Nepali Clothes

Recently a whole bunch of us went "kurta shopping".

Kurtas are one of the most common types of clothes Nepali women wear.
They are made up of a matching set of trousers (or "pants"...hehehe...living with Americans...), a long top and a scarf.
They are often very loud colours and unusual mixtures of colours, too, but they are very beautiful.

So off we went, led by Stephanie (who works with a linguistic organisation out here) who is the queen of kurtas, and is good at Nepali, so a very useful person to take kurta shopping!

Firstly, we went to a material shop.
There were so many beautiful materials, so many colours, so many patterns...it was very overwhelming!
We all chose some, and paid - it cost about £2 for enough material to make a kurta top.

Next stop: the tailor.
We chose what sort of design we wanted - the lengths of sleeves, the shape of the neckline - just by describing it (often through Stephanie's translation) to the lady in the tailor shop, and left our newly purchased material in her hands. She told us they would be ready by the following Wednesday
(That was 10 days from dropping them in. There were 6 of us each getting 2-3 tops made. Impressed?)

Then we waited.
(Well, actually, we got on with life. 10 days of just waiting would have been a bit silly, particularly with term starting, and classes needing taught...)

On Wednesday we went to pick them up.
Very exciting.
Also very cheap tailoring - about £1 per top.

When we got home SarahNewYork (She's called Sarah; she's from New York) and I had some fun being girly and trying them on and showing each other and discussing potentially getting pants (of the trouser variety) and scarves to match our tops so we can wear full kurta outfits.
(Some of the female Nepali staff were telling me just yesterday that unless you wear all 3 parts, it doesn't count as a kurta.)

The next day at school we all had one of our new kurta tops on - wearing them proudly!