Monday 29 July 2013

Cockroaches

Tonight was again one of these nights...!!!  Yesterday, Alastair and I just talked about how nice it is that we havn't seen any cockroaches for a few days. Big mistake, just to mention the topic!!! We had to pay for it last night. Aroung midnight, I had to leave the bad to get something to drink. We always sleep under a mosquito net and when I untagged it to get out of bed, I found two huge cockroaches at the inside of our net- IN OUR BED!!! For the next 30 min we were hunting theses biests and at the end we killed 10! After this cliening session, we actually managed to go back to sleep. However, this morning, we found another 5 in the room.
So, we will never mention them again!


Walks around Pokhara

Alastair finally recovered from his illness and the effects of the medication, so we were able to do a couple of trips before school began.

On Thursday we walked down the Seti river, which runs through a 2 m wide gorge through most of Pokhara, to the point where it bursts turbulently from its confines and forms a fast moving stream about 50 m wide. The wider gorge it emerges into has a wide terrace half way up (rather like a miniature grand canyon) which supports a picturesquely
perched village. Strange grassy rock ridges(reminiscent of Bryce canyon) rise from the village to the top. After a nice lunch at the mountain museum, we make our way back on the other side of the road,
coming across a old man scooping fresh buffalo dung from the road with
his hands; presumably to use as fuel.























Friday, we started at 6 am on a bolder adventure, to climb to the local beauty-spot and mountain viewing theater, Sarankot. We found our way out of the city, and climbed on a narrow path through increasingly
dense vegetation. Occasionally we passed clearings containing abandoned or half-finished buildings, one of which contained a rather frightening looking man who didn't answer our Namastes and watched with what we hoped was disinterest as we passed. There were many butterflies of all colours and some strange flower munching stripy things - bees or beetles?

Eventually we reached habitation and made our way to the look-out point at the top of the hill although, since there was too much cloud to see the mountains, we avoided the 30 rp fee to see the same hills we could see from below the view point. We also avoided paying 250 rps for vegetable chowmain (about 1 pound 80 - scandalous!) and retreated down the mountain to find something more reasonable priced (80 rp). On the way down we stopped to watch the paragliders launching
themselves from the hillside towards the lake shores below. There was a specially trained policeman, who assisted with dragging unresponsive tourist along the ground then they didn't react quickly enough to the
command "run run run!!". He also tried to prevent collisions, between gliders competing for take-off time - it was busier than Heathrow up there, with sometimes about 5 take-offs a minute.
The day was really hotting up, so we made our way down by a different route to take us to a more convenient part of town. It was never clear which path would take you there, so you just have to follow one and hope something convenient will turn up, but after some warmly contested decisions, we made our way down to a very welcome cold Lassi.



Wednesday 24 July 2013

Football

Yesterday we were invited to watch the boys football team in their 3rd round match of the Pokhara region school's cup.  We gathered, on a small, concrete stadium stand, very grateful of a the shade because the sun was beating relentlessly on the pitch. On the other side of the dusty football field, young men training for the Gurkha soldier entrance exams ran up and down the steps of the other stand (no shade there), with weighted baskets on their backs. I was chatting to one Gurkha hopeful in the stand and he said that among other tests, they have to do 70 sit ups in two minutes and run 800 m in under 2.45. There are around 4000 applicants each year for 63 places in the British Gurkha army.
Eventually it was the turn of our school to play, and they put up a sterling performance in the 30 minutes each-way game. The other team were bigger and stronger but our boys made up for it in skill and strategy, comfortably winning two - nill. They were also helped by a large supporting crowd of particularly vocal girls who probably did some long-lasting damage to their vocal chords and our eardrums! Next, it's the quater finals, and if they win the Pokhara contest, they enter the all-Nepal competition in Kathmandu.











Food

Food! This topic is at the moment not Alastair's favoured one, so it's me giving a short summery of our daily meals. First at all, it's rice, rice and rice again! Did you hear! RICE. I still really enjoy it, we can get it (if we want) for breakfast, lunch, tea time and diner! And  in addition to the rice, we always get dhal (lentel soup) and a cooked dish with vegatables (such as beans with tomato and potao / other beans with tomato and potatoes) and a lot of garlic!! A lot!!! We are already afraid that when we come back to Europe, everyone will smell our arrival miles in advace. And not to forget, all the spices!




