Thamel

Yesterday I ventured to the Thamel district, the main tourist district in Kathmandu. It is where most of the hotels and hostels in Kathmandu can be found. Consequently it is a very busy, crazy place with lots of bars; lots of restaurants; lots of tourists; lots of stores selling cheap (and not so cheap) souvenirs and trekking supplies to those tourists; lots of tiny streets that people, motorbikes, and cars try to navigate through; and lots and lots of noise:

You can even get Mexican food here

And Irish food too, with Johnny Cash on the jukebox. Only in Thamel would you find this in Nepal.

It's not all touristy though. For example, there is this Buddhist temple right in the middle of the district.

 And there are plenty of multi-story buildings that exist all over Kathmandu that somehow managed to survive last year's earthquakes.

 Though not all of them did...

Now that I think about it, Thamel is a lot like the French Quarter in New Orleans, though with not as many good restaurants, or for that matter beignets. There is though a New Orleans restaurant here where you can get hurricanes at the bar.

I stayed in Thamel for part of my trip last year before moving to Sanepa when Build Change set up their office and guest house. Now having stayed in Sanepa for several weeks on this trip, I am really thankful to be staying here instead of Thamel again. Thamel can be exhausting.

I was in Thamel to have dinner with Ram Kumar, who runs the trekking tour company Alpine Eco here in Nepal. I came in contact with Ram through one of my friends at St. Cross who did an Everest Base Camp trek with Ram a couple of years ago. When my friend and his wife learned that I was going to be in Nepal they gave me Ram's contact information and told me what a great guy he was. We didn't get a chance to meet in person when I was here last year but this year we did. My friend was right, Ram is a great guy. Ram had great things to say about my friends too...

Ram and I before dinner arrived

And again after dinner arrived

Ram took me to a Nepali restaurant that featured a cultural show. Most of the audience were Chinese tour groups. Ram told me this is the biggest time of year for Chinese tourists, so he wasn't surprised to see them.

My Nepali dinner: rice, lintel soup, spinach, chicken curry, yak (yes, yak), vegetables, and Everest Beer, all yummy

I'm told this dance was a story about a man with 2 wives...

I don't know if I'll have the chance to go on a tour with Ram on this trip. However, if I come back again I'll try and set aside an extra week to do a trek with him, though I probably won't go to Everest Base Camp unless I get into much better shape like my friends are.

I may be joining the Build Change team out in a rural village this week, so if you don't hear from me for a few days don't worry. I'll be out in the country.

Thanksgiving in Nepal

For the last couple of weeks my colleagues here in Nepal have asked me about Thanksgiving, mostly wondering about the activities that take place on the holiday. I summarized it by saying that families get together, cook a lot of food, eat a lot of food, watch a lot of American football, sometimes play football either in the street or in a park, and then sit around and exchange family gossip while digesting the food and watching the football. Then after a quick night sleep everybody goes shopping for Christmas.

And yes, I do have to qualify "football" here as American football instead of soccer.

I was also asked a lot about what food we eat on Thanksgiving, and I named off all the foods I could think of, including turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing (which I then had to describe), sweet potatoes/yams, cranberries, salad, and last but not least pumpkin pie for desert.

After describing Thanksgiving to them 2 of my colleagues invited me to join them for dinner Thanksgiving night to celebrate the holiday. They looked but couldn't find a place that had turkey, but they still selected a nice restaurant. At first I thought it would just be the 3 of us but to my pleasant surprise word got out to the entire office about the dinner and we had a party of 9.

 Instead of turkey I had steak with mashed potatoes, my first taste of beef in 5-1/2 weeks. I wasn't sure about this at first but I was told that the steak at this restaurant was actually good, and indeed it was.

The best part was the pumpkin pie for desert. The restaurant didn't have this so 1 of my colleagues called around the different bakeries around town and found one that could bake a pie for us. The bakery was on the other side of town so before the dinner he went to the bakery on his motorbike, picked up the pie, and brought it to the restaurant. I am still amazed, honored, and yes thankful for the effort that he made to get the pie. Never has anyone made such an effort just so that I could have pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving.

