Monkeys!

This weekend we went up to the Gokarna Golf Course / Resort, also known as Le Meridien, after the chain that currently owns it.  We’re told the resort has the only 18-hole golf course in the entire country of Nepal.  (Hey, golf started in Scotland–that’s a LONG way from here!)

Since we’re not golfers, we were most interested in the chance to get out of the city for a while.  A day with no beeping or hammering or loud music or gaggling voices–city dwellers of the world, unite!  You know what I’m talking about.  Country dwellers, you know about something the city dwellers forget:  silence.

Or at least the softer sounds of chirping birds and gentle breezes.  We very much looked forward to that, when we saw the sign for the resort.  We knew it had been built on the site of an old royal hunting preserve, and its sign pointed to the sanctuary of nature it now is.

I know, it's sort of cock-eyed, and I didn't quite capture it all--but the car was moving at the time, all right?

Matters looked even more promising as we continued up the road to the resort.  As the road entered the trees, we could have been back in Southern Indiana.  I could have been home:  a gently sloping road climbing a hill, through overhanging, verdant trees…

Kathmandu woods, or American woods?

And then I remembered we were in Nepal.  Because we both gasped, and my husband slowed the car, and we pointed and talked at the same time–and since I luckily had it handy, I swung the camera into position and caught them.  Monkeys!

Um, not something I see running across the road every day?

Nepali of the day:

rukh:  tree

tasbiir:  photo(s)

kiichnu:  to take

tasbiir kiichnu:  to take photos

*I don’t know monkey yet — I’ll look it up and add it later.  But I do know the monkey god is Hanuman.

Henna, Revisited

I’m tired and don’t want to write much, but since I feel I ought to put up something, here are some pictures from a month ago, to go with the Aug. 29 post about the Nepali Teej Festival.

This is how the henna looked after it dried, before I picked it off.

I was surprised by the process — henna goes on like paint, deftly squeezed out by experienced artists to create the designs.  Then, for about an hour, you don’t want to touch anything or move your hands too much, because that will smear the henna and ruin the design.  After about an hour, you’re technically free to move your hands again, but it’s better to keep them as still as possible, because the more you move, the more likely you’ll loosen the dried henna for it to flake off.

I read online that the skin could keep absorbing the pigment for about 8 hours, so I tried to keep as much as possible on until that point, at which time the picture above and the picture below were taken.

By this point I'd picked the henna off my finger, but you can still see the dried stuff on my palm.

If you look carefully at my palm above, you can see where I partially squished the design while the henna was still wet.  Still, mostly it turned out very well — the picture below was taken about a week later.

The quality of the henna, on the backs of my hands (where it was lighter) after it had a week to fade.

Earlier this week one of my friends marveled at the fact that you could still barely see a trace of the design at the bottom of my palm.  “Wow, you must really love your husband!”  (Remember, the Teej Festival is a celebration for women, but also a day when they pray for the long life of their husband and the prosperity of his family.)  “Or else you must never wash your hands…”  I indignantly answered, “I do wash them!  Often!”

And I use hand sanitizer, too — I’m paranoid about the germs here, and as paranoid about the water.  (See …And Not a Drop to Drink.)

But I had left the dried henna on longer than anyone else (most picked it off after an hour) and I was much paler to start with, a handy blank canvas.  Finally, today, I noticed that you can no longer see the slightest trace of henna.

Almost a month… a fair long time!

Nepali of the Day:

mehndi:  the usual word for henna here, even when talking to an English-speaking Nepali

haat:  hand

haatharu:  hands

haptaa:  week

mehina:  month

Nepali Pedestrian Life

I decided to walk home today.  I went out to the street, saw the traffic was backed up as far as I could see in both directions, and determined that I could probably walk to the nearest chowk faster than I could find a taxi to take me to it.

By the time I reached the chowk, I realized I was enjoying the walk.  It was still light, about 5:40, and I knew that if I got tired, or misjudged the distance and it started getting too dark, I could find a taxi later.