However, we decided really early on, that we prefer no rice for breakfast and therefore, we get always black or milk tea (really good!) and either white bread, cookies or, really fancy, popcorn! I love this!!!
These meals we get in the cantine at our school and from time to time, we sneak now out to have a different meal out. We found a really nice restaurant around the corner, where we can vary our diet and Alastair can also get a non-rice meal, such as pancake, nuddel dishes or the famous momo's (see earlier blog post).
Today will be again such a sneaky day! After finishing writing our blog, we will have a loveley diner in our 'Stamm-Restaurant'! Guten Appetit!

Mountains!

Three days ago there was a great storm at dusk. It had rained hard all day, but as the light drew in a great sheet of lightening illuminated the whole city and then plunged it into power-cut blackness. Pokhara is surrounded by hills so the rolls of thunder echoed round the valley. The storm continued to rage for over an hour before it gradually took it's wrath elsewhere
The next morning....








Mountains!!!!! :-) We woke to see towering, icy summits where there was only cloud before. The 6000 m Machapuchare rises in an impossibly steep cone whose summit is only 30 m as the crow flies behind the city. The still greater peaks of Annapurna make up the backdrop behind.

Monday 22 July 2013

Diner Invitation



Last week on Tuesday, we had a holiday. It is the start of a new month in the Nepali calendar and in this month, people rest and the plants (rice, maize) that were planted in the previous months will just grow. On this day, families come together and lots of animals will be sacrificed to the gods and then later eaten. Women dress in green and red saris and they wear green arm rings at their hand wrists. Also really typical are the mendis that are painted at the female’s left hand balm. On this day, Alastair and Wiebke walked in the afternoon along our street where we meet Rashem, one of the science teachers. He invited us spontaneously to his place where we met his wife, daughter, sister and parents. It was really nice and we spend 2 hours there, getting some nice food and tea. Wiebke was then also asked to get a painting on her left hand  and now she is a proud owner of her first mendi.



Sunday 21 July 2013

Hospital


A couple of days ago we got some first-hand experience of the Nepali medical system. Alastair started feeling ill one evening and then vomited all night. The next day he couldn’t keep down any fluids for more than a couple of hours and was getting dehydrated, so we decided we’d better go to hospital. A lovely teacher, called Kim, kindly accompanied us and translated when necessary.
We went to Phewa City Hospital which is a private clinic – one of about 20 hospitals in Pokhara. The entrance hall / reception to A&E is also a ward containing six beds, and Alastair was lucky enough to get the one next to the window. A medical orderly came to see me and took his blood pressure (rather low) and soon the nurses were hooking up a drip and giving him intravenous fluids and antibiotics. Everything was sterile-packed, but you had to pay for each item as it was provided. A blood sample was sent to the lab and the results (unsurprisingly) confirmed a bacterial infection, but no other issues.

There were a couple of other patients on the ward, also on drips, receiving treatment for the infections which abound in the monsoonal climate. Later, an old later was brought in an her wrists and ankles clamped will giant crocodile clips to what looked like an ancient fax machine, which turned out to be an ECG.

Eventually, sometime after four O’clock, the consultants arrived. Nepali consultants spend most of the day at state hospitals and then retreat to their respective private hospitals in the late afternoon, where they see patients until about midnight. The consultant who saw Alastair was very jovial and spent an efficient couple of minutes with each patient. He proscribed a pharmacopeia of drugs to be taken for five days: gastric enzymes, two antibiotics and an anti-amoebic drug amongst others. All in all the visit was very efficient: four and a half hours spent in the hospital and no queuing at all – beats the NHS!

Now Alastair’s recovering and relaxing back at the school – all those drugs really knock it out of you.

Monday 15 July 2013

Scary creatures


Last night was quite a challenge. Before going to brush our teeth, we found 2 cockroaches in our room and Alastair was so brave to remove them (I think he removed so far around 50 since we arrived!). However, after coming back from the toilet area, we found next to our bed a massive spider on our wash bucket (big as a hand). Well first of all, Wiebke jumped onto the bed, Alastair put some solid shoes on and then we thought about  a good strategy to remove the monstrous thing. In the end we managed to throw the bucket with the spider out of our window.  

Well, to cut a long story short, we found 4 more cockroaches this night,  outside there was a massive thunderstorm and we heard some bats at our window. That was one of our best night! Grrr!

Children entertainment















Since we moved to the roof top apartment the rumors are spreading that up there on top of the guest house a foreign couple is living. How exciting! Well, we have now every late afternoon small and also taller visitors who come to say hello. The last two days we had an art workshop running. 