The evening concluded with some impromptu singing, both American songs and Nepali ones. Since I am a lousy singer I instead kept the rhythm for them by thumping on the table. I actually got a couple of compliments on my rhythm skills, though they paled in comparison to the skills of our singers.

When I planned this trip I knew that I would miss Thanksgiving with my family, and I wasn't sure how sad and homesick I would be when the holiday came. As it turned out, this Thanksgiving will be one of my most memorable thanks to my colleagues. They really went above and beyond the call. For that and for them I am truly thankful.

Halftime Report

Today is the official halfway point of my journey to Nepal. I left 32 days ago and I'll be coming back home 32 days from now. I suppose then that I should say a few words here to commemorate this occasion.

While this is not yet my longest trip of my life (there's still another 2 weeks to go before I get there), the 32 days is the longest time that I have ever spent in any foreign country, topping the 3 weeks that I spent in Australia in 1996 and the 3 weeks I spent in Indonesia in 2009. Still, it doesn't seem that long ago that I first arrived here looking for the driver that was picking me up, wondering where I could exchange my money, what food I would be able to buy, and what work I would be doing for Build Change. Those questions have all been answered plus a few others like how I would be able to do laundry (the guest house has a washing machine). I one thing I haven't done yet is withdraw money from an ATM. Food is so inexpensive here that I haven't had to pull money out since I arrived. I'll have to do it at some point though...

Staying at the guest house has been very convenient (not to mention free), but it does get lonely here since it's a 4 bedroom house and I'm the only one here. There are some advantages to being here by myself: I get hot water in the shower, I have control of the TV remote, I'm the only one using the Internet, and no one is eating my food. However, I have no one to talk to in person here and it still gets a little spooky at night. Only in the last couple of days have I felt comfortable enough to turn off all of the lights.

It's still a challenge to get a full night's sleep, with a mattress that is on the floor and the packs of stray dogs that bark and howl every night just outside my window. Then last night there was an excavator working to clear one of my neighbor's lots until around midnight. It's working right now too even though Saturday is supposed to be the day off for Nepali workers.

From my bedroom balcony, it's louder than it looks in this photo

I realize now that I should have brought some DVDs with me, because the TV selections here are pretty limited. There's The Sopranos and lots and lots of cricket, plus four English language news stations: the BBC, two stations from India that only talk about the cash exchange program the government there just instituted, and CNN with its all Trump all the time news coverage.

One of the things I'll remember about this trip is the advertisement for a women's facial skin moisturizer Pamacare that comes on every time I turn the TV on. Apparently they have some deal with the satellite provider, so every time I turn on the TV there are the same 4 girls splashing this moisturizer on themselves while the announcer talks about how wonderful the product is in Nepali before finally saying in English "Pamacare, forever with you."

Yeah, this will be forever with me, but not in a good way...

Despite all this, and perhaps to a degree because of it, I'm glad that I came. The work here is going slowly but still going, and I am still keeping up with work back at LBNL (especially since someone else is handling the parking stuff ;).

A couple of the guys from work are coming over to watch the Manchester United v. Arsenal football match that'll be starting in about 90 minutes. In honor of my sister and because I'm not a fan of Man U I will be rooting for Arsenal while my colleagues will be rooting for United. They're supposed to be bringing dinner so there is one less meal I have to worry about...

Dhungkharka

OK, get ready for lots of pictures, because today we made it to Dhungkharka, one of the hill villages that Build Change is doing work. As I mentioned in previous posts, it is also one of the villages that the Build Change survey team I was on surveyed last June, so I wanted to see how things were now.

My first impressions were that things looked better. There were still some buildings with damage but not as many as before, and the houses that were destroyed had been demolished. There were still people who were living in temporary shelters but there were also some that had moved back into their homes. Life appeared to be somewhat normal, as best I could tell anyway.

