I had to keep it in my room instead of on the shelf lest it contaminate the rest of the food there. This was strange because as I had understood it, Jhuto was something like a theological edict against double-dipping, which I hadn't done, and I had just seen the little son of our house do the same exact thing with a jelly jar that morning. Than I saw the chart. Foreigners are exactly adjacent to the Dalit, or 'Untouchable' castes, and are under the 'impure' section of the pyramid meaning that no Hindu Nepali can accept food or water that we offer without becoming tainted.
This also explained the extreme lengths they had gone to to separate our water from theirs, something I had thought was an attempt to keep us from being exposed to kathandu's bowel-disintegrating tap water. Guess not.
(just found it again, we're 'Impure but touchable', and also 'Enslavable', but since no one here eats more that 900 calories a day, I doubt they have the strength or energy to subdue us)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_caste_system
Anyway, there are only 9 days left for Daniel and I here assuming our flight isn't delayed which is quite possible. We're kind of broke because Bank of America has apparently been deducting $5 from our bank account, without permission or notification, for every atm transaction. So we're out about 3500 rupees which sucks because we have to pay exactly that much in airport taxes when we fly out of here next Wednesday.
On a better note, yesterday I made a necklace out of some wooden prayer beads and a medallion that a tibetan lady conned me into buying in Pokhara. I asked our house mother if I could have it blessed by a priest so that it wards off hippies and she said she'd see what she can do. that's about it for now.
This also explained the extreme lengths they had gone to to separate our water from theirs, something I had thought was an attempt to keep us from being exposed to kathandu's bowel-disintegrating tap water. Guess not.
(just found it again, we're 'Impure but touchable', and also 'Enslavable', but since no one here eats more that 900 calories a day, I doubt they have the strength or energy to subdue us)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_caste_system
Anyway, there are only 9 days left for Daniel and I here assuming our flight isn't delayed which is quite possible. We're kind of broke because Bank of America has apparently been deducting $5 from our bank account, without permission or notification, for every atm transaction. So we're out about 3500 rupees which sucks because we have to pay exactly that much in airport taxes when we fly out of here next Wednesday.
On a better note, yesterday I made a necklace out of some wooden prayer beads and a medallion that a tibetan lady conned me into buying in Pokhara. I asked our house mother if I could have it blessed by a priest so that it wards off hippies and she said she'd see what she can do. that's about it for now.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
The Coveted Mustard Belt Returns to America
http://www.ifoce.com/news.php?action=detail&sn=538
That news, and the rereading of Don Quixote, have improved my mood substantially. I'm keeping this post short both because I'm lazy and due to the fact that I'm incapable of writing in a normal fashion because of said book. I sincerely almost wrote "due to the strains of affect and prolixity resultant of such a narrative."
I also can't wait to come home and make my return to the professional eating circuit.
That news, and the rereading of Don Quixote, have improved my mood substantially. I'm keeping this post short both because I'm lazy and due to the fact that I'm incapable of writing in a normal fashion because of said book. I sincerely almost wrote "due to the strains of affect and prolixity resultant of such a narrative."
I also can't wait to come home and make my return to the professional eating circuit.
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
digging data instead of dirt
http://www.who.int/whosis/
click on 'query the online database'
hold ctrl and click
Ethiopia
Nepal
United States of America
For indicators select
Risk Factors
Health Systems
Inequalities in Health
Submit
Check out under Nepal's 5 growth stunting!!
That's why I absolutely hate daal bhaat with even inch of my person. I'm sick right now, so is everyone else, and I 'm still the only one sick of white rice.
click on 'query the online database'
hold ctrl and click
Ethiopia
Nepal
United States of America
For indicators select
Risk Factors
Health Systems
Inequalities in Health
Submit
Check out under Nepal's 5 growth stunting!!
That's why I absolutely hate daal bhaat with even inch of my person. I'm sick right now, so is everyone else, and I 'm still the only one sick of white rice.
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