Speaking Nepali

[Oops...it's been a while...but I still have that list of things to write about...I'm working on it...!]

I like to do touristy things – to see interesting things and visit different places, even here in Scotland, but I really hate looking like a tourist.

It’s hard when you are a different colour, though, to NOT look like a tourist. But being able to drop a bit of Nepali into conversations would generally counter this.

That, and knowing what prices to be willing to pay a taxi driver.

One driver, after we haggled from 500Rps to 300, when we got in the car said “so, you are volunteers?”!

Anyway, I really loved the language lessons. Our Nepali teacher was SO encouraging.

“Ekdaam Raamro!!!” She would exclaim! (Very good!)

And learning something completely new, and very obviously functional and useful for the time and place was great.

Some things I learned to say in Nepali, above and beyond the “hello, how are you?” chit-chat included: asking the price of things; being able to name various fruit and veg; naming classroom objects; describing the colour and whereabouts of things; and numbers up to 10.

I was very proud of myself.

Unfortunately, little snippets like that aren’t particularly useful in conversation…because you get stuck very quickly!

In English an attempted conversation might look like this:

“Hello! How are you?”

“I’m well, and you?”

“I’m good!"

"Is this your pen?”

"No, that's *insert name here*'s pen."

"Okay"

“So…uhm….potato?”

Not seeing mountains (except in dreams)

The biggest attraction of tourists to Nepal is the fact that it is home to Mount Everest and the Himalayan Mountain Range.
I spent 10 weeks in Nepal waiting desperately to catch a glimpse of these beautiful mountains.
But monsoon season isn't really the time for views. The mountains are obscured by clouds.

The weekend I was in Pokhara I got up at ridiculous o'clock in the hope that I might catch the mountains early in the day.
I did not.
I then hoped all day and asked various Nepali's that I met there if they thought the mountains might "come out" later in the day.
They did not.

I was so desperate to see the mountains that I'd even been dreaming about seeing them.
But dreams didn't count.
I had been in Nepal for 10 weeks and hadn't seen the Himalayas.

On my last night in Kathmandu there was a beautiful sunset.
Complete with heart-shaped holes-in-clouds.
See?

Naturally, we ran up to the roof with our cameras to see this.

The roof of our home was definitely my favourite place in Kathmandu. I liked going up there to sit and read or watch the sun set.

On this particular evening, just after the sun set, SarahNY and Whitney were with me, and one of them noticed something white that looked a bit different from the clouds.
We reckoned it was probably the mountains. And I kid you not, I actually literally physically jumped for joy.
I had finally seen them!

Since I have returned to Scotland, the mountains have been visible more in Kathmandu, because the monsoon is over. This means that Whitney has been able to confirm that the glimpse of potential-mountains on my last night in the country was really truly the Himalayas!
Hurray!

Plus, from the plane as I left Nepal I got some pretty clear and amazing views of the mountains.
They are huge and stunning and beautiful and wonderful and magnificent and they were right there.
Epic.
Although bittersweet...since I was somewhat gutted about leaving...

14 hours in a car

Do you remember how some Nepali teachers had all been trying to persuade me to go to Pokhara - a city West of Kathmandu - and how I'd been like "oh, no, I can't, I won't have time while I'm here..."

Well.
I made it to Pokhara!

Christine was doing a maths training there on a Friday evening/Saturday morning, and it was actually her publisher (the one organising the training) who suggested she should take me.
I wasn't teaching any music classes on the Friday, so I was given permission to take the day off school in order to go with Christine.

We left early on the Friday morning, arriving in Pokhara after 8 hours in a car (thankfully a very comfortable one!) in time to do the training in a Catholic girls school with teachers from all over Pokhara.
I stayed and helped out with this and chatted to the teachers. It was fun - they were making pretty symmetric pictures and things.

Christine and I then spent Friday evening at the Lakeside - we walked along the main street of the Lakeside area, and Christine told me loads of stories from when she'd lived in Pokhara (for 5 years).
It was beautiful. A really nice evening with a beautifully clear sky. And the moon was huuuge.
And Christine's stories are so inspiring.

