I have a problem with Baltimore.

What's going on in Baltimore is important. Vitally so. But as a global citizen, how exactly do I hold it in mind when so many are suffering and dying around the world? Thoughts on Baltimore and elsewhere, on today's vagabondurges.com post, here.

Gratitude and siblings

After posting that blog last night I went into the kitchen and started chopping veggies for dinner, and on the last cut of the onion sliced into my thumb.  Not too bad, but there’s a chunk of nail and skin hanging off, and blood started flowing, and much to my disappointment I got a little shaky.  Damn, I wanna be a mountain man who shrugs away compound fractures!

But I sat down for a minute to let the nausea pass and was thinking it’s not too surprising that I don’t like seeing my own blood.  After all, I’ve gone without seeing it much, at least since childhood’s continuously skinned knees.  And that lack of injury is something to be grateful for.

And holy cannoli, do I have shit-tons to be grateful for!  I look down at my clothes alone… 

My belt…I set my favorite belt aside when I packed up the rest of my stuff in Santa Cruz three years ago, then forgot to put it on the morning I left.  My brother drove me to the airport, and when I noticed I was beltless he immediately whipped his own off and gave it to me.  That was three years ago, and the belt’s come with me just about everywhere.  And he is still sagging like a homeboy.

Hanging on the back of the chair next to me is the black hoodie sweatshirt I wear to the gym, given to me by my other brother when he heard I didn’t have one.  Hanging on the retro coat rack (cuz we’re stylish like that) is my waterproof layer that a pequeño Spanish innkeeper on the plains of La Mancha gave to a poor shivering pilgrim.

Looking at this list I feel a tremendous gratitude (and a little embarrassment at my apparent lack of preparation and shopping skills) for the gifts I’ve been given, and these are just a few physical ones!

Another place in Spain gave me a hand-me-down cap that protected me from the sun all the way to Zambia where I traded it to a guy at a river-crossing for a wood carving to give to a friend who had donated very generously to our fundraising for the orphanages there.  Is there a blessing greater than friendship?

My folks were here in September (which is yet another thing to be grateful for) but I was surprised when my mom asked if we really enjoyed Nepal.  I guess my blogging tended to focus on the odd and sometimes uncomfortable aspects, just cuz I think they make interesting tidbits, but I was startled and frankly ashamed to not have expressed just how fantastic our time in Nepal was.

I mentioned two of my three brothers already, all of whom are fantastic buds that a guy is lucky to have, and all of whom I am proud to call my kin (plus my sister!  I could go on but I feel like I’m bragging.)  I am already blessed by them, but in Nepal I picked up more.

K and I lived in a room, in a building, next to a school, in a neighborhood, outside of Bhaktapur, in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal.  The owner of the building was a…shall we say: taciturn…little fellow, and though his wife smiled enthusiastically and greeted us with a robust “Namaste!” every morning, her total lack of English (and our Nepali being limited to “My name is Tilak, I like vegetables and the color blue”) made a more substantial friendship rather difficult.

But we were far from bereft of friendship, because in the school next door (Kalika, one of the two schools we taught in) lived Saroj Subba and his wife Anita (I never saw it written, so I’m not sure if that is a westernized form or not).  Subba Sir is a teacher at Kalika as well as the property guardian, and was our liaison and assistance with all things scholastic.  (That's K and Subba Sir on the third floor.)

Anita made our dal bhat, twice a day, delicious without exception, all summer long.  The guest culture of Nepal is “The guest is a god” which included not letting us help with the preparations or clean-up, but we enjoyed a nightly game of seeing how much we could get away with helping.  By the end I could sometimes wash a few plates before she ran me off, and K was allowed to help cook.  (Which is great because now she makes a mean dal bhat herself.  Here she's crushing garlic and ginger with the big stone roller.)

But Subba and Anita were much much more than just our feeders.  They invited us into their home, in all the profound senses of the word.  They invited us into their faith, culture, and family.  Some of my favorite memories of Nepal are participating in the Hindu rituals of their humble home.

One of those rituals was Janai Purni.  (Note: I will describe it according to my experience and explanation of it while there.  When I looked online for confirmation, I basically found the same article plagiarized on half a dozen different sites, which describes something different from what we experienced.  Thus this disclaimer.  This blog is not a text on Nepali Hindu-Buddhist tradition, just what I learned while there.)

Where was I?  Janai Purni!  Janai Purni takes place on the first day of Gai Jatra, the weeklong Festival of the Cow.  Gai Jatra is another whole post, in fact it’s second on my longstanding mental list of post-to-be.

On Janai Purni we were invited up to the Subbas’ room (Subba is their surname, but what Saroj Sir went by most of the time) where we had a tikka ceremony, but with something extra.  After lighting the Ganesh lamp and incense, Anita performed a ritual cleansing with a pinch of rice (which absorbs your sins/impurities and is then thrown out the window) and sprinkling of water, then blessed me, as my sister, and tied a Janai around my wrist.

The Janai is a sacred thread that seems to have two manifestations.