The main purpose of the trip was so that I could see the 3 homes that Build Change had retrofitted in Dhungkharka. They wanted me to see what they did and offer suggestions (if any) to make the designs better, since Build Change is preparing to make a large push to retrofit homes in several Nepali villages.

Here is the first retrofitted house, painted in Build Change teal. Or maybe it's cyan, but I prefer to call it teal since I'm a San Jose Sharks fan...

The interior of the ground floor of the house, pretty typical of houses in these villages.

The retrofit design included adding straps and wood strongbacks to strengthen the walls, and a stud wall and straps at the roof to tie the roof to the rest of the building.

Pretty slick I thought. The second house had a similar scheme, only instead of metal straps it had concrete beams poured within the floor.

House #2

Concrete beams in the floor

At the roof

This house is owned by an elderly couple who were very happy that they could sleep in their house, which is really why I am here and why Build Change does what it does. The owner of the first house wasn't home but one of her neighbors came by and told us that she wanted her house retrofitted too.

One of the elderly couple's neighbors came over and invited us to his house where he gave us what best could be described as thick oatmeal that tasted like cookie dough. It is made by heating up buffalo milk until it hardened. The buffalo was in the next room so I knew that what they told me was true. I'm pretty sure that the plate and utensils that I was eating with were not at all sanitized, and I didn't know whether there was any bacteria in the meal, but I couldn't stop myself from eating it because it was very tasty.

Just like last time, I'm amazed at the million dollar views that the peasants in these villages have. Not that it helps them have better lives or anything, but they are still amazing views.

There were also Europeans lounging outside of another house next to the elderly couple's. I had to do a double take since I didn't expect to see Europeans here, especially those that were sitting outside reading books. I was told that they were on vacation doing farming while they stayed at the house as part of a work-stay kind of thing, but they weren't picking up any tools while I was there. Perhaps they were what one of my colleagues called "volun-tourists", people who come to places saying they want to help but are not qualified to do anything helpful and are in fact there to be tourists and still feel good about themselves. I guess it is good for the local economy but I don't know. I also don't know how they ended up in a place like Dhungkharka...

On the way to the third house the driver stopped in front of a steep and wet dirt path. I was thinking there was no way we were going up that, were we? Well, yes, we did.

This is actually one of the drier sections...

We made it to the third house that is still under construction but close to completion. This house was different from the other two in that it had concrete strongbacks instead of wood.

House #3 with a wood gable, a Build Change trademark

A concrete strongback

The floor joists were tied to the beams in the wall with embedded rebar.

My colleague in the office doesn't think we need to design the attics for heavy loads. I took this picture for him.

My colleague Kiran being friendly with a shy calf.

Finally it was time to go, which meant traversing down that steep, narrow, wet path again...

My hats off to our driver for driving up and down this...

Not that the roads in the valleys are any better. Some of them are just as plagued with ruts, rocks, and ditches as the paths in the mountains. My Fitbit, which can't tell the difference between walking and bounding around inside a car, says that I made 22,925 steps today. I probably walked about 1/10 of that.

Finally we arrived in Kathmandu during the height of the rush hour, where we got up close and personal with many of our Nepali friends...

Check out this guy riding a bike in the "fast" lane.

This reminded me of a photo that I took in Port-au-Prince, Haiti when caught in rush hour traffic there.

Same problem, different hemisphere...

Now I have to take 2 Advil tablets and going to bed. I still feel like I've rolled around in a washing machine...

Venturing Out

It's now been a month since I left home, and I've pretty much stayed in Kathmandu. It's hard to get out of the city when you don't have private transportation as I don't. For that matter, it's not easy to get around the city when you don't speak Nepali and the taxi drivers don't speak much English. Consequently, I've become very familiar with the neighborhood around my house and office that is within walking distance. The folks at the expat coffee place know me on sight now and invited me to join their frequent coffee drinker program. What can I say, they're very close (less than a 5 minute walk), their lattes are good, their bacon is excellent, and they have CNN on the television, though today at least that wasn't such a treat.
 

