Kathmandu

July 16 2007

Ok so I have started to sleep properly at night and feel like I am ready to write a bit more than last time...

Since arriving here we have spent our days learning nepali and doing a little sight seeing. We have learnt pretty soon that it is quite hard to get anything done over here there is always a strike or a holiday or something of the sort that brings the entire city to a standstill. Quite a change from London..

On Friday we headed into the city to get our visas (this simple task took all day)and visit the Temple of the Living Goddess. She is a child who is picked at birth to live in a temple with the priest and his wife until she is around 12... there are around 9 festivals a year when the city comes to worship her, we werent allowed to take a photo even though we were required to make a donation. Seems you cant take more than two steps without being hassled to give someone something.

After that we headed to Thamel with the other volunteers for a night on the town.. Thamel is pretty crazy so many people, cars, cows, dogs, shops etc but we met some very interesting people. One english guy who works for a charity saving Nepali girls who have been sold as sex slaves to Indian circus groups.. I think we will try to meet up with him again as there may well be some fund raising we could do at home to help them.

The next day we were just wandering from cafe to cafe nusrsing our hangovers and then early to bed so that yesterday we could get up at 5.30am to get the bus to Nagarkot. It is one of the hills in the area, we trekked down and it really was beautiful to pass all the rice fields with the women working in all their colourful clothes. We passed some schools and all he children were running out trying to practic english with us. Anyway 20k later we were home and tired so another early night for us. This week we are continuing with our language classes and hope to visit the orphanage where we will be working next week.

On a personal note we are settling in now, the jet lag seems to be subsiding and we have met some great people that I really hope to stay in touch with after we leave. The dhaal bhat for breakfast is probably going to be the hardest thing to get used to apart from the traffic(?!) but we are pretty happy and are just looking forward to starting work. A lot of the volunteers that are here now are leaving soon so we are awaiting the next batch!!

Caroline