The first (according to my googling) is as a marker of male adulthood, and is bestowed in a ceremony called Bratabandhan.  This Janai has three threads, which represent body, speech, and mind, and when the knots are tied by a Brahman the wearer gains complete control over all three.  He must wear the thread for the rest of his life.  We did not have a Bratabandhan ceremony.

Janai Purni (or Purnima) is the day when these threads are changed, if they have become frayed or defiled (for example by touching a woman who is menstruating), and for us it was a single thread, which granted protection from evil spirits.

Anita had already blessed me, and afterwards I blessed her in kind, including a tikka and a ritual gift of money.  (My Western money-consciousness wished I had known this beforehand and so brought more cash with me, to sneakily pay them back for all their hospitality, but I’m not sure this would have been appropriate.)  This two-way blessing was repeated by K and Subba Sir.

Then the sisters served the brothers a portion of a special rice pudding, with dried dates, coconut, and raisins, which tasted better than anything, eaten there in a familial circle on the floor of their room, which was fairly Spartan in décor, but luxurious with hospitality.  Subba set aside a little of the pudding as an offering to his mother, who died the year before.

The Janai on this day is tied onto each man by his sister.  So when Anita tied one on me, and K tied one on Subba, done in appreciation and recognition of our time together, they became our brothers and sisters.

So I have four brothers and two sisters, spanning the West Coast of the US all the way to the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal.  And more blessings than I can count.

Most of a lost post from Bhaktapur on teaching

(Doing a little house-cleaning, and too tired to write anything new, I found this post stuck in the drafts folder, from when the internet connection went out before I could post or finish it.  It is from the last week in Bhaktapur, after we got back from our vacation week in Pokhara.)

On the first day teaching again after our Pokhara Spring Break '11 it felt weird to walk into a classroom, stretching the stiffness out of teaching muscles (took about 10 minutes).  It was funny, touching, and a bit maddening how even the most chaotic class would go still and somber when I told them the next day was my last with them.

Yesterday was my last at Kalika, and as I walked out the gate there were little voices shouting "goodbye Tilak sir" (my Nepali name...did I ever tell you about that?) and little hands waving out the windows of the school bus.  Today was penultimate at Himalayan, and I was surprised and touched by how many kids said they would miss me.  The entirety of Class 7 wanted my autograph, even the girls who, up until now, I have barely been able to entice into uttering a word.

When a teacher walks into a Nepali classroom (at least at both our schools) the students all stand and say together "good morning teacher and namaste!" and when you leave say "thank you for teaching us teacher and bye-bye."  It didn't take too long before I really heard the thank you as genuine.  The kids here are a delight.  Their enthusiasm and good natures put smiles and happiness in every single day.  And they only drive you insane 12% of the time, not bad.

(One day we rode the school bus in the afternoon while it took the kids back to the farms outside the city, where many of them dropped their bags and went to work in the fields.)

I am guessing the classes are not that different from Western schools; peer influence is crucial and pivotal, the girls mature faster than the boys, when they are interested they participate wholeheartedly and when not interested/understanding their attention goes right out the window.  The differences as I see them now revolve around two things: the atrophied creativity of students in a system that relies entirely on rote memorization and repetition, and the increased physicality of a culture in which students are always smacking each other and teachers often punish students physically.  Yeah, the teachers here hit the kids.  Pretty hard and reliably often.  A solid portion of teachers carry sticks all day.

I don't agree with the corporal approach, but to be honest I was tempted once or twice because that is the fundamental structure they know, and so my words were ineffective (again, this was only in one or two cases...I'm looking at you, Himalayan Class 8).  The worst manifestation of it though is when teachers hit a student for a wrong answer.  Making mistakes in inevitable, especially in a language class, and if you punish a student for a mistake, s/he just stops trying in order to avoid them.

I think that is part of the reason behind the utter epidemic of copying that goes on in these schools.  When I collect homework or classwork (or even during K's poetry contest, pictured) I'll get the same words written in multiple student's notebooks, sometimes even in the same handwriting!  They are clearly not grasping the function of homework.

One thing that I imagine is different from some western schools but not others, is that disinterested or un-included students fall by the wayside and fall further and further behind.  There is no awareness or technique for dealing with learning disabilities here, nor for helping if a student just falls behind.  They come to school six days a week, 50 weeks a year, and to be honest the teaching method would bore me to tears too.  I am actually amazed by the kids who are still checked IN, when the school environment feels more like a daycare than a school.

I just finished washing my windbreaker/rain-jacket in the shower with a heavy-duty cleanser.  Ever since the jungle, it’s never quite smelled right…  That reminds me, I never did journal/blog about that part of Nepal.

First off, it meant another day on the highway, exhaust pipes of endless and uncountable trucks pumping that cartoonishly thick black smoke.  With the heat and the wind I expect the first drops of the next shower to turn dark like the drops of spilled coffee drying on the side of the cup.  If you pick your nose after a day on that highway it comes out like a little black worm, all muddy and smudgy.

