live hamburger
Juphal
I discovered a weird plant
I found a tiny boot
Putoo
Dog tikkah
sloooooog
Bhaktapur rice paddies
Helllllooooo
So I just finished up week two in Kathmandu. I am feeling a little more comfortable and able to find my way around. I understand a bit of Nepali (if people speak slowly) and my homestay is going well. My brothers are great. Last weekend was Bhai Tikka which is the festival for celebrating bros so I got to put tikka (red stuff) on their face. I felt kind of weird doing it, but they seemed fine with it. We watch Naruto together in the evening (unless my ama and didi (older sister) make me watch Nepali soap operas with them. Soap operas are pretty big here and they are really hard to watch without laughing.) My thangka painting class is cool. I have learned how to draw the Buddha head according to the precise dimensions. It takes me 25 minutes just to draw the head. Tomorrow I will learn how to do the body and then next week I will get to start my canvas. My Nepali is progressing. I can make my needs/wants known for the most part and I am totally awesome at bartering. I can’t believe October is almost over. Time has started to move faster which is nice. Thanks for all the nice messages. I am having fun, but am excited to get back to my western life in about a month and a half.
My IV
CHill
Some pics!!
little note
we started our homestay last night. my homestay mother is very very nice and speaks pretty good english. i have two younger brothers 15 and 16. i only met the 15 year old because the other is on vacation with his sister who also has a little girl who lives in our house for now. i have my own room and bathroom(!!!!!). my brother nisha is really into death metal and plays guitar really well. We jammed last night for a little while. We talked about comic books and he likes to draw cartoons. it is still nerve wracking and weird but i think it will be good.
Today marks exactly one month since I arrived in Nepal. It seems like a lot longer, but then I think one third of this trip is already over and behind me. Weird. This has probably been the most intense month of my life from the mountains to the monastery. In other news, I have become pretty good at meditation (some might say enlightened, just kidding, maybe). The other important thing I learned is that if you want to practice Buddhism you can still celebrate Christmas. So, yeah. I also met a “Little Lama” today who is supposedly the reincarnation of a dead lama who was enlightened. There is a movie about this kid, lama Konchog, called The Unmistaken Child if you want to check it out.
Namaste bros!
update!
It takes ages for Tumblr to load over here in Nepal, but I finally had some time to let it do its thing. So back to the beginning of the trek! We flew to Nepal Ganj which is a city in the plains right near the boarder of India. It was so gross there. More humid than florida in the summer and because of its proximity to india there is a huge muslim influence, which means there are less women on the streets and we got stared at a lot by creepy guys. We only were there for one night though so it wasn’t too bad but i got bed bug bites in the hotel we stayed at. the next day we flew to juphal which in where the trek began. We ate breakfast there and did a three hour trek to Dunai, another village. we had a guy come and give a lecture about the yasagoomba which are mushrooms that live in the brains of caterpillars and apparently they can shrink tumors when eaten. We had our first full day of trekking which wasnt too bad because it was mostly flat. We stopped in a place called Teracote (sp.?) for the night and the next day began the really hard up hills. I made it through but not without a lot of difficulty. I wasn’t in the way back of the group but I was definitelynot in the front. the views were amazing. We met a guy along the trail (his house was on the trail) and we stoppedto talk to him for a while. He kept saying to me “You are a very beautiful girl! WIll you marriage Nepali boy? I have fine sons.” The day after that I began to feel sick in the morning but figured it was just the stress and tiredness so I pushed through that day. When we got to our camp site that night I threw up. THen twice more before bed. THe next day people took some stuff from my pack so i didn’t have as much to carry, but I don’t remember a lot of that day I just kept thinking about making it to the next camp where we would have a rest day. I kept puking up water on the trail and couldn’t keep down any lunch or dinner that night. The next day was a lot of the same but we were resting not trekking which was nice. But i didn’t eat anything so they arranged for a horse to come and get me to take me to the next camp site thinking that would give me another day to rest. THe horses are tiny here and the terrain is rough so the parts i remember are pretty scary. When we stopped for lunch i fell asleep and was having a lot of trouble breathing because of the altitude so the instructors started to get really worried and i guess i rode the horse to Doh where there was supposed to be a clinic. I don’t remember that ride at all. (But i didn’t fall off cause my heels were down : ) ) In Doh I stayed in this man’s spare room while three doctors argued in Nepali outside about what to do. It was really scary not being able to understand what they were talking about and knowing that they were talking about me. I got a shot that night of anti nausea but threw upthe bread they gave me to eat and went to sleep. The next morning a nurse came down fromt he clinic and gave me an IV which made me feel better but then I got worse taht night. The next day I had two IV’s and i finally kept down some food. We stayed in DOh for 5 days. THe man whose house it was was very nice, his name was Chambah and he had a really cute daughter named Doma, or Putoo which was her nick name. He told us some crazy stories about his life like when the Maoists were trying to recruit him and he refused so they nearlykilled him until his wife gave them all of their money in return for them sparing his life. Another story he told us was when he got married to his first wife (he has 5!) he was 17 and she was 19 and he was so shy that whenever she talked to him he would run away! He runs a tea house out of his house and I spent a lot of time in there reading. By the end of our stay there he said I was like his daughter and he wanted me to come back to visit…I said maybe. One night a Tibetan doctor came and after reading my pulse and looking at my tongue said I had too much wind in my body…which I am not really sure the meaning of. But he was very nice and had started a school there (which is the school at the highest elevation in the world!) I don’t like being at high altitudes I would wake up panting from not being able to get enough air. I decided that I wanted to try walking out instead of taking a helicopter because i didn’t want to miss out on the rest of the trip. So my backpack got put on a horse and I essentially just carried my water bottles. It was really hard going back. I felt like all my muscles had dissappeared and it was still hard to eat food to get energy. But I did make it! When we got back to Jophal we ate a delicious dinner with our porters who we had all become good friends with (and who called me Guliyo Julia which translates to sweet julia). We flew back to Nepal Ganj and embarked on our 14 hour bus ride back to Kathmandu. It was terrible at first. the bus was so rickety and loud and hot. When we stopped for dinner it was so hot and humid that i threw up dinner whichw as really upsetting and frustrating for me. But the next day we made it back to Kathmandu and the program house is awesome. I did some exploring of Kathmandu and found it to be pretty awesome (even with all the honking horns! it’s even louder than NYC!) Now I am in the Kopan Monastery taking an intro course on Buddhism and meditation. We wake up at 5:45 and have three meditation sessions with classes in between. It is pretty intense. All the monks are so nice and happy though it really does make me want to get a little of what they got. I also found a giant leech on my foot the other morning which was terrible. I miss home so much, but overall I guess I am having a good time. Keep the emails coming they make me so happy!!!!!
!
I’m still in the Hong Kong air port waiting for my flight to Nepal. I have been here for 10 hours and have 2 more to go. It took me a while to get into Tumblr (I gave up several times after I kept getting an error that said “Keyboard fail fuck,” anyone know what that means?). I cannot send emails through gmail, but I have been reading the ones I got and they are nice, keep them coming! The group of kids I am with seem pretty solid so far, half of them go to or are going to Colorado College which is funny. I haven’t had a breathe of fresh air in more than 26 hours and I am beginning to feel a bit stir crazy. I brushed my teeth and washed my face and have eaten enough air port food to last me a life time. I miss everyone, but I think this is going to be good.
brb
