Trying to drive myself away with bugs.

Sorry, I know my last blogs were about leeches and cockroaches, but I am sick of bugs (and I think subconsciously focusing on it to make leaving in five days easier...that's gonna suck).

I was sitting in bed last night watching the Full House of spiders, three of a kind of the "peek-a-boo" type and a pair of the thick black ones that are in their nesting season so are spinning and inhabiting cocoons all over the place.  (I have never seen spiders make a cocoon and then live in it for weeks, coming out occasionally to feed/prowl and I think mate?)  I call the big flat ones peek-a-boo's because they love hiding behind and under stuff, but only hide their bodies, leaving 4 or 8 long legs sticking out, depending on how thick whatever they're hiding behind is.  (These are the jumping ones that reminded me to live my birthday as an everyday.)

Then I saw a sixth, which was dark black with two yellow stripes and was way more aggressive than the others.  It was living on the curtain, just above my head, and when I'd open the curtain in the morning he'd sometimes take a big base jump off it on a silk strand, so out of curiosity I asked our host about it.  He related that that kind of spider is highly venomous and can spit its venom.  Apparently if it gets on your skin "much disturbance" and in your eyes "blindness" and on your tongue "(shake of the head and serious expression)."  As far as I know I don't sleep with my tongue out, but just to be sure I borrowed their vacuum cleaner and slurped the little bastard away.  He led me a merry chase before I cornered him.  I left the vacuum on for awhile to make sure he was all the way inside.  (Though then I sucked up two silverfish before returning the machine, so maybe I kidnapped him to buffet paradise.)

Brushing my teeth last night I watched one of the centipedey-worm things (the ones we found under K's pillow one night) wander around the walls until finding one of the nest-building spiders on top of its cocoon.  The wormy killed the arachnid in epic and repulsive combat then spent the next hour or so eating all the (relatively) fleshy parts of the body, before letting the body drop, where it hung from one of its own silk lines, vanquished and humiliated, like a desiccated trophy.  The centipedey thing then tried to find his way into the cocoon.  He was initially frustrated by the cottony thickness, but found his ingress in the seam with the ceiling.  Soon the overly mobile top part of its body was inside, blurred as it went about devouring the contents in what I reckon would be the most repulsive thing imaginable if seen clearly.  I took a picture, which I'll upload for your pleasure (and disappointment, it's not that clear) once we get back to Belgium...next week.

I'm going to miss 99% of Nepal.

A nice day hike around Pokhara, Nepal.

The skyline above Pokhara is normally dominated by the epic snow and stone bulk of Machapuchare, one of those incredible Himalayan peaks that are unbelievably...themselves.  We caught a look at it one afternoon when the monsoon clouds parted, and the word "breathless" comes to mind.

The rest of the time though we were locked in monsoon downpours, which filled the streets, air, and ear canals with rainwater and its various associated beauties, although day by day the frequency of wafting mildew smells increased.  I fear for the redeemability of my raincoat...

With the skies both high and low filled with gray clouds, the role of landmark switched to a white dome that sits on one of the steep jungle-sided ridges above the lake.  The World Peace Pagoda was built and destroyed and built again over the course of 30 years, and is intended to serve as a focal point and inspiration for peoples of all faiths, races, and creeds to come together and move towards world peace.

Inspired by meeting Gandhi, and after seeing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a Buddhist monk from Japan named Nichidatsu Fiji decided to build 100 of them to help bring about a prophesied change in consciousness.  The one in Pokhara was number...um...71 I think?  Wikipedia says as of 2000 there were 80 of them worldwide.

There are three ways to get to the one above Pokhara.  The easy way is to take a taxi to just below it.  The middle way is to row (or be rowed) across the lake then climb the stairs/trail up, which takes about an hour.  The scenic route goes through the jungle and takes about two hours.

This week our peace and tranquility received a boost from a nationwide taxi and bus strike (except for those who needed buses and taxi's, whose tranquility was additionally challenged) so the easy route was out of the question (although we didn't know it at the time, not looking the gift horse of taxi hustler absence in the mouth).

