Buses and waffles

I might as well get into a good habit of writing every few days while I have the time, so here goes post number two of random thoughts and stories.

Our neighbor, Robin from Norway, came down last night for evening banana bread and tea. Very cozy! He is a Norwegian student at a Buddhist school here in Kathmandu, and has been very helpful. Halfway through the meal the electricity suddenly came back on, (it was off) and we all jumped. After some ooing and aahing (light, woohoo!) I started thinking about how we start appreciating these things in a new way here. Small things, like electricity, warm water or a driver who uses his blinkers (!) make us happy. Did they make us happy at home? We’re actually getting pretty good at doing things in the dark here. Every day power is off for 3 to 6 hours or so (supposedly following a schedule.. haha) to save electricity. Our candles are at all times placed in strategic spots around the apartment, and by now it feels quite normal to do everything from reading to eating to peeing by candlelight.

In the outside world our biggest achievement since we arrived is, without a doubt, learning to take the bus. Did I say bus? I meant the little white vans that rattle along, fitting up to 34 people inside (yes, we've counted!), including the people often hanging on in the open door. These microbuses (that’s what they’re called) don’t really ever stop. There is a guy standing in the door who is in charge of shouting out the destination of the bus, shoving people inside, holding them in, and making them pay. A slap on the roof means stop, two means go. To get on a bus you have to be quite agressive; stepping out into the road to ask where it’s going, and then scrambling in while it’s still moving slowly. The first day, Anna and I ended up with the stand-in-the-door, hang-on-to-the-roof, look-out-for-telephone-poles spots. These are really not bad. Andrea was bent double with her butt outside and her head just under the roof inside, and of course Nepalis love to laugh at people (especially white ones) who don’t know what they’re doing. The first few days I’m sure we gave a lot of joy and entertainment to our fellow passengers, but the last couple of days we’ve actually managed to do the whole 1 ½ hour ride and transfer smoothly! They don’t even make us pay more than the average Nepali, which is a sure sign that we don’t look like clueless tourists anymore. Progress!

Our first bus ride included a monsoon rainshower. I am talking heavy, hard drops that soak you to your skin within seconds, not an annoying drizzle. We got off to transfer to another bus, and found ourselves splashing around in an ankle-deep river (the road), trying to see through the pounding bucketfuls of water being dumped over our heads. Running around in 3 lanes of white minivans, trying to find the right one.. we soon abandoned all hopes of keeping anything dry on our bodies for the rest of that day. But the rain brings back good memories: of muddy swimmingpools in the streets, warm rain, catching frogs.. the roads are just as muddy and stinky as they always were. We try not to think of what we’re stepping in on our way home (to quote Andrea: ”it looks like we’re walking in a nice stream of diarrhea” – unfortunately this is probably not too far from the truth).

Today we went to the Norwegian embassy's friday "waffleparty", to meet other Norwegians (and for the brown cheese of course). We met Alice Holmen, who recruited us, and who is going to show us around HDCS headquarters (the organization that runs the center where we will be working) on Monday. We are looking forward to getting started, even though we enjoy the days of roaming around town, reading, eating out and knitting by candlelight at home. I will tell you more about our job when we've seen it ourselves!

Sentence of the day:
"yo microbusmaa chautis janaa chha!"
(= there are thirty-four people in this microbus.)

Namaste!

Here comes the blog I promised I would write, to update you all on our year of volunteering in Nepal. I am pretty proud of myself that I have managed to get this far (as some of you may know, computers aren’t my best friends). Although it’s hard to describe life here in words, I’ll try to update you regularly with news and stories from our life in Kathmandu. Feel free to comment or ask questions!

So far our move to Nepal has been pretty smooth. (That is – smooth isn’t the right word for Kathmandu. They dont really do smooth here.) We arrived on Friday the 19th, and after a bit off shuffling between hot and sticky lines of tired and grumpy people, a bit of sign language and a few dollars we got our visas. The many complicated and detailed questions on the forms seem to make up for the apparent lack of interest and the half-hearted checking of what we wrote on them; we had a funny feeling that the stack of nicely filled-in forms disappeared mysteriously shortly after we left the site.

From the minute we stepped out of the little brick airport (it hasn’t changed a bit!) and into the crowd, it was good to be back. From the many hands reaching out to carry our bags (for a few rupees, of course), to the turbulent taxi-ride , roads that look somewhat like pictures you’ve seen of the surface of the moon, the smell of burning garbage, smoke and dust, food and spice, dogs and cows... it was a well-known and familiar sort of landing.

I’m getting ahead of myself here. First came the loooong plane trip: 10 ½ hours + 4 hours in Bangkok + 3 ½ hours to Kathmandu. We were pretty awake during the first flight, but managed to fal asleep in a very elegant position (all three of us slumped on top of eachother) on a bench in the BKK airport. (This was, of course, after a plate of mangoes and stickyrice, and a fruit smoothie) We did get a few funny looks, but there comes a point in tiredness where you just don’t care.
Some of our highlights from the flight include:
- Anna falling asleep with her head lolling in the middle of the aisle and getting backed into by a friendly little Thai stewardess: ”very tired?”
- ”Look, we’re going to crash into that plane right over there.” – Andrea on the runway, lack of sleep licking in.
- Anna nearly running down an even smaller Thai lady, ”They’re so tiny, I can’t really see them.”
- Andrea mistaking the wing of the plane for fascinating Nepali landscape. (Lack of sleep becoming severe.)
Though I behaved completely normally and with dignity as usual, I did contribute with my ”moments” (recognizing a significant place or smell, triggoring vivid childhood memories). A moment is a moment.

If we though we were tired in BKK, by the time we got to our flat at 2ish, took ashower, went out to explore, and sat down to eat (determined to stay up: beat the jetlag), the ground was definitely swaying slightly. The first day was followed by a solid 12-hour sleep, and a few days of getting settled. We live in the area of town called Bouddha, where there are a lot of Tibetan immigrants and Buddhist temples. We live just down the street from a Stupa similar to the one you see on the picture here, which is the most peaceful place, (almost) away from the noisy, dusty streets of Kathmandu. It’s a beautiful area, and we have now found our favorite mobile phone-guy, vegetables-and-rice-guy, fruit-girl and fabric-lady. We love just wandering around, taking in life in the streets. Traffic is an experience, as our upstairs neighbor says ”it’s like a videogame, where hitting a cow is game over”. We were ecstatic today when we saw our driver actually use the blinkers!

Sunday we went to the international church, where I met several old friends from Nepal days. I really love being back here, it feels almost as though I never left! I even find myself remembering things in Nepali that I didn’t know I knew. Today we met with Samjhana, who will be our language-helper and who will introduce us to the place we’ll be working at. In a couple weeks we will have settled down into the rythm of everyday life here.

We have found a dream in life: a book and a pot of tea on a rooftop in a sea of prayer flags, overlooking the Bouddhanath Stupa. What more could you wish for?