The next day was all mine.
I was free to wander around Pokhara, soak up the sun (which I did to the point of some pretty bad sunburn - on my legs and hands, because I didn't really think they were worthy of sun cream), do a little bit of shopping, chat to random Nepali people and just take in the views whilst Christine trained, before heading back to Kathmandu.

Some highlights included:

Meeting a couple of adorable little Nepali boys who I chatted to (half in Nepali and half in English) - they showed me up a hill to where their horse was kept and fetched their kite to show me, too!

Walking along the lakeside. Oh, how I had missed water. (Ironic, in a monsoon - but I'm meaning clean water...)

Having time to just chill out and relax and read and walk about.

Just being in such a beautiful place. The whole "I'm in Nepal" experience...feeling a bit touristy - but battling that by being able to speak a little Nepali to the locals!

Some interesting things that I saw on the way to and in Pokhara:

- proper, actually-used, swing foot bridges
- a wild giant snail
- comedy menu translations, the best of which was "chocolate craps" (meaning chocolate crepes)
- a veeeerrryyy long, winding traffic jam on the only route out of Kathmandu towards India: the main trading route
- 2 cute little Nepali girls dancing and singing on an up-turned boat by the lake
- a pile of leaves with legs (someone carrying them from behind)
- transit lorries which are so beautifully and brightly decorated!
- a monkey run across the road in front of our car!

But best of all:

The time spent in the car, and then eating in a local, friendly cafe, and just walking around with Christine.
This lady is pretty much my hero.
She has done so much with her life.
And so in the 14-hour car journey, I got to ask her so many questions, and find out about all the different places she has been to and worked in.
And she showed me things that meant a lot to her in Nepal - like the tree on top of a hill that marks the spot of where the village is that she taught in for her first 5 years in Nepal - 30 years ago!
She is a legend.

Retrospect

I have now been back in Scotland for 2 weeks, but still have a list of things I wanted to write about about my time in Nepal, and so I will still do this, but now writing from the other side.

My experiences in retrospect.

(Shortest post ever?)

The Royal Palace

A couple of weekends ago we put on our tourist hats and went on a trip to the Royal Palace.

It's been about 3 years since the monarchy of Nepal was abolished, and so what was the home of the royal family up until about 2008 (I think) is now open to the public to look around.

It was super-interesting.
There were loads of rooms you could go into and look at, including the bedrooms for visiting heads of states, where the British Queen will have stayed when she visited Nepal and the bedroom of the King of Nepal himself.
Interestingly, the room for the visitors was much grander.
The king's bedroom just looked like a fairly normal 50s bedroom!!

One of my favourite things was all the paintings of the previous kings. They were huuuge and the kings were always dressed in their proper king-gear with feathers coming out their hats.

Other interesting things we saw in the palace:
Two stuffed tigers in ready-to-pounce-positions. We took turns standing under them and imagining what it would be like to be mauled by a tiger. Conclusion: scary.
Gifts from various other countries - so basically lots of pretty ornaments and things from looooads of other countries.
A very grand staircase.
Paintings from Scotland of Loch Lomond and Loch Katrine. (Christine reckoned these may have been painted by Princes Charles - did you even know he paints?!)

And then there was the garden.
In 2001 there was a massacre of the royal family, where one of the crown princes shot the rest of his family.
The building this took place in has been taken down, but we could see where it was that it happened.
And there were even still some bullet holes in another wall from the incident.
I can't really think of a suitable word to describe this/what it was like to see this...

The history of Nepal is pretty fascinating.

Earthquake

Which city do you not want to be in when you experience your first earthquake?

I'd be guessing you might choose to avoid any of the top 20 most earthquake-vulnerable cities.
I'd be guessing you might especially not want to be in the one ranked number 1: Kathmandu.

http://rosemary-e-bachelor.suite101.com/worlds-20-most-earthquake-prone-cities-a209850

It took us a few moments to really realise what was going on.
Several of us in the Guest House were in the communal area, making dinner, putting on a film, using the internet...then Whitney was like "is that an earthquake?"

There was a little bit of flapping and the conversation went a little bit like:
"should we put shoes on?"
"do we have time?"
"do we do the triangle thing?"
"do we just get out of the building?"
"is there time?"
"no - let's just get down"
And we all found refuge under the dining room tables and next to kitchen cabinets.