Some other friends wanted to row around the lake, so we rented a rowboat and crossed together, then I climbed the stairs with two fantabulous Welsh co-volunteers named Gareth and Louise.  The first part was in hard sunshine, and after 45 minutes of steep climbing I was a pretty sweaty fella.  There is a pre-top viewpoint from where we looked down over the valley, and doused ourselves from a hose sticking out of the hillside.

We resumed climbing and quickly met a descending family of intensely likeable Indians.  The lead member was a holy man (I assume) in the full orange robes.  When he saw Gareth's rugby-player physique, adorned by a tasteful amount of tattooing, he reportedly said "wow, look at you!" and asked to take a picture.  When he came around a corner and met me he said simply "sweaty."

He sees right to the heart of things.  I responded that some of it was water, and he amiably gave me advice on how much to drink to ensure proper digestive health.  It was an awesome conversation to have with an awesome person in an awesome place.

We finished the last 10 minutes of the ascent, during which it began pouring again (I love a well-timed shower) and viewed the pagoda in warm rain and solitude.  You could dimly see the town below through the rain, and the sky blended into the lake in one thick pewter band.

As we headed for the 2 hour trail back down to town, we met a pair of Japanese men who counseled me to put my sandals back on since they had each been bitten by a leech on their way up.  I put my imitation teva's on and begged a big scoop of salt from the restaurant up there.

We followed the trail down through beautiful jungle, listening to light rain on the leaves above us, alternating between the slickness of wet clay and the sponginess of water-logged soil and leaf-matter.  The afternoon was getting a tad dim when the trail ended in jungle.  Oops.

We backtracked to a side trail that I had advised against since it looked to me more like the water runoff path than the actual trail.  It soon dissolved into jungle too, but I stubbornly resisted, pushing through verdant growth and remarkably thick and numerous spiderwebs to see if the trail continued below.  I finally admitted that it didn't and turned around just as the first leech took a bite of my ankle.

I scraped him off and we started backtracking again.  I had a second bite before we regained the original trail, and when I paused to remove it, I could see the jungle floor begin to come alive once I held still, little tubes of bloodsucking intent inchworming their way at the bare skin of my feet with impressive speed.

Louise was less than enthusiastic about the prospect of the little feeders, and I wasn't too keen myself, so we set off again towards the pagoda at a healthy pace.  The prospect of climbing all the way and spending the night in my wet Tshirt in the sparely appointed guesthouse there wasn't ideal, so when I saw something maybe possibly resembling a trail again, I offered to explore it to see if it was valid.  I think there was at least one thought behind me along the lines of "WTF are you doing, American, that is jungle, not a path" and was about to give up when I saw the regular line of a real trail a bit ahead.

We forged across and made the trail in time to salt a few more leeches off our ankles.  The bites keep bleeding after the little buggers are gone, and my half dozen holes were making the soles of my sandals sticky with blood.  I had one bite between my second and third toes, and that one in particular was seeping pretty good.

I had my fake teva's, so had good foot access and visibility, Louise had flip-flops, which made walking difficult and traction impossible, but response-time quick and thorough monitoring much easier, and she escaped fairly close to unscathed.

Gareth had a pair of low canvas shoes, and after walking for a bit said "I think I have one in my shoe.  I can feel something."  That stretch of trail was relatively clear clay, so we stopped so he could check.  He took off the shoe to reveal a half dozen of the fatest specimens we had yet seen, all contentedly bleeding him dry.

When you put salt on a leech, nothing happens for a second, then they hunch up and you can feel their little stabbing part retract from inside your skin.  You have to flick it off quickly then, or they will simply bite again.  When you do this, they leave enough anti-coagulant gunk in the hole that you keep bleeding for a good little while.

