Happy Loshar!!!

A couple of days ago, Jenn and I spent the day with my boss and coworkers celebrating the Gurung New Year. The festival is called Loshar and what is a Gurung you ask? The Gurung are one of the many indigenous people that make up Nepali society. Originally the Gurung people came from the Annapurna area of the country, but now they are dispersed throughout Nepal. They originated from the mid-hills to the higher elevation Himalayas of Nepal. There are in fact 61 indigenous groups in Nepal.

We started out our celebration on the evening of the 29th by going out for dinner with my co-workers. Parbat (my boss) has a brother who owns a restaurant, so we all piled into a taxi and headed down to the World Trade Center in the southern part of Kathmandu where the restaurant is located. The restaurant was very new (18 months in operation) and very nice, the food was good and we all had a good time. It was actually the first time that Jenn had met my co-workers so it was a very pleasant introduction.

The next day was the actual Loshar celebration which took place at Ratna Park in central Kathmandu. The celebration was much bigger than I thought it would be, and I was told that up to 50,000 people would be in attendance that day. We arrived a little later in the afternoon, as we skipped the formal speeches (seeing as we wouldn’t understand them anyway). We arrived in time for the start of the cultural program. The program included traditional singing and dancing. It was very interesting and entertaining, but the real entertainment was just watching the many people that were gathered and visiting with friends and family. It was an incredibly friendly environment. Many people stopped and wished up a happy Loshar. One child really liked Jenn’s hair and kept coming by to surreptitiously touch it. There were seemingly an endless number of booths set up and each one was selling food! It smelled pretty amazing, but Jenn and I withheld for the most part as Parbat warned us that the food was prepared in pretty unhygienic conditions. So we just smelled the food instead… We left at about 5:30 but the party apparently would go on all night! My counterpart Khilendra explained to me that Gurung celebrations always involve drinking and as such the party would get wilder as the night went on. Before we left we could see that the dancing had started. It was nice to see the spontaneous dancing that would start as the traditional folk music played on.

Jenn and I were very thankful to be invited and to take part in the Loshar celebrations. It is precisely events like these that make our time in Nepal interesting and worthwhile.