A Wonderful Weekend

Namasté,

I hope everyone had a good weekend! Mine was quite fun and eventful:

Friday: Leila, Kat and I headed down the street to check out Patan’s huge assortment of handicraft stores, where you can find fair-trade textiles, pottery, Nepali paper, and other touristy wares. Nepali paper is beautiful; it’s made from the bark of a high-altitude indigenous plant called Lokta. It’s all handmade, and you can find any color, print, or style you can imagine – my personal favorites are natural-colored sheets with dried flowers and leaves mixed in, and screenprinted sheets with multicolored animal designs. I bought a few different styles of paper, some greeting cards, and really cool folding paper lanterns with screenprinting on them. It was really cool to have met the Sitapaila factory people who made the things I was buying; I made sure to visit their shop since the owner was nice enough to let me talk to his workers during their workday. I also picked up some prayer flags and a beautiful little Maithili [Nepali ethnic group from the southern Tarai region] cloth painting for my room at school next year.

Kat headed home before us, and therefore was lucky enough to miss being accosted by one of the most persistent and vindictive street children I’ve met here. Leila sees this girl, who can’t be much older than twelve, every day on her way to do research, and even though Leila had never given her money the girl still approached us with her baby brother. As a general rule here it’s good to discourage begging, because you don’t know what your money will be used for, and donate to organizations for street people instead. So Leila and I kept walking, but when the girl realized we weren’t going to give her any money, she started following us and grabbing our clothes. She walked alongside me for at least a block yanking on my kurta scarf and trying to choke me; I finally took it off and she started yanking on Leila’s backpack strap instead. She finally gave up, but it was really intimidating – usually other Nepalis will try to help you out if someone is harassing you, but nobody did anything that time. It’s sad to see people who are so desperate and whose lives are so hard that they’re forced to take such extreme actions. When I get back to the States I’m going to sign up to sponsor a Nepali child through an aid organization; maybe I can help one kid to go to school instead of ending up on the street like that little girl.

Later that night we went to a nearby Japanese restaurant for udon, ginger tofu, avocado sushi, and sake. It was surprisingly tasty, considering that Nepali ethnic food is generally as loose an adaptation of the original as one can get. It’s usually a better bet to stick to local stuff – a good rule in general for travelers, I imagine.

Saturday: On Saturday morning we made French toast with delicious bread from a Japanese bakery. Japan has invested in lots of development projects in Nepal, and apparently providing bakery equipment to people who eat bread maybe twice a week constitutes development. Anyway, speaking of Japan, we also watched “Letters from Iwo Jima” on Saturday morning. It was extremely disturbing but excellent, one of the best films I’ve seen recently. Kat had heard about a flea market at the Summit Hotel, so we took a taxi over there and mooned around for an hour or two. It was around the hotel pool, which was pretty but made it sort of a torturous affair since it was blazing hot out. We made cold peanut noodles for lunch, which helped cool us off a bit, and then Emily and Leila and I set off for Kathmandu. Leila has been feeling really sick all week, and she wanted to try going to one of the Tibetan medical practitioners Emily has been interviewing for her research. Unfortunately, though, we didn’t realize there was a bandh (strike) going on. All the taxi drivers were asking astronomical prices because none of the buses were running, and of course once we finally found a semi-reasonable one we got stuck at a police blockade after maybe one-fourth of the trip. Our driver said we would have to get out and then proceeded to try and convince us that we still owed him the price we would have paid had we gotten all the way to our destination of Thamel, because it wasn’t his fault that there was a bandh. Um, right.

Leila decided to go back home because she wasn’t feeling well, but Emily and I pressed on on foot. After walking a bit, though, we found a really nice rickshaw driver who offered to take us the rest of the way (even though cars and buses aren’t allowed out during bandhs, motorcycles and bicycles are okay). He drove us past several large mobs in the road, and even though nothing happened it was really intimidating. A bunch of Nepali men would surround a policeman or two and start yelling and generally looking like they wanted to start a fight – not the best time for my big white self to sail by in a rickshaw. We also passed a few smoldering mounds from bonfires people had built in the road, and started to wonder whether we should have turned back with Leila. The pièce de résistance, however, was when we noticed a few policemen in the road ahead spreading a line of burning coals across all the lanes. We were getting ready to get out and walk more, but our rickshaw driver just found a non-burning spot and drove across.

With that adventure behind us, we located all our CNSP friends, American and Nepali, and headed to Sky’s roommate Bikram’s house for dinner with his family. His mom, dad, grandmother, and two of his brothers were home. They made us a delicious and fancy daal-bhaat, including kheer (the best rice pudding ever), and we all danced and sang and laughed at Bikram’s baby pictures. Nepali parties end early, though, so around 8:30 we said our goodbyes and all the American CNSP students headed back to Patan. We went up on our roof with some wine and lots of Kat’s fancy winebottle candle holders, and had great fun playing cards and talking all night. Kat also made us some delicious midnight ramen the way her dad prepares it, with little slices of potato, ginger, garlic, and onion added in along with a few eggs.