So at the chowk I calmly reverted to a little trick I’ve learned.  I still have trouble drumming up the nerve to jump out into the middle of the street in front of traffic.  Yes, I know how slow they’re going, and I know the local people do it all the time, and I haven’t seen anyone hit yet.  But I still hear, in my mind, stern remonstrances to not cross the road except at crosswalks, when the signal is favorable and I’ve carefully ascertained that all the traffic has stopped.

So here, whenever possible, I go stand with a cluster of Nepalis who look like they want to cross the road.  I don’t watch the traffic as much as I watch them; when they start to cross, I match them step for step.  The crassness in this is that I usually keep to whichever side is further from traffic.  The honesty in it is that I figure they know what they’re doing a lot better than I do, and they can judge when it’s time to skiddadle or slow down or even stop, for anything ranging from a motorcycle to a massive truck barrelling along.  With their guidance, I always feel more confident, and I’ve made it across every road I’ve tried.

To quickly end the above:  I did in fact make it home just as dusk was falling, discovering that the 3 km walk took about 35 minutes.  I used to drive 36 miles to work each day, and the same back.  I was lucky to survive “rush hour” by arriving home in less than an hour.  A 35 minute WALK is remarkable — and much more healthy.  And less frustrating!

Plus, I have the joy of using the Pretty Mountain Hill as my northern landmark, walking straight toward it.  Watching the sun’s rays go iridescent, all around it, is breath-taking.

On the negative side, so is the exhaust from the motors clogging the road.  Far more people walk here than anywhere in the US, and a fair percentage of them do so while wearing breath masks.  Women often lift up their pashminas — their thin scarves or shawls, which are a required fashion item here — and hold the fabric over their mouth and nose for improvised filters.  I’m very tempted to do the same, and may at some point while we’re here.

Every once in a while, though, even an urban walk is nice.

And a final note on times and distances:  Usually, the same drive for the road I walked takes us about 20 minutes.  In the middle of the night, when there’s virtually no traffic and you drive slow only to avoid those who are out without headlights… it takes less than five minutes.  Go figure.

(I actually take the below pictures several days ago; none of them feature the Pretty Mountain Hill.  But they should give you some idea of the sunset here.)

Nepali of the day:

hidnu:  to walk

hidchu:  I walk

hid-ay:  I walked

ghar:  home

-tira:  toward

-maa:  in, at, to

aaja:  today

kahile pani:  almost never

Ma kahile pani ghartira hidchu:  I almost never walk home.

Aaja ma gharmaa hiday:  Today I walked home.

Happy 2 Month Anniversary, and Over 1000 Hits, And…

Mauph Garnus!

I’m afraid it has again been a while since I’ve written a post.  And I can’t blame it on the internet this time — I’ve just been busy or exhausted.

In my last post I wrote that our stuff had gotten here.  We spent several days unpacking it, and we’re still straightening up the house even now.  It’s nearly done…

But meanwhile we’ve done other things, too.  I thought at the end of last Sunday that I could write a week’s worth of posts just about that day.  I still could, and might.

Meanwhile I’m distracted by today.

This evening we went down to Thamel to pick up some paintings we bought last Sunday and left to be framed.  They’re AMAZING — the artist is very talented.  His style is mildly impressionistic.  We were first drawn in by his painting of a tiny shack on a snow-covered mountainside, with taller peaks in the distance — a cloudy mist obscures the entire landscape, so realistic it seems about to pour off the canvas.  Then we discovered he’d painted another work of matching size and color and style, except of people in two small boats setting out on a misty lake.  And picture number three seemed the perfect fulcrum to place in the middle of the other two long paintings.  It’s smaller, more of a square, and depicts the sillhouette of a heavily-laden yak in the middle of crossing a rickety bridge over a cavern — still in the same eerie mist.

Yes, pictures are worth more than words.  We’ll unwrap & hang up the paintings soon — I’ll take pictures of them then, to post.

On a related note, if you’re visiting Kathmandu, and you go to Thamel, find you way to the 21st Century Art Gallery in Seven Corners.  It’s well worth it.

Seven Corners?  The area, on the …. west side (I think) of Thamel… in any case, just head straight in from the entrance by the King’s former palace and turn right when the road dead-ends by the Barnes & Noble Book (sic!).  Then, if you pay attention, you can notice the road zagging seven times in a row around (7) sharp corners.  Voila, Seven Corners.