Seriously, this is news? What's the next headline, Trump is eating a steak?

However, I am starting to venture out a bit. Last night three of my colleagues invited me to join them for dinner at a Nepali restaurant that is outside of my neighborhood, and they ordered all Nepali food for the table, or maybe it was Newari food, I'm not sure what it was except that I've never had any of it before and most of it was very good. There were a couple of things I thought were just OK, and one thing that was so spicy I had to drink a whole bottle of water to relive the burn, but there were a couple of other things that were very good, including a chicken dish and momos stuffed with buffalo meat and covered in sauce. Yes, it took me a month for me to eat momos in Nepal...

Dinner with my colleagues, taken by a waiter who didn't bother to focus...

Much of the conversation was about how the last volunteer engineer wouldn't try Nepali food and how happy they were that I was, though one of them did ask me this morning if my stomach felt alright...

Tomorrow we make our second attempt to go to the village of Dhungkharka, one of the villages that I visited last year and where now Build Change is doing some house retrofit work. Hopefully there will not be a truck breakdown blocking the road this time. The weather promises to be nice though. I'm bringing my camera.

I did finally hear back from the tour operator that I have been exchanging emails with. He just returned from a leading a long Himalayan trek and still wants to have dinner with me. So hopefully we'll be able to work something out where I can make a weekend trip to see the Himalayas. In the meantime I'll settle for the view from the roof of my guest house...

One advantage of coming to Kathmandu at the end of the monsoon season is that you get treated to views of the mountains. The rest of the year it's either too cloudy or too smoggy.

OK, Just One More...

I'll begin this post like a NPR story ;)

I'm sitting here in Kathmandu at one of the coffee places that I've become a frequent guest of, sipping my latte, munching on an omelet, and thinking about the election.  It's hard not to think about it, even in Nepal. My email and message inboxes, and of course my Facebook news feed, are stuffed with comments about the election and about the protests that have followed. I had a hard time sleeping 2 nights ago because my phones kept buzzing and I couldn't figure out how to turn them off. Apparently you all forgot that when it's the middle of the day where you are it's the middle of the night here, and some of us were trying to sleep... ;)

Most of my friends voted for Clinton so most of these messages are filled with despair, anger, rage, and angst. To their credit, my friends who voted for Trump were not boastful or triumphant. A few of them pointed out that they understood because that's how they felt 8 years ago when Obama was elected.

Here in Nepal the election is still the prime topic of conversation.  My colleagues still cannot believe that Trump won, and now they can't believe that there are protests and riots in the streets of America about it.

I can but don't want to believe that there are protests and riots in the streets. It seems like half the country is so mad that they voted for Trump and now the other half is mad because they did. Trump has become a talisman for everything that people believe is wrong with America, either by the promise that he will fix it or by the threat that he will make it worse. I don't know how anyone could govern in those circumstances.

I've been telling my younger colleagues, both here and in the US, that things could be worse, and that this is not the first time there has been so much anger about the presidential election (1968 for example). They only know what they've experienced in their lifetimes so I've tried to give them some assurance from the experience that my grey hairs suggest that I have. I have to say though that it's getting more difficult for me to do this with any degree of conviction when there are people with grey hairs who are more worried than the kids are. I don't want to mention that to my colleagues.

I still have hope that the country I will be coming back to next month will still be the great country that I left, faults and all. I haven't changed my travel plans or put my house in Oakland up for sale (assuming of course that the house is still in one piece when I get back...). As one of my friends told me yesterday, our future is going to be one day at a time. 

Kids on their way to school this morning

Now back to work...

OK, I'll Post About the Election

With Build Change's permission I stayed at the guest house this morning to watch the election returns. I wasn't all that surprised by the outcome. Disappointed perhaps, but not surprised. I was surprised by how long it took CNN and the BBC (the two English news stations that I get here in Nepal) to call the election for Trump. CNN didn't call it until Trump was literally walking up to the podium to give his victory speech. The extra time though did allow me to catch up on my LBNL projects.