The trucks are all junky old things that have been patched together innumerable times, and don't manage much speed, which I guess is why they tend to pass on the right, on a two lane road, as they go around completely blind corners.  It's a slow motion maneuver, and they often get back into their lane with a few feet of space before the next oncoming behemoth.  There's nothing you can do about this practice, so you sit back and trust your luck, but on the trip to Chitwan one of the other volunteers was napping, opened his eyes and looked out the front windshield to see a massive dumptruck headed straight for us, nice and close.  With the truth serum of sleep making him honest, he shouted "Oh God!" as the truck swerved back onto its side just in time, the wind of its close passage shaking our bus.

Chitwan National Park (the name comes from Sanskrit for “Heart of the Jungle”) borders a wildlife reserve to the east and an Indian National Park to the south to form 800 square miles of verdant jungle packed with a soul-uplifting variety of animals, the most famous (charismatic mega-fauna) are rhino, crocodile, sloth bear, and some cat thing called a…what was it?…tiger.  We saw the first two, and enjoyed staring into the jungle for the second pair.

Chitwan gets something like 2,500 mm of rain during the monsoon season, which, for us non-metric people is equivalent to 1.3 shitloads of precipitation.  The humidity when the sun comes out turns it into the interior of a rice cooker.  You strip off your rain jacket and swelter, then when a nice fresh breath of air comes you enjoy it then put your raincoat back on because the rain follows that wind by about 30 seconds, and feels pretty darn good.

On the edge of the park is the small town of Sauraha, where we went for the things tourists need, namely souvenirs, bottles of water, and an ATM.  Tourism has developed one street to provide these things, which has earned the nickname "Little Thamel".  I see what they mean, but elephants don't casually walk down the street in Thamel.

There are a lot of elephants in Sauraha; between the breeding center, an anti-poacher ranger force, the ones at the park for safari's, and the ones owned by hotels, I'm (very roughly) guessing there must be about 60 elephants living in that little town.  We were only there a couple days, but it is surprising how quickly people get used to seeing elephants wandering around.  I must be a city-yokel because I just couldn’t get over these massive animals, looking at you both warmly and impassively, and always with intelligence.

One of the tourist activities is bathing the elephants in the river, but the pouring rain makes the river dirty and the elephants don’t like it, so for our elephant bath we watched it following the mahout’s barked instructions to fill its trunk from a well-pipe, then spray it over its back and us, while we scrubbed its skin with pieces of broken bricks.  Now that’s micro-abrasion skin therapy.  We found a couple big purple lumps that seemed different, but didn’t come off when we scraped them with the bricks.  It’s hard to get leeches out of elephant skin, the mahout really had to twist and yank the things.

Another tourist highlight is the elephant-back safari through the jungle.  The movement of those things is tremendous, ponderous, and unique.  It was pouring down rain during ours, so no pictures after these first couple, which is a bummer because we sat a couple meters away (ie above) a mother and baby rhino, eating rain-washed leaves and looking slightly bored with us.

We saw a couple different types of rather stunning deer as well, but no tigers or sloth bears, which may be good since sloth bears go for your eyes when confronted with humans, and their massive claws tend to remove most of the face.  At one point the elephants apparently didn’t like something?  The mahouts were trying to lead them in one direction and they stopped and all started trumpeting, balking and shying away.  It was beautiful, stunning, and more than a little freaky, sitting on one’s back while it is obviously agitated.  Did you know they used the sound of an elephant trumpeting for a large portion of the T-Rex roar in Jurassic Park?  You can hear it.

Then there was the worst part.  Have you seen/read Like Water for Elephants?  You know the stuff about the bull hook?  The mahouts mostly carry stout sticks, though some have the vicious metal spike and barb weapons, and they whack the elephants on the top of the head with them.  Hard.  Really hard.  I tried to convince myself they have such thick skin that they could barely feel it, but when struck they make a crying sound that was one of the worst things I have ever heard.  It is so full of feeling, and made me think of a child being abused and not even knowing why.  As our driver hit our elephant we could feel it shaking, and the vibration of its cries running through our bodies.

I don’t want to travel to a new place and start telling people how to be, but it was horrible.  We made our dark looks and remonstrances as loud as possible without being confrontational, hoping it would dissuade him from further use, hoping customer displeasure can change the practices of centuries.  I assume they are used to the squeamish looks from tourists, but hopefully it will have an effect?

We also took a couple walks with our hotel guide, Laxman, who had a weeping abscess or something on his foot.  It had a big swollen lump, which he had drained but didn't go away, so it just leaked fluid continuously, and the swelling was reaching up his foot in a new direction in a big bulb of inflated skin.  When we would stop and all be looking at something, he would bend down and poke at it.

Our weekend had a pretty tight schedule, and Laxman would try to keep us moving.  We were on vacation though, and since we were the guests he couldn’t be very forceful, so he started asking my help in curtailing the endless photoshoots that would develop whenever we held still.  "Okay, now take one with my camera.  And his.  And hers.  And you’re going to facebook these to me, right?  Wait, the flash didn't go."

I don't really like that role, but at one point I was talking to Laxman while one of those “okay, now with my camera from this side, now that side, now underneath” sessions, and he got a call from the hotel boss, yelling at him to hurry us up and get us back in time for the next event.  I could see the helpless worry in his eyes.  The boss can fire him any time he feels like, on the spot.  There are very few jobs there, if you get one, you have to hold on to it.  Laxman’s foot must have been searingly painful, but he kept leading tours, every day.  He misses a tour, he doesn’t get paid.  He misses a few tours, he gets fired.  We miss an event we paid for, even if it's our own fault, and he gets in trouble for it.

