Having settled into a routine here, I don't seem to have as much to blog about as I did at first. My weeks are pretty predictable. Monday to Friday I have 3 hours of Nepali lessons, usually in the afternoons. I spend my mornings playing the piano, praying, studying Nepali, and chatting with my didi when she arrives. I am at the point where we can communicate reasonably well. She does a good job of speaking slowly, using simple language, and it also helps that our subject matter is usually fairly limited ("How is your family? Please cook daal bhaat today. And can you wash these clothes?"). But it's encouraging to have her around, because it gives me a chance to practice, and also lets me see that I am making progress. I really wish that I could snap my fingers and be instantly fluent, but I haven't yet figured out that trick, so it's "slow and steady wins the race" instead. But it is coming along, for sure, and I'm still enjoying it. Once I get home, I practice the guitar (my new hobby) for awhile, shower (if there's electricity so that I can dry my hair afterwards...otherwise it's WAY too cold...and I've decided that daily showers are WAY overrated!), eat, and study Nepali. There's the odd Skype call with friends or family back home in the evenings, and occasionally I'm out for dinner with someone, but otherwise it's a pretty consistent routine, and I'm pretty happy with it.
And then most weekends I go to the children's home Saturday morning and come back Sunday. I eat with them, play with them, talk with them, practice Nepali with them, sing with them, laugh with them, pray with them, etc. I still love it there!
Routine is good...I do well with it. But as things here become more familiar I notice fewer "interesting" things. They have become normal sights for me. So now I see the stray dogs, the piles of garbage mixed with mud (and a few dead rats), the women (and some men) carrying huge loads in baskets on their backs via some sort of strap on their forehead, the children playing badminton or soccer, the schoolchildren in their very western style school uniforms, 2 men or 2 women walking holding hands in friendship (while you almost NEVER see a man and a woman holding hands or showing any affection in public), the cars and other vehicles trying to make their way through streets that are too narrow for two to be side-by-side at any one time (but they still try...with lots of honking), the cows walking along the road, the guys on their bikes selling (or collecting) who-knows-what, people warming themselves by little fires outside, women sitting outside in patches of sunlight picking lice out of each other's hair, and all kinds of other things, and instead of thinking, "I should blog about that," I just walk on by. So you get the fly-by version instead. As a white women, I get lots of people staring at me, and often people will say, "Hello...hello...hello!" to me. Usually I ignore them, but if they are small children, then I play along. And sometimes I stop to kick a soccerball with them once or twice before I go on my way. They get a big kick (pardon the pun) out of that. Oh, and of course, there are always the interesting signs, some of which I've shared already. Here is the one I'd seen before but forgotten where it was...
And two little boys walking home from school together...
Today was some sort of Hindu festival, so schools were closed, and people were eating yams (which aren't the same as North American yams...they're white, starchy, and not very sweet), and molasses taffy (which as far as I could tell was just pure molasses, and wasn't my favourite thing in the world to eat). Don't know any more about it than that, except that a lot of people were going to and from their villages to visit family, and so there were many more buses than usual. So it was no problem getting home from the children's home today on the bus.
Here are a few more photos of the lovely children's home kids...
Tomorrow is January 16, which means that I have now been in Nepal 2 months. When I think of it in those terms, I don't feel so bad about not being fluent yet :)