My co-workers here though were all surprised by the result. In one case I had to show her a picture of the TV broadcasting Trump's acceptance speech before she would believe it:

I didn't realize how pink the wall is until now...

As you might expect, everyone that I talked to here in Nepal was no fan of Trump. They were convinced that he would lose and told me a number of times about how all the polls showed that Hillary Clinton would win. I reminded them that we in the USA have seen before how the polls for presidential elections can be misleading. There was also concern expressed that international aid from the USA could dry up under a Trump presidency. Much of the funds coming to places like Nepal are from USAID and the Clinton Foundation. USAID funding could disappear under Trump, and who knows what will happen now to the Clinton Foundation.

The same co-worker who told me I had the blessing of a sister asked me today if I was upset by the election. I told her I wasn't happy about it but I could live with the result. I believe that if America values democracy to the degree that many people claim it does then we must be able to live with the result. Otherwise we are being hypocritical. There were plenty of people who were upset when Barack Obama won 8 years ago and there were plenty of people who were upset when George W. Bush won in 2000, but we survived both presidencies with our democracy still intact. In fact, this may have been one of our most democratic presidential elections in years in that a guy that was not hand picked by the political party leadership won. And 4 years from now, we can vote him out.

That being said, I have no clue what this guy is going to do as president. None whatsoever. That's as far as I will go here with a political rant.

I was kidding though in my FAQs about staying in Nepal depending on who won. I booked my return trip long before I left, and my mom would be very upset if I didn't come home for Christmas. Besides, as I told my Facebook friends this morning before the results came in, I had proof that the sun would still rise the day after the election no matter who won.

See, the sun will come up, tomorrow...

Two Week Check In

It's been two weeks now since I arrived in Nepal. The weather has been wonderful, 75 degrees F (or as they say here 24 degrees C) and sunny every day. The monsoon season ended just before I arrived so I'm getting to reap the benefits, including these views yesterday from the roof of Build Change's office of the west side of Kathmandu:

That white stripe in the back, those are the Himalayas

Work has been good so far. I haven't had a chance to go out in the field yet, the trip that we started last week got cancelled because a broken down truck blocked the road to the village we were going to. That happens around here. One of the challenges to rebuilding the homes and schools in these villages is how difficult it is to even get to them. During the monsoon rains the roads get blocked by mudslides a lot, and even during the dry season there are events like broken down trucks blocking the road. This even happens in Kathmandu, where on Wednesday a lot of roads were blocked because the president of India was in town for a state visit.

So I've been spending most of my time in the office, working on guidelines for constructing homes using stone masonry. Pretty much everybody on the Build Change staff is under the age of 30, and while most of them know a good amount of English typically Nepali is spoken around the office. Thus it has been a bit of a culture shock sitting in a room with a bunch of kids speaking Nepali when I'm the "old" (relatively speaking) guy who can only speak English and a few words of Spanish. Then again, the same thing was the case when I worked for Build Change in Haiti and Indonesia. There too the staff was mostly young people who spoke a foreign language. It's actually better here since in both Haiti and Indonesia there were only a few people who could speak English.

One of my big concerns coming here was whether or not I could figure out how to eat, since I cannot cook at all and it's intimidating for me to go to a restaurant alone (in the US as well as a foreign country). So I packed my suitcase with as many Clif bars, bags of oatmeal, breakfast bars, beef jerky, and bags of ramen noodles as I could fit into my suitcase (which exceeded the baggage weight limit as a result). However, I have managed so far without having to resort to a diet consisting solely of what I brought. I've only had 2 Clif bars, 2 breakfast bars, 1 bag of jerky, and 2 bags of ramen over these 2 weeks. I have been eating a lot of pasta dinners. That is the one thing I know how to make since it only requires being able to boil water, and all of the markets here sell lots of bags of pasta and even tomato sauce. I did try making rice for the first time in decades and failed miserably (too much rice & too much water makes a lot of mushy rice to throw in the trash), but I still have 6 weeks to figure that out. It does help that Build Change has a cook on staff to make lunches, that there are two good pizza places within walking distance for dinner, and there are 2 places nearby (plus 1 I haven't tried yet) that serve breakfast with lattes...

