You can only go forwards

The corn is gone already?  How the hell is the corn gone already?  I swear it was just pushing up through the furrows, looking all green and eager and naïve.  Now it’s rows of mass-mowed stubs, Winter’s five o’clock shadow, and I never even saw the monster harvesting machine.

(Okay, it hasn't snowed yet, but I had to use a picture from last year.)

Summer left its sun behind though; it’s shining away up there, enthusiastically bright, and we walk around with our eyes squinted.  For some reason we squinch our mouths tightly too.  But Summer packed up the warmth when it left, like a departing college student who can only fit the speakers in the car and leaves the stereo.  So the sun is telling a story about picnics, volleyball and shorts, but it’s a newscaster on a muted TV and we turn away distracted, to find something else to do, like getting the heavy coats out of the attic.

But I can remember that I like Autumn, gall-darnit.  It’s warm cup of tea season.  Mug of hot chocolate time.  Blankets and books and thick slippers.  And holy shit, you can’t beat the leaves.  Those fresh green ones are a delight to see, but these wizened reds and purples and yellows can hold a better conversation.

This is actually a nice window of time.  The cows with their inexplicably muddy posteriors lounge on grass still luxuriously green, while the leaves obligingly take aesthetically pleasing positions around them.  Martha Stewart’s a chump next to Mother Nature.  (Or anyone else for that matter.)

We danced like grasshoppers (or should I say base-jumping venom-spiting/peeing spiders?) all summer long in the Nepali sunshine, washed in Indian Ocean monsoon drops, but already my legs have forgotten shorts and my feet are accustomed to socks.  The tan lines of my sandals are completely gone and my gloves wait by the door for morning departures.

I find myself again in Belgium.  Still not quite able to function in the language, still stranded in the boonies, still wondering what the fuck I’m doing here.  Still bouncing between admiration and irritation for the local particulars too.  They give you tons of free samples in the grocery store!  They charge you for a glass of water.  Internationally-minded people speaking tons of languages!  Who abuse immigrants in all of them.  And of course, the great healthcare system that is emphatically NOT bankrupting the country, and where we can get quality medical care nearly at a moment’s notice for a few bucks…but they’re going to take half my paycheck.  Once you factor that in, this new job I start tomorrow seems kind of ridiculous.

(Note, if the taxes just went for the social system like healthcare and supporting those in need, it would be easier, but Belgium has an overabundance of governments, and I can’t help but suspect that a lot of those shiny euro’s of not-mine go to bureaucrats and their paperwork.  I think the medical system should be amended to not cover paper cuts…)

Teaching English in Nepal was so groovy, I thought hey, why not do it in Belgium?  That was my original plan after all.  So I spent the last 2-3 weeks following a training course that was really more like boot camp.  They broke us down with theories, prohibitions, and critiques until we were all convinced we had made a mistake and were not suited for the job after all, then deployed us throughout Belgium saying “you start tomorrow.”

Most of my students will be adults, but tomorrow my first paid lesson will be with a 7-8? year old.  (I find it odd that the company doesn’t seem to know how old he is.)  I will teach him, one on one, for an hour and a half, and once you take away the price of my train fare and taxes, for the 4-5 hours of my Saturday it will take, I’ll earn about 7€.  Score!  That will almost cover lunch!

But I’ll see it as a means to an end.  I’m learning more about this teaching shtick, and putting a known brand on my resume, and hell, I still hold out hope that it will be enjoyable.  At least for awhile.

But that reminds me, anybody have any advice on Latin America?

First week of teacher training

Tuesday October 4 – Taking the train home after Day 1 of teacher training, pulling into the station at Brussels North past shy behemoths of office towers loitering outside the station, waiting tragically for some executive to come make them feel loved.  Their profane expanses of reflective glass look best when punctured and shattered in the post-apocalyptic cityscape; it will take the end of the world as we know it to make them interesting.  I mean that in a good-natured way.  Those institutions are not a means for the growth of human happiness and wellbeing. I promise I’m not listening to Marilyn Manson and wearing big black boots with lots of buckles right now.

Class was a pleasant event.  Looks like work, and that’s a good thing.  Looks like quality people, and that’s a great thing.  My online TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) class was too easy/boring/non-practical, and learning is always worthwhile.

Cruising above traffic-constipated highways in a train that hums in a language fluent in speed is just plain fun.

Wednesday October 5 – I screwed up my demo lesson in class today worse than I’ve ever screwed anything up.  It was even worse than that time in freshman year of college when I didn’t prepare a Spanish presentation on Sor Juana based on prior “knowledge” of a book I (didn’t) read for another class, and tried to stretch the statement “Sor Juana was a nun” into a 5 minute presentation.

Luckily it was the best possible scenario for a failure, with an instructor who can frame it as a mixed bag, and a class who can benefit from it as a learning experience.  It wasn’t just me who flailed, it was us who learned…  Though it just felt like me at the time.

