It’s been a while since I last updated the blog, and I have no specific topic to address, but thought I would give a little update on our status here in Nepal.
On living conditions…. Things have shaped up in our apartment. We no longer live as complete minimalists and we have replaced our plastic patio table and chairs with a real dining room table. We now are the proud owners of a spare bed, so all those who stay with us can sleep on a real bed!
Electricity has been the biggest inconvenience so far, as we are now operating on 8 hours of electricity per day. We get 4 hour chunks of electricity interspersed between 8 hour outages. Very difficult to get work done, or anything done for that matter! Sometimes that 4 hour chunk will come at 4 in the morning, so the useful hours of electricity in one day can sometimes be only 4 hours!! Crazy! I have heard that the hours of electricity will increase come March, but I will have to see it before I believe it.
On the weather…. Things are warming up here in Kathmandu. It feels as though the winter is over. The days are warming up (although the days never really got that cold), and the nights are definitely not as cold these days. We do not need to use our heater nearly as much and I have stopped wearing my long underwear! This must mean that winter is over right???
On friends…. We have seen quite a few friends come and go now that we have been here for over 3 months (getting close to 4!). It is a bit of a transition period for the Uniterra Program that I am working for. The program is up for renewal and until the minister signs off on the program, there will be no more recruitment of volunteers here in Nepal. So, the numbers of Canadian volunteers is dwindling as people finish up their mandates. Since Jenn and I arrived we have seen about 7 long term volunteers leave and only one arrive! They have been a good support group though and have definitely made our transition to Nepal easier. We also have made friends with a number of wonderful Nepali people and have spent some time visiting with them in their homes… I will write about that another time.
On language… Jenn and I have started taking Nepali language lessons. It’s pretty slow going, but we can do some counting (ek, dui, tin, char…), ask people their name and how they are doing (tapai: ko naam ke ho?) and conjugate a number of verbs. It’s not very useful yet, but we’ll get there.
On entertainment… Sometimes it is difficult to entertain ourselves when we are sitting in the dark, but we have been able to keep up with recently released movies. Nepal has a thriving bootleg DVD market with numerous shops around the city selling recently released movies on DVD. So, we have seen a number of the Academy Award nominee films on DVD already including Slumdog Millionaire, Revolutionary Road etc. The quality can be somewhat suspect, but for the most part they are watchable. Jenn and I have also been catching up on television series that we had previously missed, such as Heroes and Carnivale. We are trying to keep up with the Lost series as well, but it takes us forever to download the files off the internet. The first two episodes took me 4 days to download! The power kept cutting out, so it would interrupt my downloading…
On health… I have been very healthy (knock on wood), but Jenn has had difficulties adjusting to the polluted Nepali environment. For the first two months, Jenn really suffered with a very bad case of sinusitis and one cold after another. She felt better for a little while and since then has gotten sick again. It’s been really frustrating for her, as she wants to do the things she had planned but her health has been getting in the way.
It’s been a difficult past couple of weeks and at times both Jenn and I have been Nepaled out. The electricity situation can be demoralizing, and on top of that the constant onslaught of pollution. Recently Jenn got her hair cut and she had asked for just a trim (less than an inch). What she got was 6 inches cut off and a Nepali style haircut called a "step cut", which is apparently just 4 chunky layers (not even blended). She was horribly upset as it had taken her sooo long to grow out her hair to a length that she liked.
To make things worse, we had purchased a very expensive Thangka (Tibetan religious painting) a while back. It was a beautiful piece of art! We were heading out to get it framed and we got distracted as we got out of the taxi… we forgot the thangka in the back seat and he drove off. By the time we realized it, he was long gone. There are so many taxis in this city, that there is no way we could ever find him again. C’est la vie! It just kind of topped off our week. In protest of our rough week, we went with a friend out for dinner and had a nice big helping of steak and beef burgers!
Holy Mother Burgers
ReplyDelete