Today's latte, from Cafe Soma

There are some things back home that I miss. I did miss the Cubs winning the World Series, the sports stations here thought it was more important to show replays of old cricket matches instead. As I type this I'm missing an art reception, and tomorrow (your time) I'll be missing the LSU-Alabama football game. However, I still get to see English Premier League matches, plus the occasional NFL game and as mentioned in my last post episodes of The Sopranos. So it's not all bad. I'm not craving a hamburger or a chimichanga yet, but that'll still be my first meals when I get home.

I'm 2 weeks in, and I'm still here and still as healthy as I was when I left, though I haven't tried washing clothes yet. That's my next challenge...

An Unexpected Pleasure

It was a slow day at work today since it was right after the 4 day holiday, yet another similarity Tihar has with Christmas, so today's subject matter is something totally un-Nepali but still related to my time here in Nepal.

Some of you might recognize the gentleman in this grainy screen shot of the TV at the guest house I'm staying at, taken with my work phone (to explain the graininess). Yes, it is Tony Soprano. Turns out that one of the HBO channels that we get here is showing an episode of The Sopranos every weeknight at 5:45 pm, right around the time I get home from work each day, just in time for dinner. They've just started showing Season 3, which included Tony's mother's death, Meadow going to college, Dr. Melfi's rape (which was tonight's episode), the introduction of Ralphie Cifaretto, Christoper becoming a made man, and the now famous episode where Christopher and Paulie pursue a Russian hit man through the back woods of New Jersey.

OK, any of you who never watched The Sopranos probably don't know what I'm talking about, and even if you do you may be wondering why I'm even bothering to mention this on a blog presumably about my trip to Nepal. I'm mentioning it because a) The Sopranos is my all time favorite TV show (and one day I'll convince someone to buy me the DVDs for Christmas ;) and b) it's perhaps the last thing I expected to see on TV in Nepal. I expected the cricket matches, the NBA games in the morning, the Bollywood movies, and the occasional American sitcom, but not my all time favorite TV show and certainly not every weeknight.

I was once asked by a co-worker whether or not I, as an American of Italian heritage (thanks to Mom), whether or not I was offended by the show. Far from it, I told him, it is a show that I loved and that he should too. Seeing these episodes again remind me just how much I loved this show. It is an unexpected pleasure.

I did mention that it was a slow day today...

 

Where is Everybody?

Today was the last day of the Festival of Tihar, and in addition to one of my neighbors shooting off firecrackers that are scaring all of the dogs in the neighborhood right now, there is something else about today that I thought was rather odd. There was nobody on the streets today. Almost every business was closed and the streets were relatively empty, like Christmas morning or during the Super Bowl back home...

Hmm, where is everybody?

Normally I'm nervous crossing this intersection on foot because of the crazy, uncontrolled traffic; but today, not a problem.

I understand that on the last day of Tihar families get together, so I figured most businesses would be closed. However, I didn't expect to see a ghost town. I think the entire country took the day off. It was kind of eerie...

This did complicate my meals today, since the restaurants were all closed too. The only place that was open was a coffee shop nearby that is owned and run by an American expat. I learned this because only he and his American wife were working today. There were no Nepalis either working there or dining there. It was all expats with nowhere else to go like me. I could have just as easily been in Berkeley instead of Latitpur except that I paid in Rupees instead of Dollars.

I guess it shows just how important family is to most Nepalis. Then again, I do wonder how everybody got to grandma's house because it doesn't look like anyone drove...

The coffee was good though...

Double latte, Nepali style