Now, if you’ve ever spent time in the DC metropolitan area, you may know of another Seven Corners.  There it’s not just a line of 7 zags–oh, no!  Instead, there are honestly seven separate roads that all converge on the SAME spot.  The traffic lights there are the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen.  The traffic always has minor jams, and beeping horns; really, looking back, I’m amazed traffic moves through that intersection as well as it does.  There are several places where there’s only space for two cars between a row of stoplights separating the rival roads.  Some lucky people get to go straight through; others have the choice of not just right or left turns, but right-sharp or right-forward or left-sharp or left-forward turns.  The angles are just extraordinary.

The art gallery here nestles in one of the zags.  While considering the paintings, we spent a while staring out at the motorcycles zooming around the corners or the cars slowly beeping along or, most commonly, the wandering people.  And I realized something:  while the traffic in Kathmandu scared me when we first got here, now I think that when I return the traffic back in the US will positively terrify me.  Blood and bloody ashes, they drive so fast!

And in the US you can’t exactly duck out into the middle of the road and calmly hold out your palm, low, near your waist, in a stop gesture, and expect all the cars (and motorcycles) to obey.  That irratated me to no end when I first got here; now I’ve realized it’s just the way pedestrians get around.  My husband has been doing it for a while.  I did it for the first time today, when I was hurrying across the main road into/out of Thamel with the heavy painting.  And the traffic was already mostly stopped, anyway, all the drivers leaning on their horns in protest of a jam around the next corner, so the on-coming drivers resigned themselves to waiting an extra 30 seconds to scoot forward instead of taking advantage of the meter-long gap forming between them and the car they followed.

One more thing–for the first time today, I saw real Kathmandu cats!  I did glimpse one kitty while we were at Bhaktapur; I’ve glimpsed another one or two while we drive up and down the main roads, always in the distance and rapidly disappearing.  But today, while we waited for the shop owner to wrap up the paintings, I flipped through ECS, the leading expatriate magazine here — and glimpsed a blur shoot by my feet, from one open wall of the shop to the other (as I said, the store’s built into a corner — it actually only has two solid walls, and a pillar at the opposite corner to hold up the roof).

I blinked.  “I think that was a cat!  Or else a really large rat…”

My husband added, “It’s a white one!  And it’s over there!”

He pointed the opposite direction, and I was confused, until I watched the brown one I’d glimpsed go darting through with the white one after it.  And then it paused in the middle of the shop, and in a split second I wondered how the shopkeeper would respond to seeing a cat in the middle of his fine paintings store.

The cat froze, staring up at us with wild eyes.  In the same moment I noticed it wore a collar, and the shopkeeper glanced up from his wrapping and said, “Oh, that’s the neighbor’s cat.”

He made a sound between his teeth, a kind of “ttsshh” that I’ve heard other Nepalis make to various animals, dogs and cows and even goats; I’ve yet to figure out whether it’s supposed to be a shooing or summoning sound, though I suspect the former.

The cat started a little, then finished observing us and went to sulk on the front step of the shop, twitching its tail and staring out at the traffic with much the same mild interest as we must have displayed a moment before.  It was quite a pretty cat — a mottled golden brown, with sharp features, so that it reminded me of an Abyssinian.  It was quite skinny and on the small side, with yellow-orange-green-tinged eyes that were a little wild, but its evident ease with not just people, but strangers, proved it was happy enough.  When it discretely turned its head back enough to inspect us, I carefully blinked at it.

The cat’s eyes widened more, and it involuntarily jerked its head a bit; I’ve learned this is the cat equivalent of a start.  I read years ago that to blink at a cat is a way to tell it “I love you;” since then I’ve read other sources that interpret the gesture as sending more of a message of, “Hey, I can take my eyes off you for a moment; I trust you; and I’m not staring at you, planning to attack you; you can trust me, too.”

I lean toward the latter explanation as better depicting what goes through a cat’s mind.  After all, cats don’t need to blink to keep their eyes moist, and usually don’t, unlike humans; it makes sense they could develop meaning behind the simple movement.  And they clearly interpret the motion with a strong meaning; I’ve seen multiple cats start that exact same way when I first carefully blink at them, and I know my own pet cats always snuggle closer and purr louder, and start returning the slow blinks, when I blink at them.

