Head bobbling - Namaste!
Its my last night in Kathmandu before I head out to internet-less village! I'm sure after I'm there for a while I will yearn for city stuff but for now I just want to go out to the countryside. Kathmandu is pretty polluted, filled with crazy honking cars, and flooded with cheap touristy crap imported from India.
Complaints give the wrong impression - the people are very nice (super cute when they bobble their heads while they give affirmatives.) and the differences between this city and first world cities is an experience in it of itself. I always appreciate the foreignness of a eastern cities. The overly elaborate, over-decorated religious shows (this temple needs more statues of Ganesh! In gold!) seems so pretty yet hollow to me as a monotheistically raised westerner. The flow of the language and the relaxed/efficient vibe of the people. Even the squat bathrooms seem nice (for a while anyways).
Yet still I want the purity of nature and the calmness of a small tourist-free village.
Today we checked our first pathogen test and it came out well!! We could SEE results and they were good (i.e. composting after digester work reduces the pathogen load by a lot, which means the digesters can be used for biogas and fertilizer).
Afterwards we treated ourselves to a tour of the city temples. The first was gaudy but then we met up with a Jon's Sherpa guide friend (Jon's been hiking here for a while) and he took us to back alley Tibetian refugee areas (with tasty tasty cheap food) and a second temple (very pretty)...where we saw a million monkeys and ritualistic corpse burning next to a river (you know in hinduism they burn bodies...). I stood there looking at the burning for a while - it didn't bother me, even though in some I could make out human like silhouettes. It also didn't bother me when little kids went into the river to fish out silver/gold offerings that people threw in (along with the ashes of the deceased). It did, however, bother me when several Nepali kids chucked their trash into the already polluted river at the insistence of their mothers. God, I'm such a hippy. Yet, ashes and and human bodies seem natural to me, as does the need to make a living (i.e. silver/gold pillaging)...plastic senselessly floating in a river is just that...senseless.
The whole thing also had a trippy edge because me and my friend Jon smoked a joint from some weed he found growing at the side of the road. However, our Sherpa guide assured us that the hindi holy men smoked the stuff all day long. So I guess its not blaspheme.
The Sherpa guide also took us to a nepali cafe to drink tongba - this weird weird drink where they give you a cup with fermented millet grains and then fill it with hot water...its like drinking primitive wine.
Complaints give the wrong impression - the people are very nice (super cute when they bobble their heads while they give affirmatives.) and the differences between this city and first world cities is an experience in it of itself. I always appreciate the foreignness of a eastern cities. The overly elaborate, over-decorated religious shows (this temple needs more statues of Ganesh! In gold!) seems so pretty yet hollow to me as a monotheistically raised westerner. The flow of the language and the relaxed/efficient vibe of the people. Even the squat bathrooms seem nice (for a while anyways).
Yet still I want the purity of nature and the calmness of a small tourist-free village.
Today we checked our first pathogen test and it came out well!! We could SEE results and they were good (i.e. composting after digester work reduces the pathogen load by a lot, which means the digesters can be used for biogas and fertilizer).
Afterwards we treated ourselves to a tour of the city temples. The first was gaudy but then we met up with a Jon's Sherpa guide friend (Jon's been hiking here for a while) and he took us to back alley Tibetian refugee areas (with tasty tasty cheap food) and a second temple (very pretty)...where we saw a million monkeys and ritualistic corpse burning next to a river (you know in hinduism they burn bodies...). I stood there looking at the burning for a while - it didn't bother me, even though in some I could make out human like silhouettes. It also didn't bother me when little kids went into the river to fish out silver/gold offerings that people threw in (along with the ashes of the deceased). It did, however, bother me when several Nepali kids chucked their trash into the already polluted river at the insistence of their mothers. God, I'm such a hippy. Yet, ashes and and human bodies seem natural to me, as does the need to make a living (i.e. silver/gold pillaging)...plastic senselessly floating in a river is just that...senseless.
The whole thing also had a trippy edge because me and my friend Jon smoked a joint from some weed he found growing at the side of the road. However, our Sherpa guide assured us that the hindi holy men smoked the stuff all day long. So I guess its not blaspheme.
The Sherpa guide also took us to a nepali cafe to drink tongba - this weird weird drink where they give you a cup with fermented millet grains and then fill it with hot water...its like drinking primitive wine.