The shaking lasted around 30 seconds (it felt longer) and in that time we prayed and then we giggled about how we'd knocked stuff over in our haste, making it look like a more dramatic earthquake!

After it stopped, we got out and went down the street to our nearest family from school (the Secondary Principal's family - they've been in Nepal for years, and so we felt safe with them!). There were lots of people out in the streets discussing what had happened.

I'm not gonna lie - the whole experience was pretty terrifying.
Kathmandu really is expected to be brought to the ground in the event of a major earthquake.
Thankfully, the epicentre, although hitting up to 6.9 on the richter scale, was 169 miles east of the city.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-14965598

Everyone here is fine, and everyone at school was fine.
The kids were pretty much just excited the next day, greeting each other with overdramatic "YOU'RE ALIIIIVE"s and wanting to tell everyone exactly where they were and what they were doing when the earthquake hit.

So there you have it.
I've survived an earthquake.

My major faux pas in the whole experience, however, was the fact that I'd been mid-facebook-conversation with a friend when it hit.
And so I typed to that friend "gotta go. um. dude. pray. earthquake" then disappeared offline.
Way to worry someone...

But hey, prevent a friend from worrying, or get them praying for the situation.
I now know which one I choose under pressure!

Unrelated Subjects

I spent most of my final year of school trying to figure out if I wanted to teach science or if I wanted to teach music.

Music won.

However, in my time at KISC I have been teaching science to year 8 and 9.

This has been loads of fun – re-living my school days in the science lab from the other side. Experiments are a lot scarier when you feel a degree of responsibility for them!

So I’ve been teaching 2 fairly unrelated subjects: music and science – so unrelated that one of the pupils realised during WEEK SIX that I’m the same person teaching him in music and in science.

That's six weeks it took him to figure it out!

Sadly, I missed the opportunity for a classic “no, that’s my twin” joke…

Multi-tasking

On Monday night, while I was getting carried away and writing 3 blog posts in a row, I was chatting to my dad on Skype.
After my blog splurge, I told my dad about the new posts and asked if he'd check them for me.
(That's what my dad does* - he checks the stuff I write...unless I've left an essay until the night before and haven't left enough time to ask him to check it. A regular occurrence...)

He asked when I'd written them.
I said, "Just now, while we've been talking"
He asked how I'd done that.
I said, "multi-tasking"

But I had an even more impressive multi-tasking moment last week...

For the past couple of weeks I've been covering all the primary music classes at KISC whilst the primary music teacher was away.
This has been lots of fun. It meant I got to know the younger kids in the school and, let's face it, singing songs with little kids produces some seriously cute moments - especially when actions are added!

It did, however, make for a somewhat busy timetable. I still had all the secondary music classes to prep and teach, several science classes to prep and teach, and several science classes to TA in.

The timings of the school day are well worked out to prevent the primary and secondary kids having break or lunch at the same time.
(Some of the year 1s would get squished, I'm sure...)
And so this meant that primary music is often timetabled during the secondary lunch.

So basically I was very busy for a while, dashing around and having very short lunch breaks.

Last week, one period just before lunch, I had Year 11.
During this period the principal came up to see me, and we discussed something to do with the junior classes - probably assessment or something teachery like that.
And I was going to be teaching during lunch, so had collected my lunch to eat during this period, too.

So I ate lunch, had a meeting with the principal, and taught a class.
All at the same time.

To be fair, there was only 1 pupil in the Year 11 class (the other half - yes, half - of the class was off).
And he was just working on some composing.

But still.
It sounds impressive.


*My dad does more than this with his life. He is also an excellent minister. Which involves more than just the Sunday gig. Just sayin'

Wearing Purple Pants

*Disclaimer: 'Pants' in this context is being used in reference to trousers.
The use of this word is due to living with several Americans, and the enjoyment of alliteration.*

To match a couple of my kurta tops, I got some purple pants made by the tailor, in a punjabi style. That is, puffy.
They are a fairly bright lilac kind of purple.

I am pretty sure I love them.

They're comfy, they're bright, they match the tops - it's like wearing pyjamas out!

I kind of felt a bit self conscious about them at first.
They really are bright for a pair of trousers.
But the love for them has blown that out of the water.