In fact, the first time I ever intentional blinked at one of my pets, the same day I first read that the gesture could have meaning, I did it to an elderly cat I’d had for years.  And immediately her eyes widened, and her ears perked, in an expression that I can only describe as shock.  For a long moment.  And then, slowly, carefully, she relaxed and returned the blink — and then turned her face clear away.

So maybe that first book’s interpretation was right.  I’m not sure you can find a closer parallel in non-human relationships to the awkward moment when a usually distant family member suddenly says, “I love you.” and the other member, startled, replies with a careful, “I love you, too.”

In any case, today’s cat then glanced away from me, too.  It didn’t return the blink.  But its muscles relaxed some, and it stopped discreetly peering at us.  Instead it just cocked its ears toward the traffic, until it abruptly took off down an alley after something that caught its interest.

See?  I still like to write.  There’s plenty more to say about life in Kathmandu.  I have more pictures, too.  I intend to return to posting more regularly — then, hopefully, my novelist tendencies won’t spill over to my blog!

Novels are going well, by the way.  Six and a half still unpublished.  (Sigh)…

Nepali of the day:

mauph garnus:  I’m sorry!  Excuse me!

painting:  painting

pasal:  store

mahongo:  expensive

sasto:  inexpensive

dherai mahongo:  way too expensive

kati rupiyaa:  how many rupees?

yo kati rupiyaa ho?:  how much does this cost?

yo:  this

tyo:  that

HHE!

Do you know the joys of household effects?

Our stuff finally arrived!  Things I haven’t seen for NINE MONTHS and was starting to doubt had ever existed.

My own dishes!  My own sheets!  My own decorations!  ALL MY TEACHING STUFF!

And my husband’s stuff, too.  I guess he’s excited about that.

But we aren’t as excited over the same stuff.  When we were eating supper tonight, and I exulted, “No more flowery plates!  Goodbye, flowery plates!” he sternly said, “Apologize to the flowery plates.  You hurt their feelings.”

“Well, it’s not like I have a problem with the flowery plates.  But they’re just not MY plates.”

So.  This evening has been a time of much unpacking.  That will continue tomorrow.  It’s very funny — we packed up all of this just after Christmas, and apparently we didn’t separate out the holiday decorations very well, because we keep finding Christmas decorations everywhere.  At one point I entered the living room where Sean was unpacking, and it might as well have been December, what with the five neat little figurines all arrayed on the coffee table… which he’d found amongst CDs and souvenir/decorations and linens.

Good grief, it’s September.  I’m happy the Halloween decorations apparently made it here, too (at least their box did).  I’m just about ready to set them out, as soon as I have an autumnal equinox as an excuse.

And all this goes very well with a conversation I had with a Nepali earlier today.

“If I planted some flowers now, would they just die in a few months, or can they live through the winter?”

“Most are okay.”

“Do they keep blooming?”

“…not all of them.  Not so much.  But some do.”

“So they’ll be okay?  I know it doesn’t snow here.”

Suddenly he was very proud.  “Two years ago it snowed.”

I’ve heard tales of this snow — the city woke up with a light dusting, like powdered sugar, which melted in less than an hour.  And it was the first snow in 50 years.

“I think it will be very different from my home.  I’m used to it snowing four or five times a year.”

Shocked.  “Five times?  In one year?”

And then we went on to have a quite interesting discussion about snow plows (“I don’t understand plow”  “I guess not; you wouldn’t have any need for it here.  It’s like a big truck with a giant shovel on the front–you understand shovel?–and the shovel pushes the snow off the road, so it’s safe to drive on.”)  And about salting roads to prevent snow from sticking.

But… sigh.  The only snow this year will likely be in my snowglobes, and the icicles will have to be the shiny tinsel on our little artificial tree.

Then again, I don’t particularly like the cold.  40s at night (Fahrenheit) doesn’t sound bad.

In any case:  to sleep, to wake up early for endless unpacking tomorrow!

