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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.