A little blood doesn't bother a rugby player, and after some foot tilting to give my salt-applying fingers access to his unauthorized passengers, he was bare skin and leaking blood, and we got ready to descend again.  It only took a minute to get rid of his feeders, but when I looked at what had previously been clear clay ground, it was a roil of soft little bodies charging at us from all sides.

We made it out of the jungle eventually, still feeling the phantom tugs and pricks of leeches, especially from places where enough blood had pooled to clot, which then felt as slick and lumpy as the leech who created the phenomenon in the first place.  Luckily none of the spiders seem to have discharged biting plaintiffs.

From the pagoda, there is a path to the southernmost part of the tourist town along the lake, called Damside, and another path to a local town farther in, whose name I don't remember.  Turns out in our jungle adventure time we crossed from the former to the latter, so when we eventually emerged from the depths of green leaves and gray bodies we still had a good long walk ahead of us.

We managed to kinda sorta get a bit lost again, giving us additional claim to the scenic route, through towns that stared at us as exotics, though after all being placed in host families and local schools, none of us really noticed.

We had made plans with the rowers to meet up at 7:00 PM for dinner, four hours after leaving them on the lake.  When we rocked up almost an hour late, they took one look at us and their irritation dissolved like a blood clot in the shower.  We went back to our respective hostels and guest houses for a quick wash, then went to get a restorative dinner.

Gareth had met the heartiest feeders, and his puncture wounds were still seeping steadily.  The waiter was peering at our bloody feet and ankles, and when he heard the word leeches he said "Leeches?  Did you walk to Peace Pagoda?"

Good morning Pokhara!

Good morning!  How did you sleep?  Did the Metallica cover band across the street keep you up?  Did the drunky voices under your window bother you?  Did the cockroaches disturb your rest?  A little, no, and yes.

The Metallicoids (no idea of their actual name) were only a bother in that their version of Sad But True was utterly lifeless and spitless.  I barely noticed the drunky voices (even the drunks go to bed early in Nepal).  Then there were the roaches.

K's gasp at finding the first big fella came while I was in the shower.  There were a pair of beer glasses provided inexplicably with the room, and I could only imagine this is their most frequent application as I chased the critter around with my would-be cage.  The little bastard was fast though, and kept escaping.  Completely, completely...halfway.  Oops.  I am sorry Little Brother, I didn't mean for it to happen this way.

But I also have a healthy fear/respect for the invincibility of cockroaches so I left the glass over the body, once I got done grinding it enough to convince myself it wasn't suffering.  That crackling noise is singular.

Lights out.  Noise on the bedside table next to my face.  Flashlight.  Second big fat shiny bastard of active antennae, clicking carapace, and moving mandibles.  The second chase took longer, since he could take easy shelter on the wicker shelf thing, but eventually he was at the back of the end table cupboard.  I lined up the glass and pushed.  He was half a roach torso too slow.  Damnit, not again.

Both glasses were now dedicated to showcasing my accidental conquests, so the third scrittler went unharrassed, and we turned off the light before a fourth could make a debut, turning the fan on low to cover the noise of their skittering legs and clicking body segments.

You keep imagining them crawling over your feet, don't you?

One last delightful detail.  You may have heard the rumor that you shouldn't squish a roach because its eggs/babies will come flying off and get everywhere.  I wasn't sure I believed that (despite having a similar experience in Africa with a spider) but when I looked in the glass in the morning there were definitely several small points of movement.  And oddly enough they seemed to be further deconstructing the body...which was already turning yellow.

Good night!  Sleep tight!

Vacation Time. Pokhara.

So yeah, we're a little tired lately, and since K only has one day off before going back to work once we get home, and I may be starting nearly as fast, we decided to take a week off for actual vacation.  The Lonely Planet for Nepal has the Kathmandu Valley, the town of Pokhara, a bit on the Terai (southern section of the country), and a chapter on trekking.  The rest of the country is apparently off limits or not prepared for your visit.

I admit to a reluctance to follow the same path as every other tourist in the country, but the option my dreaming and adventurous side was shouting about would have been exhausting in its own right (I'll tell you about Mustang some other time), and there is a good yoga retreat for K, so we scheduled a week in Pokhara.