Between 3-6 children came and drew / copied animals from a work sheet that Wiebke’s mum gave her for school lessons. The children really love copying these pictures of elephants, tigers, camels…. And some of them are really talented. However, it seems to be that they prefer copying things to being creative. Maybe over the next few days we can encourage them more and more to draw their own pictures. 
As well as the art project, we also had a microscopy workshop running. That even attracted the adults and so we looked at dead cockroaches, live ants and flies and a dead salamander using our 4x magnification glasses. 
Young and old are so excited to see these things magnified. Later, this workshop turned into an english-nepali lesson and Alastair and Wiebke learned some new words and phrases.










Our neighbour, a 6 year old boy, always comes and wants to play with us. He got so excited about the 8 m long skipping robe we bought a while ago and it is fascinating what different games you can play with it. This of cause attracts the other kids and we had some really nice circus evenings where they tried to walk the tightrope. The youngest participant is 9 months and she gets really excited holding the rope at one end as the other children are jumping over it.


Having to deal with all the school children during the day, we thought that maybe it will be too much to have children around our living place. But it is a really joy to have them around us and especially during the drawing time when we can read and they play next to us in silence.
  




Wedding


The courtyard (ie rocky, muddy, wasteland) next to our house is currently being developed for a ‘party palace’ to be hired our for weddings and other celebrations. Things seemed to be moving along pretty slowly, but one day last week the area was a hive of activity. Holes were dug, the bare breeze block walls were faced with cement and we gathered a wedding was going to take place the next day. The following afternoon the guests arrived rapidly trampling a green ceremonial carpet into the mud. The ladies were beautifully dress in red, pink and orange saris threaded with gold, and the men mostly wore European style suits with a Nepali hat. We looked down from our rooftop as they paraded past; first the women, carrying platters of luridly coloured food and then the men, heralded by a traditional Nepali band. The musicians took their place under the tarpaulin: two played an oboe-like instrument, two sported large horns which curved back behind their heads, while others played drums and cymbals. To the untrained ear, each tune sound quite identical to the previous. The oboes played the melody, generally on the same scale, interrupted occasional by blasts from the horns, all underpinned by some complex percussion. Alastair’s hoping to learn more about Nepali music from the school music teacher while he’s here.
 

















The bride and groom mostly stayed inside performing the elaborate ceremonies of a Nepali wedding while outside, one by one, men got up to dance. Classical Nepali dancing must make you dizzy. It involves rapid gyrations punctuated by fluid and wave-like movements of the hands and wrists. Even the old men manage some elegant moves. Eventually the bride emerges, looking demurely at the ground. Our neighbor says this may be shyness, or an attempt to conceal her emotions if it is an arranged marriage she is not entirely sure about. Love matches are increasingly common in Nepal, but are still not the rule. Weddings here generally go on for two days, so tomorrow it’s the brides turn to host the party.



Walk around Pokhara


Last Thursday we set out early on an excursion to the world peace Stupa: a Buddhist temple perched on a hill above the lake. After a one hour walk through the town we came to the fast flowing river running out of Phewa lake. Our way across was via a rickety suspension bridge with many rotten planks and some missing entirely. You didn’t want to be the unlucky person who finally broke through the wood, although only your leg would fall through. Probably. On the far side, we were accosted by a young man, a little smelly, who, uninvited, took on the role of guide. He pointed to a dubious looking sign post saying that foreigners must have a guide to enter the forest and warned us of difficult route finding, bandits and snakes. Walking along the edge of the forest, trying to block out the guides prattle about how many friends he had in Europe, we saw some beautiful butterflies dancing above the paddy fields. We followed the guide up the forest track and past a temple on a massive, easy to follow track and then managed to persuade him to leave us alone, although he seem upset and claimed that we didn’t think him a ‘good person’.

Bandits and snakes seemed to be on holiday that day, but we were frequently troubled by a much more slippery adversary: the leach.  They were everywhere amongst the leaf litter at our feet, some a good two inches long, and stood on end, swaying gently as though trying to hypnotise their victims. When they latch onto your shoe they loop steadily upwards in search of exposed flesh and a bloody meal, but in our case they were foiled by a cunning tactic borrowed from the British rambler –  our trousers were tucked into our socks. Despite this protection, it was still necessary to stop every five minutes and flick, pull or prize a few leaches off our shoes and socks. Thankfully it seems the Pokhara leaches hadn’t learnt all the gorilla tactics Alastair experience before when trekking in the Helambu area. There the leaches will hide in trees and, on sensing your approach, drop onto the back of your head and neck. It makes you paranoid about every drop of water which lands on you.
 


















After about an hour of walking we emerged onto the ridge top and strolled along a delightfully leach free path to the stupa. The building of the Stupa was a Japanese led project in collaboration with Nepal and other countries, but was halted by planning restrictions for many years: a sure sign Nepal is slowly moving up the development ladder. The Gompa itself (the word stupa is not used by locals) is a two story white dome, with four golden statues depicting the Buddha and his wisdom, spaced around it’s circumference. The views over the Pokhara valley are spectacular, but we can only imagine what it’s like when the high Himalaya emerge from the clouds.

