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.