We went to the elephant breeding center, which is one of the few other employers in the area.  Plus, it is a government job, so includes a pension, which is practically unheard of in Nepal.  Those guys spend a lot of them time up in the trees, gathering firewood and fodder, and the interview for the job is who can climb up and down the fastest.  The competition is so fierce, these guys running up and down the trees, that injuries and even fatalities are common.

The breeding center has about a hundred staff, and the job of cooking that much dal bhat twice a day was killing the cooks after only a couple years, so nowadays they have a rotating work schedule, with a different team each night responsible for the largest pots of rice I have ever seen.

The breeding center has a line of females (cows) and they initially brought in one bull once a year.  Eventually they would have had to worry about inbreeding, but that problem has solved itself since for the last decade or so, all the babies born there have been the result of incursions by wild elephants.

Laxman was telling us about one bull who stays nearby, and has learned about the load sharing and power outages.  He waits for the perimeter lights to go out, knocks over a section of the now un-electrified fence, and visits his girlfriends.  This is an incredibly powerful animal, and seeing entire sections of the steel fence that he had bashed out was impressive, to say the least.

The center has a pair of young twins, which are extremely rare, and a younger one who was ridiculously adorable.  I did not know something that size could be such a...kitten.  They have a dance they do when they want food, rocking forward and back, alternatively lifting a front foot then the opposite rear one.  They know when mealtime is approaching, and as we walked down the row, most of them were doing this rocking dance.  Pachyderm choreography.  The baby will do the dance at an adult elephant if there's no humans around.

Somehow I don't have a good picture of the little guy, but you can see him in there, back a bit on the left.

He could roam freely, but all the adults were chained at the ankle.  I was not sure how I felt about the use/exploitation? of these incredible animals.  They are well cared for, and Laxman was telling us about one old bull who was retired and set free in the park, but kept coming back to live at the center.  You can choose to see that as dependency and domestication, or as friendship (and comfort)...  The only ones I saw being mistreated (in my judgement) were the safari ones, who are kept under such strict discipline, perhaps because they're carrying a load of Nepal's only income on their backs.

It was the ones who patrol the jungle against poachers that I really wanted to spend time with...I wonder if I can volunteer as a park warden...  (In Sauraha there is the base the rangers live out of, complete with barbed wire, entrenchments, and pill boxes.  Poachers are serious business, and the type of people who will do the things they do, are obviously ruthless.)

So no tigers on our jungle trip, but as you can probably tell, I was fairly enamoured of the elephants.  We took a canoe trip to see some crocodiles and gharials, which were cool too, but I remember most clearly the site of coming around a bend to find a man standing in the middle of the river.  On top of it.

I was wondering if we had found Jesus (and surprise, he’s Hindu!) but then I noticed a smooth curve of rock beneath him, and a small one off to the side.  Of course, the one he was standing on turned out to be an elephant’s side, and the small one was the tip of its trunk, which was made clear a second later when he barked a command, and the entire massive animal lunged upward out of the water, rolling to its feet and up onto the riverbank in a display of power and majesty that left me breathless.

 (PS.  If you go outside of the monsoon season, you can "help" with that bathing process, presumably being dumped in the river at the end.  I will try my best not to be jealous when you do.)

Kathmandu's Durbar Square

The Kathmandu Valley has three main cities, Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur, though Kathmandu (KTM) has basically swallowed Patan.  They used to be rivals (after one kingdom was split between three sons) who competed to have the biggest, most ornate, most impressive buildings, which were clustered around the palaces.  So now each city has an area of temples, a palace, and monuments called Durbar Square.

They are the required tourist sites, so our first day in Kathmandu we walked down through the frenetic streets of rickshaws, motorcycles, dust, cows, dogs, garbage, vendors, and the constant stimulation of colors, smells, and sounds that felt like a rugby game for the brain

KTM’s square, more than the others, is chaotic, crowded, and that remarkable blend of sacred and profane that characterizes the developing world in my mind.  It’s the piles of garbage gathered and left to rot in the sun around temples and stupa’s on back streets.  The tourist kitsch pedalled out of ancient palaces.  Muddy prayer flags fallen in a heap.  It’s the goats walking around the Dattatraya Temple in Bhaktapur, dropping crap pellets in all the carved oil-lamp holders they’re stepping over.  It’s the taxi’s and motorcycles parked under the Maju Deval temple, and the exhaust stains on crimson banners.  Spray-painted slogans and pictures of Vishnu and Ganesh.  It’s the offerings given every morning and the stray dogs eating them and leaving a steaming pile of shit behind.  It’s the sacred cows (and sometimes non-castrated bulls) left to wander the streets after being offered in ceremonies of the devout, which graze in the piles of rotting garbage on street corners, hooves battered from a life on pavement.

It's a living city after all, and the laundry has to dry someplace.