We walk down the hill into the valley and explore a famous local cave cum temple. It’s not especially spectacular compared to the caves at Ingleton for example, but the fact that it’s lit by Nepal’s notoriously unreliable power supply (power cuts occur every other evening and last hours) adds an extra frission to the experience. Across the road from the cave is a spectacular slot of a gorge into which a river turbulently disappears, mining strange shapes out of the local conglomerate. To complete our day, we make out way back through the paddy fields to Pokhara, stopping for a well earned drink and watching some boys diving and somersaulting into a stream running through the city.






Thursday 11 July 2013

Our new home in Pokhara

Today, it is the last day of school exams and  tomorrow 10 days of holliday begin. Thus, today  is our last day of relaxing and tomorrow we start teaching Class 10, the most scenior class, who will stay over the hollidays. We hope to use the time to develop a peice of theatre with them, writing a script and then using it as a platform to improve their english pronounciation and increase their self-confidence. Hopefully it will be fun!



Today, it was officially decided (and accepted) that we can stay in the school hostel instead of the principle's house. We were quietly preparing our lessons this afternoon, then suddenly our room was full of people., moving our things around, cleaning and rearranging. As a result we now have a proper bed (replacing the 100+ year old bed that was full of cockroaches), a table, two chairs and curtains. So we have a really nice, clean room on the roof of the school hostel with a really nice view over the hills that surrund Pokhara (see pictures). This will be our home for the next 3 months!   



Tuesday 9 July 2013

Arriving in Nepal - Kathmandu

A long but uneventful flight with a stop in the fiery desert of Qatar (34 degrees at 7am) brought us safely to Kathmandu. Alastair could immediately pick out of the crowd one of the widest grins known to mankind – Sandeep come to pick us up from the airport. Driving out through Katmandu is a bit overwhelming; there are cars, bikes and trucks whizzing by on all sides and a chocking dust in the air, but after half an hour we’re on the altogether more pleasant road leading to the hilltop temple of Changu Narayan.

Changu is where Alastair spent 11 weeks in 2008, so it’s strange, but lovely to be back. The village is made of reddish brick and mud houses, either thatched or with tin roofs, and the main street, cobbled with brown stones, winds it’s way up the hill towards the temple.















As we climb, Alastair greets faces he recognizes, especially Kamal; the owner a shop selling traditional paintings. We agree to have tea later and continue to the guest house which is beautifully situated right next door to the world heritage site temple. Here we are greeted by the owner, Sarita, a beautiful lady in her 40’s wrapped in a red sari and Anish, her son. It’s especially wonderful to see Anamika (12) and Isha (9), two little girls from poor families in the south of Nepal, who have been living with the family and getting a good education in the nearby town of Baktapur. We all go for a walk round the temple for old times’ sake and admire the view of the luscious green paddies of the Kathmandu valley. It’s extremely humid and Alastair exhausts himself racing Isha up the steps back to the temple.


 













The following day is for recovering and visiting. We walk down the hill to have tea with Kamal, the painter. He specialises in a particular Nepali art of from the Buddhist tradition; the thanka. These are complex and finely detailed designs, often in bright colours and edged with gold paint, which commonly represent scenes from the life of the Buddha, the cycle of reincarnation or sometimes even the ineffable mysteries of the universe with a never ending temple or a large circle of swirling blue. Tea this time means ‘milk tea’ made of thick buffalo milk, a little tea and a lot of sugar. We’ve brought Kamal a small present from Europe, but this disappears into his draw, unopened and without a word or thanks – funny how cultures differ in these things.

Later that afternoon Sarita’s daughter, Anisha arrives back from college and we spend a couple of hours catching up. She had the misfortune to be in a bus accident 9 months ago which broke her jaw and cut her face up badly, but the Kathmandu surgeons did and incredible job and it’s impossible to tell. After a game or two of UNO when the girls come home from school, we set off for dinner at Sandeep’s house. His mother (gnarled from years working in the fields) looks highly suspicious at the sweet thing’s we’ve brought, but is soon rapturously munching. Before dinner they perform a Pooja to celebrate Sandeep’s recovery from a motorcycle accident and one of his nephew’s success in his college application. The ceremony starts with the preparation of the red paste and the tearing up of flowers before everyone has a Pooja mark plastered to their forehead and a petal placed behind their ear. They’re very matter-of-fact about the whole process, pausing to make a joke or have a belch whenever they feel like it. Next everyone tucks into curried eggs and a sort of lentil dumpling.  Dinner itself is Daal Bhatt (daal, rice and curried vegetables). We eat quickly and make our excuses – it’s an early start tomorrow.