Pokhara is on Lake Fewa (or Phewa) a couple hundred kilometers west of Kathmandu.  It takes 7-8 hours on the local bus, though in my experience so far these estimates are always overly optimistic.  After our three days on buses to and from Manakamana, and ~17 hours to and from Chitwan National Park, the prospect of that much time crammed in some beefy dude's armpit (that's not just a figure of speech, I spent four hours wedged in there last time) was not exactly relaxing, and this volunteering gig has been rather economical thus far, so we opted for luxury and flew out.  We passed over the 7-8 hour bus zone in half an hour, and they even gave us little bags of peanuts!

(Another factor was our desire for good views of the Himalaya, but the monsoon clouds stayed with us, though the canyons, caves, and crevasses of cloud were in themselves a delight.  I hope I never get used to that beauty.  And holy shit, the first person to see that (Wilbur/Orville Wright?) must have had a religious experience of it.)

The domestic terminal in Kathmandu airport is a modest-sized echoing hall of coughs, untended children, and the inevitable thin muddy footprints on the bathroom floor.  (I will never understand the amount of missing that goes on in public bathrooms.  It's really not that difficult, guys).  It is more authentically chaotic than the international terminal, but luckily on a smaller, manageable scale.  They never did check our IDs, the less than alert X-ray guard waved me through when I told him I had already put my bag through the machine (I had), and apparently only one of the 8 airlines has access to the PA system, as everyone else just shouts their boarding announcements.

K was worried that the morbidly obese mountain of a man in mourning white behind us would unbalance the plane.  The wee Indian lad in front of me dropped just over half his peanuts and left an impressive scatter of garbage behind, and the older woman in the deep blue sari behind and to the left of us kept her eyes closed the entire flight, her lips moving nonstop in quiet prayer.

On landing we waded through the taxista's and asked the guards where the local bus into town stopped.  That's not really fair of us since we will be gone in 2 minutes, and the guards live here with the cabbies, so they pretended not to understand the question while the taxi drivers shouted that there is no local bus and that it doesn't come for two more hours.  I kept walking and one young guard silently pointed the way out to K.

Pokhara is like a psychologically healthier version of Thamel, the notorious tourist district of Kathmandu.  It has great restaurants, bargain lodging by the dozen, and souvenir stores aplenty, but without the sick intensity, desperation, and aggression of the city of millions.

I believe the beneficial effects of nature on the human animal are so obvious and numerous as to be undebatable.  That people are healthier, happier, and more whole when they spend at least a substantial amount of time outside of cities is an axiom in my mind.  There is a lake here, and the stability and thoughtfulness of water is an important peer for the human mind, and across the lake is thick preserved jungle; the color plant-green is a key nutrient for the psyche.

K is ensconced in her four day yoga retreat, and I have begun a strict regimen of eating whenever I damn well feel like it.  The monsoon is heavy lately, but my hostel has a garden and the sound is a benediction.  Life is good.

8/11 Aaaand back.

Today I found myself walking along a little muddy path strewn with broken bricks to provide footholds in the slick, with wholeheartedly green vegetation on both sides.  The leaves are so exuberant that I can't just call them leaves, they demand the respect of "vegetation."  Or maybe "habitat."

There were voices coming from a small house on my left, light and warm rain on my forehead, and the chicken-coup noises of the school I had just left dwindling on my right, where I had half a dozen fantastic classes.  I could have brainstormed and discussed being lost in the jungle with classes 6 or 7 for another hour each.  I survived class 8.  I could easily have spent another couple hours each in classes 9 and 10, talking about environmental problems, similes, metaphors, and dream analysis.  It was a great day.

Suddenly I remembered that I am in love with the world, and utterly blessed to be here.