We walked around the square that hot morning, trying to remember details from the guide book read before leaving the hotel (I can’t bring myself to walk around those places with the book open in my hands).  We were just discussing finding a café to get a lassi and read up on what the hell we were looking at when a chipper little fellow approached us with a very “official” looking laminated guide badge with his picture on it.

When we were in Tikal two years ago I waved off all the guides automatically, and after an hour of wondering what the hell each impressive pyramid was used for, decided maybe we should have sprung for a guide.  So when this fellow waved his badge long enough to see but not really inspect, I heard him out.

It was the usual lines about him studying history at a local university and yada yada yada and today is a very special day, when I can get you in to see something special, but it closes in an hour.  He wanted about $4.

So we had a guide.  He told us his name was “Chico” because previous tourists had told him he looked Peruvian, that he didn’t like Israeli’s, and that he met his wife half an hour before he married her.  Chico was a nice enough fellow, but didn’t seem to actually know anything about Durbar Square or its monuments.

He was handy for keeping the other touts away though, and at the Trailokya Mohan Narayan temple (whose window carvings date back to 1680 by the way) he spoke with one of the guys resting from their never-ending work of carrying massive burdens across town on their backs.  Chico smiled and told me the guy had agreed to let me try his burden, and that I was lucky, it wasn’t very heavy that day.  I fit the greasy strap over my forehead and stood up to find that apparently local’s aren’t used to this sight, and a surprisingly large crowd had gathered to watch me hobble around.  No, that wasn’t embarrassing or anything.  (That’s one of the things I love about travelling.  I can humiliate myself, and be anonymous again ten minutes later.)

After the tour he wanted to show us the best view of the square, and surprise, it’s a restaurant!  So we had a snack and offered to buy him something.  He ordered a big plate of fried rice and a beer.  The beer in Nepal costs twice as much as a meal and comes in gigantic bottles, it’s gotta be a liter in those puppies, or at least ¾.  Chico downed his beer and began telling us more and more about his arranged bride.  She was okay, but his mother-in-law…  He had a number of interesting things to say about his new mother dearest, which included the fact that she won’t let him drink any alcohol.  Luckily they eat fast in Nepal, so we finished our food and ran before he could get too gabby.

Here Chico is in the mirror of the Ganesh temple that you have to visit before beginning any journey.  This includes trekkers, so supposedly Tenzing and Hillary did a puja here before leaving for the first summiting of Everest.  It is described as one of the four most important Genesh shrines in the valley; I had to lead Chico to where it was.  (The mirror is provided so worshippers can check the tikka’s they self-apply from the provided materials.)

We ended up coming back to KTM’s Durbar Square with our volunteer group.  For that visit (the director) Rajesh asks one or two people to serve as tour guides for the others.  K and I volunteered, and after a little more research could talk about the small temple to Narayan, whose primary statue was stolen in 1766, and had not been replaced by 1768 when the city was conquered, so the conqueror just filled the void with his own choice, Bhagwati.

And could point out the elaborately carved balcony where the royal family used to watch festivals, back when there was a royal family (Nepal’s monarchy was abolished in 2008).

And about the theory that the famous erotic carvings on the roof struts of many temples may be intended to protect the structure from lightning, since the goddess of it is a shy female, so she would be too embarrassed to visit a structure with such explicit images.  (I think this was made up to please tourists.  I find it more likely that they just liked sex, or even wanted to inform the masses, the world’s first self-help books.  And given that at least one temple in Bhaktapur shows elephants doing it in basically the missionary position, I think they were also just entertaining themselves.)

And the smaller square in the corner, closed most of the year, where in 1846 a prince massacred most of the royal family, paving the way (in blood) for the corrupt and selfish Rana pseudo-dynasty that ruled and neglected Nepal for the next 101 years.  Every year they sacrifice 100’s of buffalo and goats there during Dashain (which begins in a couple weeks).  (There was another royal massacre in 2001, in case that sounds familiar.)

And that the temple with the often-photographed statues of Shiva and his consort Parvati looking out the window, may actually be built on a much older platform which was used for dances and other religious rites centuries beforehand.  I think it was during that anecdote that one of the Dutch girls stepped back and threw up in the street.

Nepal is cleaner than India, which is famous for giving all tourists a case of “Delhi Belly”, but a lot of visitors to Nepal still get a case of the Kathmandu Quickstep.  Luckily for the Dutchling, hers was coming out the top that afternoon.  She was embarrassed, the locals were pretty uninterested, and I realized that if you are going to throw up in a UNESCO World Heritage Site, this is the one to do it in.  It fit right in.

Here's Chico again, the massive Maju Deval on the left and rickshaws behind, trying to make a buck in Nepal.  So much beauty, so much poverty; so much nobility and desperation and more world than we can ever hope to know.

Last day in Kathmandu

The original schedule for our last day in Nepal was to get up at 4:00 AM to catch the morning flight to Bahrain for a 14 hour layover before continuing on to London.  I prepared myself for a long day of granola bars and airplane food.  Airlines seem to usually have two flights per day out of Kathmandu, and luckily they switched us to the evening flight, cutting our layover down to 2 hours.