Sunday: Sunday was a much more relaxing day than Saturday, but equally fun. We made a big breakfast and watched “Bobby”, which was also very good, and then spent the afternoon at the pool with trashy magazines, snacks, and our forty-rupee (fifty cents?) beach ball. It’s a bit of a walk to the pool, which is at a nearby hotel, but it’s clean and big and generally has nobody in it, and it’s cheap to swim there. Phebe and Jessie had to leave after our beachy afternoon, and Leila was at bible study, so the remaining four of us made a delicious dinner. Sky invented a delicious tofu and eggplant concoction, which we ate with brown rice and Asian-style cabbage slaw (and mango, of course). Emily showed us a hilarious fashion documentary made by her friend at Cornell; the best part was an interview with a 30-ish woman wearing an all-black Victorian dress and a big poofy old-fashioned updo. At one point she whipped out a little rag doll dressed exactly like her and said she carried it everywhere because it helped her to feel less anxious. Interesting.

Today: I got woken up in the middle of the night by a huge lightning storm, but didn’t mind because the weather cooled down considerably afterwards. I had to get up early this morning for research interviews at a nearby beauty parlor; Shanti and I talked to nine very nice beauty students today after their class was over. My throat has been sore, though, so I was ready for a break after all that talking! Later on I called a few local models to try and set up some interviews, and didn’t realize that one of the girls I was talking to, Richya Sharma, is so famous even I’ve heard of her. She started talking about the Miss Nepal Pageant and how she won the “Miss Most Beautiful Smile” award or something like that, and then I realized who she was and said something lame along the lines of “Oh, wow, I saw you on TV.” She was so nice and helpful, though, and her English was impeccable. I was really impressed.

Before I head back to my research work, I’d like to leave you all with a little list. I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences I’ve observed between American and Nepali culture, since I’ll be going through reverse culture shock quite soon, starting three weeks from tomorrow, in fact. This is by no means exhaustive, just a few of the most striking differences off the top of my head:

1. Nepalis use this sort of head bobble – it’s quite beyond description – to mean yes, no, maybe, and just about anything else. However, if you ask someone to do something and they don’t answer verbally but do give you a head bobble, it generally means “I’m too polite to say not even though I really don’t want to.” People are polite to a fault; whenever I try to ask Shanti’s opinion on something about our research, she always says, “Oh, whatever you think.”
2. Nothing makes an American more uncomfortable than long gaps in conversation, but Nepalis don’t mind it. Conversations will often have long pauses in them, but instead of rushing to say something, anything, to fill in the gap, people just sit and wait until someone else thinks of something to say. It’s taken a while for me not to feel obligated to fill up that silence.
3. Most of the Nepalis I’ve met are awesome at waiting. Like, Zen-master awesome. Shanti and I showed up at 7:30 today for our beauty parlor interviews, but it turned out that the students had class until 8:30. In typical let-no-minute-go-unwasted American fashion, I suggested we try to find other people to talk to and return in an hour. But Shanti just settled down on the bench, and we sat looking at photo albums from beauty seminars for an hour.
4. People rarely identify themselves on the phone. When one of our Nepali friends calls, a typical conversation starts like this:
NEPALI FRIEND: Hi, ______ [name].
AMERICAN: Oh, hi…
N.F.: *awkward pause* …hello? …Hello?
AMERICAN: Hi, I’m here.
N.F.: Oh, okay. *awkward pause II*
AMERICAN: Um, who is this?
5. People in stores generally go out of their way to follow you around, talk to you about whatever you’re looking at, ask you if you need help, etc. When I go to the fruit store, for example, I don’t always know exactly what I want. I’d like to browse around without being bothered, choose what I want myself, and then bring it up and pay for it. Instead, as soon as I go in about five men stand up, “namaste” me, grab the basket into which I’ve just finished placing an orange, and start to ring it up. “But, uh, I need some other things too,” I say, so they give me my basket back but follow me around the store. The other day Emily and I wanted to buy two pears, so we choose two good ones and put them in the basket. A guy had noticed we were looking at pears, so he came over with like four more and put them in our basket. “Thanks, but we only needed two”…It drives me insane because I just want to do it myself, but they’re just being polite.
6. Names are generally alphabetized by first names instead of last. It makes sense, since most people in a caste share the same three or four clan names. Funny how we’re the opposite, with all our Jessicas and Matthews!
7. Most people refuse to drink cold beverages because they think it gives you a sore throat and a stomachache. Some won’t even swim because they think it’s bad to immerse your body in water for that long; it’ll make it cold and you’ll get sick. Emily’s roommate Kussum doesn’t like to eat fruit in the morning for the same reason; she says it will give her a cold.
I’m used to room-temperature water and soda at this point, but it’s still really exciting to get a cold one from the store every now and then. People also drink hot tea and eat hot daal-bhaat throughout the year, even during the deadliest months of summer.

That’s about all I can think of for now…

Pheri bhetaulaa!
Rani/Renée