How great is it to be someplace long enough to have emotional swings, frustration and recovery?  (Basically I had a ferocious man-period this month.  Normally my man-period just makes me more susceptible to sappy movies.)  My life here is not just constant enough to allow me "ups and downs," but has lasted long enough to allow me frickin stages for crying out loud!

I may have mentioned previously my expat friend who told me about the stages of culture shock when you live for awhile somewhere different.  First you love everything, then you hate everything, then you reach the balance and can fairly evaluate it all.

It's not always that clear-cut, but today I feel like I'm in the third section, and the music sounds sweet.

...Although come to think about it, I'm writing this right now because we had planned to spend the night in a little hill town nearby where you can watch the sun rise over the Himalayas and shine down over the Kathmandu Valley...but the bus drivers were stupidly greedy, trying to charge us four times what our host family told us the normal fare is, so we are staying here.  (And a quick peak at Lonely Planet warns that we would be lucky to get even a glimpse of anything during the monsoon season, and there's nothing in the town otherwise.)

When these guys were looking at my skin and the small daypack on my back, and quadrupling the price, I was ready to pop their tires and go home.  So maybe I'm on the border between stages 2 and 3...

OH!  AND!  Tomorrow begins Gai Jatra, or Cow Festival!  It is 8 days long.
Day 1: sisters tie a special thread band on their brothers' wrists.  K will be brother to our host family male, and his wife will be sister to me.  (I'll try to bring you five of them, Cait!)
Day 2: Gai Jatra.  Too many interesting things to list here, I'll try to cram them in a short enough blog afterwards.
Day 3-8: People openly criticize the government in skits and performances around town.

AND!  We awarded ourselves some relaxation time this summer, so we are spending next week in Pokhara, which is rumored to be absolutely gorgeous.  K is doing a yoga/meditation retreat and I am...I have no idea!  We'll see!  If they have an internet place I'll tell you about it.

Happy Gai Jatra everyone!

8/10 Out of steam

8/10  Crap.  We've only been here two months and we are out of steam.  Neither of us has any energy, K has stabbing pains after every meal, I am done with the main stages of a Nepali cold with just the endless weeks of coughing left, K's vision occasionally goes black while she's teaching, and I spent a couple interludes tonight vomiting uncontrollably, first in a squatty potty, and second in a western toilet that is not connected to any inflow pipes and so reeks permanently of the liquid contributions of the various teachers, staff, and higher level students who have been upgraded from the student bathrooms where tiny people stand outside the door, trousers around their ankles, peeing on the floor.

Stale urine is a rather stunningly commonplace odor in our schools.

We haven't been here that long, not even two months yet, and we feel run over by buses.  The heat is continuous, the bacteria more multitudinous than back home by an astronomical exponent, we are continuously on stage wherever we go, the classes are as demanding as classes of children always are I suspect, with the added bonus that large numbers of the students have no idea what we're saying, and then there's the food schedule.

We are expected for morning tea at 6:30, though nothing happens for two more hours, when we eat a massive, substantially spiced breakfast of rice and curry.  Then people don't eat until 1:00 when they have a small cup of tea and a biscuit, then nothing until 8:30 at night, when they repeat the massive rice & curry meal then go straight to bed.  So basically they eat at 8:30 AM, then PM.  12 hours of nothing in between, and try to sleep with the full belly at night.

I have lost an inch or two off my belly, which didn't really have that much to spare before, and have burned off all the muscle I incrementally built over the last year.  (And the other peacocks were just in the habit of nodding to me as we passed going to and from the weight rack.  Rats!)

I am whining like never before, I deeply apologize, but you're reading my whine-diary today.  Let me know if it's horrible.

8/7 WTF is going on?

Is there an astrologer in the house?  I am hoping you can give me an external explanation for WTF is going on lately.

8/5  Friday, politics/culture clash lead us to have a sulky sorta-host as one of our Nepal liaisons gets offended when we only spend nine hours of K's birthday at his non-party, instead of the 12+ hours he informed us we would spend there.