(the pictures below are actually from the arrival of our earlier shipment, which just had things we had with us or got just before we left the US… what arrived today is the bulk of our actual stuff… but the view of the arrival is very much the same)

Kathmandu moving truck — straight from the airport to our door

The joys of unpacking

Unpacking, continued

Nepali of the day:

sutnu:  to sleep

khannu:  to eat

kaam garnu:  to do work

chhahunnu: to want (to do something)

chhahunchu:  I want (to do something)

chhahundina:  I don’t want (to do something)

Ma sutna chhahanchu.   –   I want to sleep.

Ma khanna chhahundina.  –  I don’t want to eat.

Ma kaam garna chhahundina.  — I don’t want to do work.

Ma sutna chhahanchu!

Busy Weekend

I know, I’m getting worse about regularly making updates.  I’m getting too adjusted to living here.  When getting out was a challenge, I had plenty of time at home to take pictures out the windows and fiddle with loading the pics into my camera and picking out my favorites and coming here to write posts around them and…

Well, now I’m unfortunately a bit busy.  Or fortunately — this is an amazing place.  It’s incredible to explore.

Though it’s becoming enough of “home” for me to forget more often to actually take the camera out with me.  So maybe no pictures again today — and I’ll just write briefly, because I’m also a novelist in my spare time, and I’ve promised myself that in 14 minutes I get to go edit drafts.  (Hip, hip… why is no one celebrating with me?!)

Anyway:

On Saturday — yesterday– we walked farther than we have since we arrived in Nepal.  We actually reached the point where we could see the individual trunks of the trees covering the hill beside The Pretty Mountain Hill.  In fact, we ascended a fair bit of The Pretty Mountain Hill itself.

Not to say we did any real trekking.  Our “long” walk was an hour and a half out and the same back, all along the road, straight up Maharajgunj and whatever comes after it up toward Shivapuri National Park.  We didn’t actually reach the park, either, though according to the map I checked today, we actually got very close to its borders.  We even reached the tree line, and for the first time in three months I could look up at normal-sized, refreshingly looming, trees over my head.

Many houses, and the side of the road, in Kathmandu have fruit trees.  Admittedly, near Thamel and the King’s former palace there are some nicely tall trees, too.  But I grew up playing in a forest.  Life seems more natural to me when conducted in the shade of protective trees.

Not that I have too much of a problem with a roof here at the edge of the city.  Our house is taller than any surrounding trees and most surrounding houses.  But that also means the view is incredible in every direction — a ring of towering hills, endlessly interesting with the shadows of clouds.  Nice!

So.  Five minutes to our deadline.  I’ll jump ahead to today — this was shopping day.  After fencing (holding the pommel of a foil is much harder for amateur novelists and frequent blog-posters who have been typing too much for too long and have mild carpal tunnel… I think so, anyway.  My fingers don’t like being that cramped!  They get used to it and never want to stretch out again!)…

…anyway, after fencing I had a day of shopping.  A very successful trip, full of uniquely Kathmandu items.  To be brief, in the form of a list:

–A large cushion with irridescent purple/gold threads, with a traditional “endless knot” design.

–two bead necklaces

–two small paintings, 1 large one

–a small hand prayer wheel with intricate designs

–a banner of 25 connected Tibetan prayer flags

–a small Krishna & small Ganesh statues

These join our lamp shades, namaste signs, hand-carved chess sets, little Buddha, pashmina, two skirts, and hand-woven alphabet scroll.  (And tea and incense, but we keep using those.) Even if we had to leave Kathmandu tomorrow, as long as we could take our current belonging with us, I could prove that we’d been here.

…Oh, and we ordered a beautiful, durable metal swing made by the ironwork shop right next to our house.  It will be ready Friday!

Whoops.  Despite how the current song (Timberlake & Madonna) are insisting I’ve got 4 minutes (“to save the world”) I’ve actually gone over my limit by three minutes.

Back to endless editing!

Flashback: Bangkok Airport

I’ve decided to stay on this theme for another day — that’s all it will take for me to post all my Thailand pictures.  We really didn’t take many; as I pointed out yesterday, we weren’t there long, and we were pretty exhausted and overwhelmed at the time.  I do have several pictures of the airport itself, taken right around the same time as the pictures posted earlier in “Flying Kitties.”

