One Year Anniversary!

No, not for the blog.  For my time in Kathmandu.

(Oh, yes, BTW, I know, “long time no see” and all that.  No, for once I haven’t been sick.  Just busy.)

As I’ve mentioned, I actually spent a few weeks back in the United States earlier this year.  But otherwise, in two days, I will have lived here for a year.  And since the flight around the world takes so long, it was actually almost precisely one year ago this minute that I boarded a plane to fly from DC to Tokyo, Tokyo to Bangkok, and Bangkok to Kathmandu.

I’d never been to any of those countries before.  I was anxious and excited and nervous, bouncing up and down.  Yes, I’d seen Canada.  I’d lived in Mexico for six weeks.  I’d visited Spain, and even Morocco… but that was all.

I was fluent in Spanish, and had a glancing knowledge of a handful of other languages, from French through German to Arabic.  But as I sat bouncing on the plane, petting anxious cats from time to time, I was clutching my “Teach Yourself Nepali” book and wondering why on earth the language was proving so hard.  For several months, lacking any other Nepali resources, I’d been studying the writing system from books about Hindi, and naively hoping the smattering of Hindi vocabulary and grammar that I’d picked up would also help with Nepali.

I’d been interested in other cultures for years, and I’d read histories about Anglo-Saxon Britain; Medieval Italy; ancient Judea; post-Incan, newly Hispanic Peru; the Arab world in the 700s AD; the Cherokee nation; the Hittite Empire; the Assyrians… but somehow I’d never really learned much about south-eastern Asia, until the months leading up to the trip, when I tore through the memoirs of Babur and the Dalai Lama; widened my eyes at the Bhagavad-Gita and the Tibetan Book of the Dead; and gazed at pictures of Himalayan Salt Caravans and the bizarre, mysterious sites of this crazy place called Kathmandu.  The type of place that would have been stamped on the outside of a box Garfield had trapped Odie inside of and was about to set out for the mailman.  The place I was going.

I listened to comments like “Kathmandu?  Is that in Tibet?” and “Nepal?  That’s part of India, isn’t it?”  (By all the powers of goodness in this universe, do you have any idea how badly that notion ticks off the Nepalis?)  And I kept bouncing around, semi-patiently explaining that Nepal was its own country in between both places–a fact I’d also been shaky on when I first heard I might be going to Kathmandu.  Mostly I sang the old “Kathmandu, that’s where I’m going to” song and, more and more often, gaped at pictures of an alien land and somewhat wondered if I was literally getting as close to traveling to another inhabited world as I could conceivably get in my lifetime.

I gaped for a long time after I got here, too.  But lately I’ve realized that it’s become passe.  After a mere glance, (and maybe a brief, “That’s a pretty cow,”) I look away after noticing a cow or two or three grazing freely in the neighboring fields.  I accept it as perfectly normal for people to walk down the street with impossible loads (including full-size refrigerators!) strapped to their backs.  I’m unfazed when cars pass me on narrow roads, their tires crunching inches from my toes; I and the driver hardly glance at each other, and that’s enough to judge the distance so that each of us can just marginally get out of the other’s way.  I weave through Thamel with no heed for the hucksters calling, “Ma’am!  You look!  Good price!  Where you from?”  And they actually seem to swirl around me less.  I feel like there must be a difference in my eyes, in my stride, that mark me as different from the tourists who just stepped off the plane.  True, I don’t gape so much anymore.

Taxis are easier to.  I step up, name my destination, insist “ek sae”  (regardless of destination; I’ve learned that I never travel far enough to justify paying even that much, as far as Nepalis are concerned, and if the driver tries to charge any higher he’s egregiously ripping me off) step in, and off we go.  The drivers hardly try to argue with me anymore.  Instead they nod, and along the way we discuss the route in a blend of Nepali and English, and then I get to practice the same Nepali conversation for the umpteenth time by explaining where I’m from, where I live here, that I teach English, and what my classes are like.

Too, when my husband’s driving our car, and a motorcycle comes up around us when we’re stopped in traffic, and rams into the side of the car, I merely sigh in aggravation as my husband slams on the horn, and the motorcycle keeps going, and I roll down the window and reach out to pop out the side mirror yet again.  And then we return to our conversation.

I do still stare at the hills, though.  They’re awfully pretty.

So.  Back to my earlier comment about recently visiting the US.  Even more recently, I was looking through pictures from the trip, and it struck me as hysterical how I could accept both environments as perfectly normal, in their own ways…  the US just looks like the US, and Kathmandu looks like Kathmandu.  And they have their similarities.  But even in those, they’re wildly different.  Honestly, it’s no wonder I used to gape.

I’ll post some examples, in the coming days, if I can get myself to sit still at the computer and NOT edit novels or write lesson plans or read the entire wikipedia.  And every interesting news article posted in the last minute.  Hmm, looks like the Iranian election results are in…

Nepali of the Day:

ek:  one

sae:  hundred

din:  day

haptaa:  week

barshaa:  year

bhashaa:  language

naya:  new

purano:  old

-ko:  equivalent to ’s; marks the possessive

subakamana:  Congratulations!  Happy… Merry… (used in phrases like our “Merry Christmas!  Happy Birthday!)

Ek bharshaako subakamana!