The taxi takes us to Kathmandu at 5 am to meet our bus which belongs to the luxury coach firm: Swiss travel. For about four pounds we get a full day’s journey, a seat each, and a relatively cautious driver. The journey is sticky and bumpy, but we pass through some interesting landscapes mostly traveling along the banks of tumultuous rivers made brown with Himalayan sediment. On arrival in Pokhara we walk 200 yards to the Social Public School and make the acquaintance of one Min Gurung, the principle. He is rather talkative and excited and gives us a tour of the school. Tin-roofed, but well equipped (they have whiteboards!) classrooms line a central dirt courtyard and accommodate the 700 students aged 4 to 16. There are also two hostels for about 40 boarding students. We have dinner and stay the night at the principle’s house, but suffer somewhat from a smell of petrol emanating from a locked metal cabinet in the corner.
The next day we arrange to move to a room at the top of the school hostel so as to avoid the smell. Are new accommodation is literally on the roof, so we step out of the door onto our own spacious balcony, shared only we the lady and her son in the next room. Today is officially a school holiday, but class 7 is being taken to the local rice planting festival, so we tag along too. The bus ride is cacophonous, the boys singing, screaming, shouting and egging on the driver to attempt every more extreme overtaking maneuvers, sending motorbikes scattering into the ditch for shelter. By the end of the journey the driver seems to have entered some heightened, trance like state, eyes transfixed greedily on impossibly small spaces between advancing vehicles and the truck in front, his left hand working the horn as through his life depended on it.
On arrival, we find hoards of people surrounding an area of newly ploughed up paddy fields with a man making announcements using a megaphone. One large muddy field is dedicated to buffalo team racing. Men test their balance to the limit, standing on a plough pulled by a pair of stampeding buffalo which they egg on and attempt to steer with whacks of a rubber tube. A neighboring field is reserved for mud fights, and a number of tourists are having the time of their lives, caked head to toe in sticky goo. We decide to take the plunge, not here, but in the neighboring fields where women are planting out the second rice crop. Alastair is shown the technique – you take two to three seedlings and push them into the mud about a hands width apart, tessellating in the approved manner. At first his attempts are tut-tutted over but, nearly and hour and a whole field later he eventually earns a ‘that is good!’.
 

























Sunday is the first day of the school week, and our first day of teaching. After a welcoming ceremony involving some military maneuvers by the students, speeches and the presentation of scarves and flowers, we are given our timetables for the day: six 45 minutes classes for Alastair and five for Wiebke to improvise on spot… go! With class nine, Alastair addresses the question “can plants do maths?” and with class 10 he copies a TEFL lesson he saw once on a video. The younger classes are much harder to work with and keep entertained, but somehow we both make it trough the day. Monday, we just have four classes each; yet more improvisation. Wiebke has a really good interactive class with year 4 and Alastair has a terrible last period class with year 7 – he can’t get them to shut up and his voice is rapidly disappearing. We’re then told that there will be no teaching the next 8 days due to exams, and none for the subsequent 10 days because of holidays – it might have been nice to know this before we arrived! At least it gives us a chance to acclimate to the sticky monsoon climate and the change in diet.

On our first free day, we take a trip down to touristy, lakeside Pokhara. There are lots of colourful rowing boats and people trying to escape the heat by lazing under a tree or swimming in the take. We wonder slowly around, admire the scenery and then find our way back, managing to get less ripped off on the bus than we did on the way there. This is mostly thanks to Wiebke’s expert haggling – flying in the face of reality, refusing to admit we have more than 30 rupees when she’s holding a 50 rupee note

Unfortunately, the next day Wiebke goes down with a fever so the next few days are spent recovering. When she’s better we take a trip to the international mountain museum, which is a very modern building with exhibitions on the Himalayan people as well as the ascents of the mountains. The visit is capped off by our first taste of buff mo-mo of the trip. These are steamed dumplings filled with buffalo meat and herbs and are absolutely delicious. We walk back along the Seti River which at one point races through a canyon only 2 m wide, but at least 50 m deep. We can hear it charging below in the darkness glimpsed through cracks in the rotten boards of the bridge.


So, now holiday’s starting, but the top class, class 10, are staying because they have their important national exams (the school leaving certificate) this year. We’re planning to give them some theatre based English lessons over the next few days and well as getting on with planning for the lessons to come!