That was welcome news, since we found the Bahraini airport a rather unnerving place the first time (so very much tension and so very many burqa’s), and though international airports are inherently interesting places, 14 hours is a long time to people-watch in the same hallway.

So instead we had another day in Kathmandu, starting with a leisurely goodbye to our three remaining program-mates (the others had all been voted off the island or eaten by sloth bears) as they departed for a village-to-village trek whose details made me jealous.  Then we walked into Basundhara for a masala omlet (sic), wandered a bit, had super-spiced veggie momos (a Nepali/Tibetan version of pot stickers), a nap, back into town for chicken butter masala curry with basmati rice and garlic roti (you can see where my priorities lay), then headed for the airport.

On the way we dropped off two Finnish girls at the orphanage where they will be volunteering for two weeks.  They were sweet girls, but their youth and green-ness were painfully obvious as they chattered away instead of paying attention to Rajesh (the program boss and superhero) even as he explained how to walk there (they would be going alone starting the next morning).

I admire Rajesh immensely for many reasons, one of which is how he somehow manages to shepherd group after group from giggling and oblivious to prepared to live for 2-12 weeks (or 10 months) in Nepali families and teach classes.  And the entire time he patiently answers questions and laughs gustily and genuinely at jokes, all of (both of) which he must have heard a thousand times before.  His entire family is a fortress of hospitality, personality, and authentic fundamental goodness.

We got onto the road to the airport to find gridlocked traffic (“gridlock” may not be the best term since there is nothing so orderly as a grid in Nepali traffic).  Nepal had just elected another in a long line of Prime Ministers that day (they rarely last a year) which may have contributed to the standstill.  Motorbikes buzzed and swirled like the flies in the gutters, while everyone else aggressively shouldered their way into spaces that seemed way too small, turning off their engines during the minutes between each miniscule movement.  I am deeply surprised to see so many relatively intact paint jobs as they defiantly refuse to ever give way.  A polite driver in Nepal would never go anywhere.  Literally.

The road was wide enough for 2 American lanes, or 3 European, so there were 4-5 Nepali.  The 3-4 in our direction were fully constipated, the 1 oncoming flowed steadily (a customary contrast in Nepal).  Half a kilometer farther along it switched, our side merged into 1 lane, which slid past 3 of stationary chaos.  No one had the patience or control to point out that it would work much better with two lanes in each direction, instead of the 4-into-1 bottlenecks on both sides.  This is Nepal.

I hear India takes all these things about Nepal and multiplies then several times over.  I am not ready for India right now.

There is not much you can do about gridlock, and I trusted Rajesh to do what could be done, so I sat back to enjoy my last bits of Nepal through the window of our little white van as he skilfully wedged it into closet-sized spaces, saying only “if you can drive in Kathmandu, you can drive anywhere.”

I watched fruit stands by the side of the road tended by women with colourful sari’s and potent scowls.  Cows wandered, grazed, or stood in peculiar places, utterly unmolested.  A woman in a bus in front of us stuck her leathery head out the window and vomited white liquid onto the street without looking; it was pure luck that there was no motorcycle coming.

Rajesh saved our bacon (not the first time) by swerving off onto small surface streets that spit us out unexpectedly close to the airport.  Having a local on your team is priceless.

Leaving a wonderful place and the people who made it even better is a uniquely difficult thing, but we took refuge in the distractions of travel, first stop: Bahrain.

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!

8/7 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.

Nepali Haircut

I got my hair cut yesterday.  I think that makes 7 countries where I've gotten one, 8 if you count the emergency beard removal in Guatemala.

There is a barbershop in between the veggie market and one of the convenience-y stores that has stacks of eggs and bags of potato chips hanging on long strings.  It was of course empty when we got there, but the vigilant barber soon showed up with his burning eyes and scruffy white coat.

His haircutting was speedy and precise while feeling chaotic and rushed.  The scissors never stopped snipping, usually in a rhythm of three, the first in the hair, the last in the air, and the second wherever it needed to be.

Then he got out the straight razor and I tried to monitor my attention and reactions for racism.  Did I feel more reassured when he changed the blade than I would have in America?  Did I pay extra attention to the authenticity of opening the packaging?  Would you find that justifiable?  Do I?

He tidied up the edges with expert strokes, which made me understand why barbers were the surgeons in the Middle Ages.  Those guys know how to use a blade.  Then it was aftershave powder with one of those little brushes, followed by a ferocious pinch at the nape of my neck that felt almost punitive...what did I ever do to you, Barberji?

Then he started beating on my head, karate chops before fists that made my vision bounce epically while I tried to hold my neck firm.

Once my vision calmed down he apparently forgave me and we made up with a brusque but enthusiastic massage, sweeping his hands up and over my noggin, down the sides, then around my ears in a precise and practiced pattern that felt like a very confused form of reiki.

He put one hand above and behind my ear on the left side of my head and the other reached around under my chin on the right, and then tried to kill me by breaking my neck.  Like Antonio Banderas in that one bar brawl scene in Desperado.  Luckily my manly sinews were too much for him, and he stopped just past the point where my uppermost vertebrae crunched like a car accident.  He tried again on the other side while I focused on not flexing a muscle, trying hard to avoid thinking about the damage we might inadvertently cause.  The second time, on the other side, he went a small amount further before the skeletal implosions began, though a millimeter feels like serious business at that point.