I was wearing them yesterday for the first time out, and sadly got caught in a MASSIVE BURST OF MONSOON RAIN.
They got very soggy at the bottom which made me sad.

But my washing day is Wednesday, and so soon I will be wearing purple pants again.

Bartering

On Saturday a group of us went to Thamel, the tourist district of Kathmandu.
We did some shopping, which involved a fair amount of bartering.

There are several joys that come from bartering.

The first is the chance to use some of the few words I have learned in Nepali.

"Oho! Muhungo! Dheri Muhungo!" means "Wow! Expensive! Very expensive!"
It's fun to say.
And there is nothing quite like being understood in a foreign language - the sense of achievement!

The second is when you succeed and manage to get the price of something down.
This is often a necessity when you're being charged "tourist" prices and you fully know you're being ripped off.

For example, on our way back we got a taxi, and we asked for it for 250Rs, which the driver agreed to, then upped to 300. We knew we didn't have to pay that and could just try another taxi, so started to walk away, which made him agree to 250.

He asked if we were volunteers, which we said yes to, and he was like "yes, obviously volunteers, asking Pulchowk for 250"!

The ridiculous thing of it all is that the amounts we're often bartering over are literally pennies! Most things we bought were under £5!

For a good portion of the time we spent in Thamel we were followed by some men trying to sell me a sarangi (a Nepali bowed stringed instrument)
This was my own fault for showing interest.
And really I was a bit interested...
I managed to get them to drop their price from 1500Rs to 500Rs, but decided against the purchase anyway, because as cool as the instrument is, it's not got the most beautiful tone in the world...

Rice Pudding

Whenever I try something new in the kitchen I always end up respecting my mother a whole bunch more.

This evening's attempt was rice pudding.
The proper nice kind of rice pudding my mum made when we were little - with rose water in it.

Rose water is readily available here in Nepal, and I bought rice the first week I was here thinking "that's a sensible staple food to purchase" and hadn't actually used any...
It was an obvious thing to attempt to make.

I emailed my ma asking her for the recipe.
She gave me 2 different ones with various different forms of measurement.
This did cause much of the confusion and google searches for "how many ounces in a cup" and "how many cups in a pint"
But sense and measurement and reason are always trumped in the kitchen by rash decisions to just add a wee bit more, anyway...

Disaster number one was boiling the milk over the edge of the pan in a somewhat dramatic fashion.
(You need to boil milk in Nepal...or buy UHT...or get ill)
Disaster number two was the electricity going off just before it was time to put it in the oven.
It's an electric oven.

But disasters were dealt with and cleaned up.

And so we had rice pudding after our Bible study this evening.
(Good stuff, by the way - learning new things from Bible stories you've heard so many times before is always an eye-opener and a reminder of the good things God wants to teach us!)

It wasn't quite like how mum's used to be, but it was tasty!

Kitchen success.

Things which have more legs than me. Part 3.

AKA: A Trip to the Zoo

(in which all the animals apart from the snakes and fish and birds had more legs than me)

Before I came to Nepal, there was one day when I was realising it was actually happening.
I'd never been out of Europe before, and my only trip abroad was to Germany last summer.
I was starting to get a little nervous.

I looked up where KISC is on google maps, and when doing so, I saw that really close to the school is a zoo.

I LOVE the zoo.
I still get excited like a little kid about animals. Any animals. All animals.
Zoos are awesome.

And so thinking about getting to visit a zoo out here calmed me down and made me excited instead of scared.

And today I did it.
I went to the zoo in Kathmandu.

It was a LOT of fun.
And not as run-down as some websites had made out it would be.

They had loads of animals: a tiger, leopards, rhinos, various kinds of deer, various kinds of colourful birds, AN ELEPHANT WHICH I RODE ON, guinea pigs, bears, a python, turtles, fish, a big old tortoise...
A really good variety.

The big cats were in fairly small enclosures, though, which was really sad.
And the elephant we rode on is surely fed up of giving rides to people all day long...

But it was a good trip.
We had lots of fun talking to the animals, much to the amusement of the Nepali people (who, due to their education system, are unlikely to really have the imagination to do things like that - to make up stories about animals just for the fun of it...)