8/6  One of the signature differences between here and the various other homes I've lived in is the honking.  Ne Yorkers honk too much, Nepali make them look positively demure.  They honk to say they're there, they honk to say they're moving, they honk to tell everyone around them to magically vaporize themselves, they honk for no discernible reason whatsoever.  There are daily cases where I want to take the honker and try to teach them a lesson on critical thinking.
  "If the rickshaw spans half this alley, and you span the entire alley, how do you expect to pass him, even if he does stop and move over?  And if he's going the same speed as the crowd of cars and pedestrians around us, what result are you hoping for?"
On Saturday afternoon we were walking down the street, I had a pounding headache (without even a haircut to explain it) and a dude on a motorbike laid on his horn to warn a puddle that he as going around it.
Without conscious thought I found myself yelling "shut UP!!!" on the street.  People turning around and everything.  I was kinda embarrassed, and kinda wanted to begin a midnight campaign of horn disconnections.

8/7  Sunday is the beginning of the Nepali workweek, and I came to school to find that the offended party from Friday had decided that all the kids were going to spend the day watching students' dance performances from to years ago.  I came here to teach, and have a lot of things I want to cover with the students, and this type of time wasting nonsense is a surprisingly common occurrence.
But you deal with what comes, so I went to get some lunch (since the Nepali eating schedule is literally killing K and I, but more on that some other time).
On the way to town I passed a half dozen excited dogs.  As I got closer I could see that two had just mated, and were fastened at The Uglies in that interesting and repulsive way dogs have.  Meanwhile the other male dogs were all hyped up on pheromones, and one was biting the female on the back of the neck in another of those delightful canine behaviors.
I have learned that when abroad I don't know how things are done and to not interfere, so I could only watch helplessly as people walked around this dog, pinned and tormented, ignoring her yelps of pain, asking passerby "does no one do anything about things like that here?"

Animal suffering left a sick feeling in my gut, but I went back to forcing the ambassadorial kindness that is required when you are the only white man in town, and are a constant object of interest (unless there is a white woman next to you, at which point you become invisible).

There are these little pilgrim shelters scattered around town, and one had a dozen or so 16ish year olds from another school.  As I walked by, one yelled "hello!"  So I responded "hello, good afternoon!"  There was a chorus of muttered "afternoon"s, then one yelled "come here" with the Nepali tendency towards accidental demands.  I apologized "sorry, I have things to do" and kept walking before hearing "you fucking bitch."

So for the second time in as many days I found myself shouting in public, letting him know this type of language was not acceptable.  I suspect on another day I would have been stern but more teacherly, explaining what the words mean, but lately...I don't know...things feel...stirred, aggravated, and somewhat febrile.

Is it me?  Or is Mars out of alignment or something, because it feels like the god of war is sitting on my damn shoulder.

Nepali Shave

I'll try to stay away from the off-putting mega-blogs, which should be easy since the "cyber" kid is blasting techno remixes of Eminem.  (Why would you take a perfectly good song like that "Watch Me Burn" one and speed it up and umph-chss-umph-chss it to death?)

Last weekend we went to Chitwan National Park, where you ride elephants and look for rhinos and tigers, but that's a mega-blog waiting to happen, so I'll come back to that later.

I got back from Chitwan with a beard that was a jungle in itself and would have needed a three day/two night tour package commitment to hack off with my tired little razor, so, remembering Barberji's gestured question if I wanted a shave too, I went back to my new favorite barbershop as the monsoon began to rain on a typical Tuesday morning street of smoking bus exhaust pipes, scraps of pavement, and a few scrawny and patient cows ignoring the stray dogs who only occasionally notice their bovine cohabitants.

My buddy, Burning Eyed Barberji, was again not in evidence as I walked up, but his son/apprentice, Cautious but Stern Eyed and Incredibly Tan Barberito nodded at my shaving gesture and returned it with an open handed sweep to the chair.  He draped the same faded pink towel over my front, which still bore the leftover hairs of an unknown quantity of previous customers on it, but I hypothesize it's not too many since, judging by the degree of mildew smell (only moderate/non-overwhelming), the towel is washed regularly.