My neck didn't hurt beforehand, but after I swear afterwards I could turn my head like a damn barn owl.

Leaving the barbershop to pick up some okra for tonight's curry and cookies (digestives of course) for tomorrow morning's tea, I felt that I got more smiles than normal; I think the locals approved of my local barbershop participation.  And of course found my delirious smile highly entertaining.

An average day in Bhaktapur

6:00 AM the little pink travel clock goes off, K or I snaking an arm out from under the mosquito net to turn it off or poke at it for a snooze.

As I said in my birthday blog, there are only a few solar water heaters on roofs around town, and there isn't one on our roof, so my morning shower is night-chilled cold water, mouth clamped shut to avoid swallowing any.  It is still not entirely comfortable to start, but once begun I enjoy it, and I really do feel warmer, fresher, and more ready for the day afterwards.

My travel towel is irredeemably stinky so I air dry, brushing my teeth with the water since by now our stomachs are pretty used to the bacteria, and we are able to take more liberties than tourism would otherwise have allowed.  The bathroom is an open space, the shower head above the toilet, the sink to the side, so everyone has bathroom flip-flops since the floor is nearly always wet.

7:00 Morning tea time with our hosts, Saroj Sir and his wife Anita Ma'am.  Saroj is a teacher at Kalika Higher Secondary School, and is our English-speaking liaison in the area, though Anita understands more than she at first admitted, which she gave away with her infectious laughter at our jokes, stories, and stumbling learning curve of Nepali culture.  The tea is black, loaded with sugar, and there are always biscuits on the plate.

K and I sit at the table, trying to add to our day's lesson plans and talking to Saroj and Anita until around the
8:30 morning meal of dal bhat.  Dal is a lentil soup, served in a small dish, which is poured over the heap of white rice (the bhat).  There is usually also some achar (I'm guessing on the spelling) which is a pickled spicy salsa, a little dab'll do ya.  Then a side dish of curry veggies, usually potato mixed with a green gourd, bean, or local unknown.

You then smishsmash these all together and eat.  Using only your hand.  Right hand.  The fingernails on our right hands are noticeably yellower than on the left after a month of dal bhat.  You scoop up a bite in your hand, manipulate it down to the last couple joints of the fingers, insert the thumb underneath this loose ball, bring the hand to the mouth and scrape it in, using the thumb as a lever/elevator.  Licking fingers (even plate) is accepted and even encouraged.  A good burp shows appreciation for the food and is polite.  I have not yet managed this, I am sorry to say.

It is absolutely delicious food.  I expect to have trouble and reluctance returning to the Dictatorship of Silverware Oppression practiced in the west.

We went out to dinner on my birthday in a nice place downtown, and I would choose the food Anita (or our first host-mother Hema) prepares 10 times out of 10.

After this meal Nepali's don't eat again until around 8-9:30 PM, taking only a small snack lunch at 1:00, so the portions are massive.  Anita returns as many times as we allow, additional scoops of each component headed for our plates.  The ratio is very important, since you cannot leave anything on your plate (deeply offensive) and if you have too much dal then it gets too liquid.  Several times I have asked for a tiny bit more rice, to soak up the dal, which has arrived with a full round of achar, curry, and more dal.  It is a delicious stretch to finish every time.

K and I teach at two schools, three days each at one before trading places (there are six workdays in Nepal, Sunday is their Monday, and they have no summer vacation, just one week between grades).  We live at Kalika, and Himalayan is a 20 minute walk across town (and through a couple rice paddies).

If you read my pre-Nepal info blog you may remember that we were expecting a different school from Himalayan and a host family (we live in a room in a building next to the school).  Both of these were changed at some point, which is utterly in character with Nepal, where things tend to change ten minutes after they were supposed to start, and you usually find out about an hour later.

Planning does not appear to be a common practice; when we showed up (already twice postponed at our hosts' request by two days then four hours) there was still no bed in our room.  I helped disassemble and relocate one, surreptitiously squishing silverfish the size of housepets when no one was looking, feeling likely a princess for even noticing them.  Luckily the giant spiders were all dried husks.

9:45 Assembly at the schools.  The children line up in rows by class.  A teacher takes them through a series of drills, "cover up" means to reach up and put your hands on the person's shoulders in front of you, then sides and straight up.  They bow tiny heads, fold small hands, and close deep brown eyes for prayer, chanted in unison, and then (at Himalayan only) sing the Nepali national anthem, which I expect to be able to mimic with reasonable accuracy soon.

As they head up to the classrooms the teacher inspects their socks, hair, ties, etc for inadequate cleanliness or ironing (all the schools here have their own uniforms, two per week, changing on Wednesday).  The Principal Ma'am at Himalayan appears to be highly intuitive, grabbing kids seemingly at random and holding them back for infractions I can only guess at.

10:00 classes begin.  Two 40 minute classes back to back, 5 minute break, two more classes.

