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?