He started energetically rubbing some sort of preshave liquid on my chin, paying a lot of attention to my neck and not much attention when he swept further up, where he tended to poke me in the eye.  After the third near loss of my depth perception, I shot him a look in the mirror to find he was watching the TV in the corner.  I think the preshave liquid was water.

Barberji came in, and Barberito grabbed a big tube of caulk and squeezed out an appropriate amount for toothbrushing onto my cheek and whipped it into shaving cream with the little brush.  It was the first time I've felt shaving cream since 2008.  Barberji sat down and started watching TV.  When Barberito lathered my other cheek I got a glance at the screen and was deeply shocked to see a Bollywood-looking conversation going on...in a strip club!

The culture here is not as severe as the Middle East, but women's clothing is utterly unrevealing of any sense whatsoever that there's a body under there, and holding hands across gender lines is absolutely scandalous.  Yet here were some lass's yams twitching up on the screen!  I think a swatch of her bum was originally visible, but they had blurred it out.

(We watched a Nepali show the other week that apparently involves mild political satire at times, which you can detect when the sound cuts out entirely.  Nepali censors don't bleep, they mute.)

Luckily the scene was over by the time Barberito got out the straight razor and started methodically removing my facial chaos with short precise strokes that reassured me that he is in fact his father's son, and practiced wipes of the resulting funky lather onto his palm, which quickly looked like he was holding a rat meringue pie.

He did the razor thing twice, doing an impressive job over the impractical angles of my chin, and a much-appreciated job on the super-upper-lip hairs that, if left untended, fraternize with and impersonate nose hair to my chagrin.  Then he hosed my face down thoroughly and without warning with the sprayer thing (of the type we use for applying pesticide to a mid-sized garden).

Next he picked up a brick of white stone and came at my face.  I could only hope there were no strip clubs on TV at the time.  It was definitely a rock, but it was the smoothest and slickest rock I've ever had close personal contact with.  As the pores on my face stung into obedience I remembered seeing rocks that serve as styptic pencils in the hippy shops in Santa Cruz.  Homeopathic!  Cool!  The water streaming down my face after the rock tasted like a slightly mineral benign nothing.

It was preferable to the aftershave that came after, with it's alcohol sting.  Or the deep pore cleansing lotion he dabbed onto my face like chicken pox medication that followed that.  He even put a spot on my nose, which felt kinda flirty.  Then he paused to watch some TV.

It was, of course, at this point, with my face covered in white dots, that our school bus came by, slowed to a crawl by the jigsaw puzzle remnants of what may once have been pavement.  Dozens of little eyes looked over at me, though mostly of kids too small to have my classes.  I did make eye contact with Nishan, grade seven, who gave me his familiar shy and contagious smile.

I swear there were at least 4 more courses of antiseptic and pleasant-smelling treatments, which he topped off with a thorough rub down with the mildew-smelling towel, complete with all those previous clients' hairs.

I have been trying futilely to introduce the concept of Critical Thinking into the Nepali classroom.  But more on that some other time.

Because it was time for my beating.

He held his hands in the same loose namaste posture that Barberji had used, slapped me in the head with it, followed by a quick tap to the shoulder, then 6-8 practiced whacks around my noggin, followed by the bonking fists that left me a tad woozy.

I gestured a smiling request to omit the neck snapping attempt, since last time I woke up two days later with my neck muscles locked in a brick wall of agony.  I think it was a good idea, because instead he gave me an abrupt (and oddly stern) manly shoulder rub, gripping the (what muscle is that?  The trapezious?) shoulder muscle and giving it a single concerted squeeze.  I expected to hear him say "harrumph" for some reason.

I'm learning this country, bit by bit. Next time I'll skip the namaste-prayer noggin-bonks too, since I spent the afternoon and evening with a pounding headache, no pun intended.  And I learned that I want a straight razor.