12:45 Tiffin Break for 30 minutes.  "Tiffin" is apparently an old English word for the small boxes that kids bring their snacks to school in, and the name has come to refer to the break.  The kitchen at Himalayan offers teachers a small snack, variable contents but reliably spicy beyond my western palate's easy comprehension.

On the first day I ate some soup, and was well into the resulting heavy sweating when the principal brought all the other teachers in to meet me, one by one.  I had brought some little cakes to share with the teachers (since it was my birthday) but instead of leaving them on a counter, I was portioning them out to shy teachers, who politely didn't look at my dripping face.  They seem to be shy/intimidated by us, and the principal urges them to speak with us, hoping we will improve their English, which is...of various levels.  It was another of those delightfully awkward experiences that I am so skilled at finding.

After Tiffin is a mirror image of the morning, two 40 minute classes, 5 minute break, then two more before school ends at 4:00.  There are 8 classes a day, of which we teach 5 at Kalika and 6 at Himalayan.

These class times are misleading to a western sense of scheduling.  That soup I ate the first day was given to me at 1:14, and Tiffin ends at 1:15.  Students tend to show up to the classroom 10-15 minutes after class "begins" and when I show up to a room on time I invariably have to wait outside for another 5+ minutes until the previous teacher leaves.

4:00 Students line up again for a short prayer, maybe an announcement or message, then dismissal.  At Himalayan I am instructed to follow the kids out to the main street to protect them, although the schedule there now has our two "leisure" periods as the last two, so I usually leave early (and for example type this blog).

4:30ish the kids have mostly left the school, and when we are both back at Kalika we have our second tea with Saroj and Anita.  Then we run any errands we may have, tell each other about how the various classes went and plan our next day's lesson plans together since we share most classes (K has 3rd to 8th at Himalayan, while I have 5th to 10th, we both have 4th to 8th at Kalika).

8:30ish evening meal of dal bhat, same as morning, just as delicious.  We don't usually linger afterwards because the culture dictates that someone always has to be available to serve, and Anita usually doesn't eat until we go home.  (When we were staying with our host family in Kathmandu we, as guests, were served first, given a headstart, then the grandmother, as elder, was served.  Once we had all finished the son was served, and once he had finished and we had all left the table, the mother would eat.  The father was sick/absent the whole time we were in that home, so I am not sure when he eats, but I believe it would be between Elder and Child.  Sometimes Saroj eats after we start, and sometimes we don't see him eat at all.  When he does, he manages an awesome Nepali quantity of rice.)
 
We get ready for bed and fall asleep around 10:30, re-stringing the mosquito net and pushing open the windows.  When we are lucky the sound of the monsoon rainfall drowns out the piercing whine of the incredibly persistent mosquitoes who will hover around our net all night long.  Other critters come and go at various times, our favorite being the small lizards, who we revere as protectors, optimistically hoping they will eat some of the mosquitoes, although the second night we watched a rather embarrassing chase where a spider seemed to effortlessly evade the little guy.

The reason why someone has to be available to serve food at all times during dinner is owing to the cultural rules regarding cleanliness.  The left hand is always considered jutho, or impure, since there is no toilet paper here.  Some toilets have a little bucket, and most have a spray nozzle.  You put water in your left hand, and clean yourself.

Us westerners at first usually find this fairly challenging/shocking, but it quickly became apparent to me that it is a superior method to toilet paper.

Of course you wash well with soap and water afterwards, but the left hand is still considered impure.  This is why you walk around the temples (and stupas) clockwise only.  You reach up to spin the prayer wheels, and must use only your right hand, the left should not face the temple.  Handling communal dishes, water bottles etc with your left hand makes them jutho.  Serving from a dish with your own utensil makes it jutho.  Once you have begun to eat food on your plate it is jutho and cannot be shared, except dry food like crackers.  A husband may give jutho food from his plate only to his wife, but cannot accept any from hers.

If food is made jutho, it is inedible (to others) and is dumped out.

Since food is eaten with your right hand, that hand is generally covered in dal, and is considered more impure than the left at that point, so you drink from your glass of water with your left while eating.  We drink boiled water, which is often still warm and seems to have an incredible cleansing effect, rushing through our bodies with unbelievable speed and irresistible urgency.

The most profane part of the body for Nepalis is the feet.  You must never touch anyone (or anything) else with your feet, or step over a person, object, food, or anything involved in worship.  This is sometimes difficult since every house has a small spot in front where offerings are made, so walking down the street involves watching carefully where you step, which is hazardous given that traffic obeys no rules, only tendencies, and during the monsoon season the puddles will last about four months, and sometimes reach epic proportions as muddy quagmires.

The only cultural aspect I have felt challenged by was the late meal then going right to bed.  K still struggles to observe the gender roles with unattached interest.

We are incredibly happy to be here; it is a singular opportunity to encounter a place at a level profoundly deeper than simple tourism.  It is also far more challenging and uncomfortable.  I find myself longing for a stint of "normal" travel, but expect I will crave this type of intimate interaction more frequently from now on.  I think I may be addicted.

And I'm going to miss the dal bhat.