I spent the next couple hours uncomfortable and tongue-tied.

The commute-time train is full of businessmen in their fresh black/navy blue suits; the air smells like a clothing store, not real life, and has a unique hush of lots of people uninterested in talking to each other, or maybe they’re just as tired as I am.

A woman who looks like Joe Torre with greasy hair to her chin reads a famous Dan Brown novel on a platform as we slide past, standing apart from the businessmen.  She doesn’t look up as we pass by.  Neither do they.

The graffiti is scattered politely across warehouse sides and farm field fences, colorful, legible, and uninspired.  I’ve never tried that, seems like it would be fun.  Maybe if this teaching gig doesn’t work out, I’ll give it a try…  Your homework: tag 5 Starbucks.  Starbuckses.

Thursday October 6 – The vagaries of human ebb + flow reliably defy comprehension and stubbornly exist, so I’m the only one to get off the train at my small station today, and I ride home in a patiently-complacently peaceful suburban silence, luckily with Chet Baker’s Almost Blue in my ears.  In a backyard glimpsed between brick houses made entirely of 90-degree angles I see a brightly colored pinwheel spinning-shouting over bulgy plastic yard toys abandoned on their sides.  It is the only motion, outside my own, in a world that has been eaten by long work hours and television.  The former has relinquished its hold for the day, and the people have embraced the anaesthetic of the latter, which blink idiotically through window after window.

It’s a zombie movie, and I’m the only survivor of the plague, only the monsters refuse to leave their houses.

Friday October 7 – I can’t quite tell if I’m exhausted or eager in class, I think both.  All I know is a very unexpected degree of nervousness.  I’m uncomfortable in my own skin like I haven’t been since adolescence.

I’ve gotten off planes with no idea what to expect on 4 continents, and it never felt like this.

I find myself in a state of witness, detached, that I associate with physical danger.  When the infamous California riptide is keeping me away from the beach, and my limbs are getting sluggish in the cold.  Walking alone through a jungle that shivers in the rain to look for a rhino that the guide said was here before he disappeared, and my own feet look so small when I step in the tracks of the animal that could be behind any bush.  Walking, alone alone, through an unknown city at night where I know no words in the language and no people in the country and have no place to sleep tonight and am 90% sure those guys from the alley are following me now.  Walking alone alone alone through a village that seems abandoned other than the half dozen dogs who are surrounding me in growls and barking.

Those all felt fun, my heart smiling as it beat faster.  This classroom detachment is more like nausea.  Logically I find it unwarranted.

In the crowded train station I play the familiar game of trying to spot the pick-pockets among the crowd, college kids heading home with bags of laundry, and the businessmen with panic around their eyes as they negotiate sanity in an existence where they look forward to Friday all week, then get here and realize it’s just waiting in mild annoyance for Monday morning, when they’ll settle back to complaining about work with a sigh of relief.

(Oh, and that one businessman whose pants are way-hay-hay too tight.  Maybe he’s Italian…)

But that’s not quite right, I don’t feel anger or depression at these facefree hordes with briefcases in hand, instead I feel empathy and respect for the tragic and unimaginable sacrifices made with varying degrees of willingness to a system of profane selfishness, desperate need, and idiotic exigencies.  I wonder what the smiling poverty of Nepal would say on this subterranean platform.

But riding home I am filled with a screaming love for the world that wants to caress and smash the lot of it.  I love my fellow man but he needs a kick in the pants and a hug.

Saturday October 8 – When I heard it was a two week training, I kinda dismissed it; how much can you expect to learn in two weeks?  I am surprised at how tiring it is, especially when logically I understand it all, but just can’t manoeuvre it into anything functional.  But enough is enough for now, so I spent Saturday without a thought for this job, instead trying to catch up with the world through the forum of an email each to my mother and brother, and 64 emails of political/environmental/social causes and newsletters.  There are amazing and horrible things going on every damn blessed day.


My Saturday was with two of the amazing things.

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.)

Today at the gym

I have a couple weeks lag time before my new job starts, and I am enjoying the freedom of it immensely.  One of my regular activities is going to the gym, trying to replace the parts of me that withered in Nepal.  I just got back from there, where I followed my normal scheme of rowing machine, weights, then the fancy German circuit machines that increase the resistance on the reverse side of every exercise.  So high-tech!

I use the three weight benches on the side with the windows.  Today I was on the far right, with a guy who looked like Rod Corddry’s beefy younger brother (but with more Celtic tattoos) on my left.  The benches are kinda close together, so we tacitly agreed to alternate our exercises so we wouldn’t whack each other’s hands, which would undoubtedly result in broken fingers and much grunting.