And we played the pretending-you-can-see-something-in-an-empty-enclosure game. Tricked a group of guys to look where we were looking.

Good times all round.

Plus, I've now ridden on an elephant.

Scottish Accents

Or more specifically: my accent.

I get mocked a fair bit by my friends (this is at home, so I can't really blame this on the Scottish accent) for the way I say some of my suffixes.
'ed' or 'es' on the end of a word the way I say it sounds more like there's an 'ies' or 'ied'

Example:
(Scene: at beach mission, at the end of a session)
Me to my group of girls: "can I have all your badges in, please?"
Girls: "What's a badgie?"

So when teaching year 5 about rounds and asking them to count the number of voices (sounds: voicies), there was a fair amoung of giggling.
Which I would understand, but their class teacher has a strong Northern Irish accent!
Surely they're used to people talking funny by now!

But teaching years 1 and 2 made it all okay again.
I taught them the Loch Ness Monster Song.
Cutest. Thing. Ever.
They all sang with little copied Scottish accents.
And I made them practise their 'ccchhh' at the end of loch so it sounded authentic.

Hopefully I will capture this magnificent display on video at some point, because the actions are also awesome.

Going up and down and up and down and up and down some more...

Nepali Scouts

Most of you will know that I do Guides at home.
This has been a long time thing for me - right from going to Rainbows in my local primary school aged 5 through to leading a unit of my own in Glasgow for the past 2 years.
Shameless plug: this has been one of the most worthwhile things I've done in life, not just as a CV-filler, but I genuinely love it. Go find your local unit and volunteer!

On/around the 22nd February every year we celebrate Scouts and Guides as a global organisation.
I love "thinking day" (as it's known) because I get to whap out my Guiding history knowledge and impress my Guides and teach them interesting facts about how it all began and how it's now in 145 different countries.
(I told you, I like explaining stuff to people)

I've known all this time in theory that Scouts/Guides is worldwide, but today I actually got to see how this is true.

Before I came to Nepal I got in touch with Nepali Scouts and told them I was coming and would be interested in meeting them, somehow.
(Scouts in Nepal is Guides and Scouts combined as one organisation)
The man I was in touch with sent me this:

"On Sunday 21st of August we have one of great festivals of Hindus in town at Patan Durbar square (Krishna Temple). Lalitpur scouts conducting a service camp at there. If you interested you can join us. Our service camp will start by morning 6 to eveinig 6."

So I took my friend Whitney along with me (See, mum? I'm being safe.) today and we went along to this.
Patan Durbar Square is very near us.

It was very busy, because of this festival - there were crowds and crowds of people, and lots of stalls, and people worshipping and burning incense all over the place.

We found some Scouts, and they showed us to the man I had been in touch with by email.
We spent a little while chatting away to some Scout leaders, drank some tea, vaguely half-learned a Nepali Scout song (when I told them I'm a music teacher they were like "sing! sing to us!" - I imagine most of you will be able to guess my reaction to that...) and I was invited to go and visit some Scout units whilst I am here.


I love that it's so worldwide, that they're so willing to accept a complete stranger from the other side of the world purely on the grounds of having this shared Guiding/Scouting experience.

Things which have more legs than me. Part 2.

There are dogs everywhere in Kathmandu.
(Ironic that it's pronounced Cat-man-do...)

They are on every street, on every corner, down every lane...

No wonder the nurse and doctor at Patan clinic were so keen for me to get rabies vaccinations (of which I still have to get the third...they did not mention that it required 3 separate shots during the persuasion process).

The dogs don't seem particularly aggressive.
In fact, many of them are fairly scared of people.
And lots of them look so scruffy and mangey...
It's sad.

Daniel, one of the teachers living in the Guest House (our token male housemate), who is here from the USA with his wife, Sara, has started naming the dogs we see around here regularly.
Sara is ensuring he doesn't start feeding them and bringing them home with him...

This is the ugliest/illest dog we've come across so far.

Among all the dogs, however, I have now seen my first cat.
A couple of days ago a very thin/fairly hairless cat came into the school.

This cat, unlike the dogs, is not scared of people.
When I tried to chase it away, it tried to get further into the school.
I ended up having to actually, physically pick up the cat and remove it from the school building.

Julian is a much more manageable pet...