Mid-morning in a terminal of the Bangkok Airport

The exact plane that flew us from Bangkok to Kathmandu

Thai Airways is an awesome airline — they served us the best food I’ve ever had on an airplane, fresh and delicious.  We had soft dinner rolls and spicy curry; endless refills of tea and water and even wine, all of which were served with the meal as a matter of course.  And then, just before landing, the flight attendants make their way down the aisles with a basket of orchid blooms, each separate bloom (and some greenery) wired to a safety pin — they hand these out to all the women on the plane.  I’ve kept mine in a drawer — it’s still pretty even now, no matter how faded.  (Akin to my “mendi,” or henna, which today has finally started to decidedly fade from its Friday brilliance.)

Reading the news from Thailand now, I can’t connect violent street protests with the serenity and urban beauty I found there.  My attention is drawn to how many of the protesters are furious with the prime minister.  Nepal, of course, had no president, and only an interim prime minister, when we arrived.  The king of Nepal had only just left his palace a few days before we passed through Bangkok.  So I peered out the windows of the terminal and took these pictures:

Hmm, what does that poster say?

Okay, it's a little clearer now. Does anyone play Wheel of Fortune? I vote for a G. Or an L.

There was another sign which read “World’s Longest Surviving and Best-Loved Monarch.”  Quite a contrast to Nepal, where the people fought a civil war and then decided to force the monarchy out of power.  Then again, in Kathmandu itself, to my knowledge, there haven’t been violent street protests that have led to serious injuries and death.  Over the summer, when students protested the government, they blocked traffic and burned tires.  In fact, a few times, when we asked about the status of the latest protest, we received the cheery reply:  “Oh, it’s over now.  They ran out of tires.”

The world is strange.

Nepali of the day:

where is… :  kahaa chha?

-tira:  toward the

north:  uttar

south:  dakshin

east:  purbaa

west:  paaschim

purbaatira:  to the east

desh:  country

Flashback: Bangkok

With the current protests and riots in Bangkok, I can’t help thinking back to when we passed through Thailand’s capital.  It was, after all, only two and a half months ago.  At the time, everything seemed very peaceful and organized there.

True, we were only in the country about ten hours… and sleeping through half of that… and most of the other half was spent in the airport…

Still, we managed to get some decent pictures of the city from our hotel window.

Looking at them now, I shake my head.  How can people build towers that big?  Here, five stories is massive.  And wide has a completely different meaning, too.  Why, in the space some of those Bangkok buildings take up you could squeeze in thirty or forty typical Kathmandu stores.

I can’t imagine what my perspective will be like when I return to the United States.  I mean, Wal-Mart is going to seem gigantic.  Cavernous.  Scary.

And that’s for an original Wal-Mart.  Super Wal-Mart?  (shudder)

Bhat Bhateni honestly has five floors, and expands over its own little block.  I’m capable of losing my husband in it, for a few minutes.  But all together, I doubt it has as much floor space as a typical Wal-Mart… at least, I have dim memories of walking and walking and peering down endless aisles for my husband (or my sister or my parents or whoever I was with) for much more time than I’ve ever needed here.

Whatever did we do in malls?

Seriously, I hope the political troubles in Bangkok are resolved peacefully, and soon.  As soon as they are, the city city can return to the neat, organized, smiling appearance I remember — and which I assume the citizens themselves prefer.

Nepali of the day:

-maa:  inside of

gharmaa:  inside the house

Kathmandumaa:  inside Kathmandu

bahg: tiger

yeuta:  one (thing)

duita:  two (things)

basnu:  to sit in, to stay, to remain, to live in

basdaina:  to NOT sit in, NOT stay, NOT remain, NOT live in

Mes baschu:  I sit in the chair.

Mes basdaina:  I don’t sit in the chair.

Dui mehina Kathmandumaa baschu:  I’ve been living in Kathmandu for two months

“Duita bahg yeuta khormaa basdaina.” –  “Two tigers can’t live together in one cage.” (a maxim)