I had just started my turn when it happened.  Over the radio a new song filled the room.  Risin’ up,back on the street, did my time, took my chances.  My ears perked up.  Went the distance now I’m back on my feet, just a man and his will to survive.  One of the bizarre things about gyms the world over is how seriously everyone takes themselves, but I could not keep the smile from my face.

So many times it happens too fast, you trade your passion for glory  I was starting to lose it, and could no longer lift those suddenly humorous things I was holding.  It’s not every day you find yourself in a Rocky montage.

Don’t lose your grip on the dreams of the past, you must fight just to keep them aliiiive. 

Mr. Corddry was looking at me to see what the deal was.  I think I was shaking a little…so he probably just assumed I was tired.

But when the chorus ripped out I couldn’t take any more, and had to sit down and just enjoy the moment.  Sing it with me now

It’s the eye of the tiger, it’s the thrill of the fight, risin’ up to the challenge of our rival, and the last known survivor stalks his prey in the night, and he’s watchin’ us all with the eeeeeeye…of the tiger.

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.

Traveling Home

We headed from our home in Nepal to our home in Belgium (sometimes the blessings of life overwhelm me) and had a layover in Bahrain.

As I said, we found the Bahrain airport a somewhat unnerving place on the way over, with that febrile Middle Eastern tension, dramatic white robes and scowling faces, burqa’s and subservient women’s positions, and not a smile to be seen, all mixed with the exhausted exhilaration of travellers en route to and from adventures, plus the nervous and maybe homesick faces of workers or migrants on their way to new jobs and lives, all in a setting made rather surreal by the presence of a Starbucks and a Chili’s restaurant.  Looking out the window at the Middle East, and hearing someone order a grande nonfat latte, all after spending two months hearing only broken English, makes for a weird afternoon.

There’s a massive US military presence in tiny Bahrain, so a noticeable percentage of the people there have the beefy solidity, scouring eyes, and short haircuts of servicemen (though I though the military had its own planes, so can’t but wonder if these guys were “contractors.”  I almost asked one guy, but he looked like he would kill me with his stir-stick if I spoke to him.).  I suspect the Starbucks and Chili’s make for the closest thing to home for American troops, and indeed I felt like I had flown from Kathmandu to Bahrain with a layover in Kansas.  It’s like a redneck’s private nightmare: a strip mall in the Heartland where most of the passerby are Muslims in full desert regalia, and there is a picture of Sheikh Hamad ibn Isa Al Kalifah smiling in his keffiye hung on top of the chili pepper logo.

Ramadan had ended the previous day, and I sat in a mix of amusement, guilt, and pity as men with bellies the size of Texas (or a Texan’s) stuffed home fries into their faces, guzzled soda from those oversized plastic faux-steins with jug handles, and tapped at Iphones with greasy fingers.  It was like America, only the customers were extra demanding and condescending to the staff.

I ate only natural foods all summer: rice, vegetables, and little pieces of chicken or buffalo (or goat lung at the barbecue) a couple times, all of which were most likely grown within the valley.  Now I was faced with an American-sized Ranch Chicken Sandwich with “tangy wing sauce” and a slab of meat larger, whiter, and more texturally consistent than anything you will ever find on a Nepali (i.e. natural) chicken.  It was awesome.  For the first third.  The second third was fine and dandy, and the final third was…challenging.  I was glad K was there to try the home fries…  Please honey, "try" all of them?

There I am, still wearing the kata scarf that I was given in the Nepali/Hindu farewell ceremony with Rajesh's family, the red tika dot on the forehead recently worn/washed off, and a monster food-thing in hand.  Given my mental state at the time, it is appropriate that I am blurry, while my delightful destroyer is solid.  The three meals before leaving Kathmandu, plus the airplane “food,” meant this was my fifth meal that day (or day-ish unit of time).  That may have been part of why I couldn’t sleep very well on the flight to London.  Oy, the belly rats were discontent, lemme tell ya.

With the lack of sleep and culinary irresponsibility weighing down my mind and body, we landed at Heathrow.  As we approached I marvelled at the giant office/apartment/university buildings, which looked like oversized batteries, a dozen storeys tall.  Surely they don’t need so many?  And the double decker buses looked almost realistic as we approached terra firma.  The British mastered uniformity (see: row houses) and exported it around the world for mixed results, an arguably benevolent disease.

We were in row 46, and it took awhile before our turn for the long walk through the 45 preceding rows, which looked like they had been the setting for a three day rockstar binge.  I am always amazed by how much mess humans make.  More garbage than I can account for, socks draped over armrests and is that a pair of underwear stuffed in the seatback pocket?

We both needed a bathroom visit, Heathrow is massive, and Italians are histrionic to the point of the ridiculous, so it took longer than we expected to make it to the Brussels Airlines desk for our boarding pass.  Once we got there we encountered some local fauna.  The British Grumpy Desk Beast is similar to its counterparts in other nations, but is characterized by a bulging gut that springs open a crucial button on the shirt front to leave a peaking zone of pasty belly.  Apparently undershirts are not part of the Heathrow dress code.  If it had been a video game monster, that would be the weakpoint you have to shoot/hit with a pineapple.

This Grumpy Desk Beast was fully mature, so it had some measure of influence over the lives of others which combined with the characteristic cantankerousness of the breed to make it bark at us “what time’s ya flight?...Na, ye won’t make it now, will you.”  (It was not phrased as a question.)  Our flight was scheduled to take off in 27 minutes.

This particular desk habitat was shared by a female Helpful Employee, a lovely species that unfortunately is seriously threatened by climate change.  Helpful Employee asked “which gate is it leaving from?” and scooped a phone up from under the desk, but Grumpy Beast swatted that idea with “if I knew that I wouldn’t be doing this, would I?  No.”  I asked if they could tell us the gate and we could try to run for it, the Beast pressed its lips together and its tightened eyes shouted “Run, eh?  Cuz it’s just that easy for you spring chickens, isn’t it?  No!”  And continued aloud “you’ll have to lad yourselves and try again.”

I put my backpack loaded with a stolen airplane blanket and 32 hours awake on my back and asked with, I must say, an impressive level of politeness “I’m sorry, what does ‘lad yourself’ mean?”

The Desk Beast looked at me with beady eyes barely restrained by thick glasses and said “yes, lad yourself.  (pause and scowl)  Gate 16.”  Feeling the likelihood of physical violence from one party or the other increasing, we opted to go see what Gate 16 was like.  Luckily it was staffed by another Helpful Employee, this one male.  I plan to go back and see if I can introduce the two Helpfuls to each other in the hope that they will form a breeding pair and continue the species.

Turns out we didn’t need to “lad” ourselves, but “land” ourselves, which meant we had to exit the airport, going through customs and border control and all that crap, reach the sidewalk outside Heathrow (hello bonny old England!) and then turn around and come back in the front door to reach the ticket desk for Brussels Airlines.  Apparently there was no way to transmit our need to be rescheduled outside of the security screened portion of the airport.  (When I go back for my Helpful Breeding Program, remind me to bring them a pair of telephones as a breeding present.)

I don’t know if it was the small Ganesh figurines we were carrying in our pockets (the elephant-headed Hindu god of fortune) or if England’s population of Helpful Employees is in fact robust, but the rest of the people we dealt with were delightful.  Shy Christopher at the check-in desk with his slightly oversized suit jacket and quiet voice deserved a hug.  The ticket desk guy wanted to hear about trekking possibilities in Nepal and to be honest I would love to go back and hike the Annapurna’s with the guy.  Even the grandfatherly customs official is invited to my birthday party.

We had just enough time to grab a bite to eat before our rescheduled flight, during which we saw some additional fauna, including the Ridiculously Attractive Scruffy Young Irish Lad With A Guitar, As If He Wasn’t Going To Get Laid As Easily As Breathe Already.  (I have observed that an acoustic guitar is the second most powerful tool in the human arsenal for procuring the attentions of the human female, only exceeded in power by a good Irish/Scottish accent, so this strumming Irish sonuvabeach with a scruffy beard and soulful blue eyes was just overkill.)

We landed in Brussels just about 24 hours after leaving Rajesh’s place, and it was good and peculiar to be back.  I saw my first car in months pass us on the lefthand side when it was legal to do so (just as lanes are something of a western concept, so are sides of the road).  Our baggage never popped out onto the conveyer belt but filling out the claim form was easy and they dropped the bags off the next day.  On the train we met a pair of gentlemen from Burkina Faso who wanted us to take their picture and then take one of us, and whose smiles shone brightly enough to blot out the reflected glare off the Desk Beast’s exposed paunch in my tender bruised memory.

So now I’m back in Belgium.  Still not sure exactly how that feels.  I flush the toilet with water cleaner than what I’ve been drinking all summer.  I walk down the street and no one looks at me; after all, no reason to stare at the white person in Belgium.  Eventually I know this anonymity and impersonality will grate on me a bit, but for now it is blessedly peaceful; I no longer feel like a diplomat onstage, representing The West.  I have a stunning variety of clothes to choose from, and best of all: none of them stink.  I don’t think I’ve heard a single car horn yet…and I may erupt into a hymn of gratitude for it.

But there are no little voices calling out questions or answers.  And there are no scents of cardamom ghosting around.  The only Buddhist chants around are the ones we brought with us (turns out that CD should have been titled “Hippies with a guitar sing Buddhism” but it’s still good).  I assume I have begun the inevitable process of forgetting.  I am supposed to start a new job in a couple weeks, though suddenly my prospective employer is not returning my emails.

Life goes on, for me, Nepal, and Grumpy Desk Beasts around the globe.