Photo: Traditional Newar village houses, showing wooden windows and corn drying. by Jennifer Shrestha.

Photo: Didi frying egg on kerosene pump stove. by Jennifer Shrestha.

Photo: Me and Bungamati Aamaa. by Jennifer Shrestha.

Visit with Pradeep and Jennifer!

My mom visited quite a while before Pradeep and Jennifer did - in fact, Tihaar may have happened after their visit as well. So I'm a little out of order but I don't think it makes that big of a difference to you all! Jennifer is from my hometown, Sandpoint, Idaho. She did Peace Corps in Nepal and now she is back in Sandpoint with her husband from Nepal, Pradeep. They came to visit Nepal and I got to have daalbhaat with Pradeep's family, and another day they came to visit Bungamati. My family loved them. Jennifer took many photos and later on sent them to me on a disc. They are amazing, and I just had to share a few of them with everybody!

Also, go ahead and click on this link to their small business, Hands of Nepal, which sells high-quality Nepalese clothing, jewelry, and crafts made by Nepalese women, and sends a portion of its profits back to Nepal: http://www.handsofnepal.com

Mom-in-Nepal 2004: Ode

My mom accomplished several amazing things while she was here for two weeks. One of these is rearranging my apartment so that it actually feels like a nice place to live. The main thing was her very diligent efforts at communicating with people, mainly my families, despite communication barriers. We had a nice role reversal, with me showing her how to do everything 'correctly;' from eating with her hand to using the chaarpi (squat toilet) to passing things with her right hand only. I would have figured she would at least know how to wash clothes by hand, but she had to have a little lesson in that too. You have to use a bit of force to get dirt out of things. She got the biggest sense of satisfaction when I allowed her in the morning to go out by herself to buy bananas and donuts from the stands/stores at the bus station/intersection nearby. She wrote down what to say ("ek darzan keraako kati rupiyaa parchha?") and bravely went off to haggle for bananas. The nice lady at the stand gave her a good deal anyways. Poor Mom was a guinea pig really… but now through experience I have a far better idea how to be a better Nepal tour guide. One of these ideas is to be really clear ahead of time exactly how much free time a guest has to spend at a family’s house. My families really wanted my mom to live with them the whole time she was here, but it’s so much physically easier to leave from my apartment, closer to the city, on your way to some temple or ancient palace! My mom impressed both of my families by cutting vegetables with a chulesi (rather than a knife), sewing on a non-electric sewing machine, and sweeping with the really cool brooms they have here. She also laughed a lot, which they loved, and reminded me about laughing. I tend to get pretty serious around here, dealing with heavy issues and adjusting and such, but laughing really is a great type of medicine. My Nepali language tutor gave her a lesson, which gave her some basic words, and with these words she managed to have entire conversations with my didi from Bungamati, who knows about the same number of words in English. Now, like me, my mom has lots of Nepali family. My mom satisfied my secret hope that when she first saw the mountains from my village she would cry, and by saying that after living in my families’ houses she finally understood how weird I was about Nepali food and other things when I got back to the US after my study abroad in Nepal two years ago.

I took her to a place called Nagarkot, a well-known mountain-viewing spot, where we found a small hotel and stayed in their best room on the top floor, with windows looking out in three directions, for around $20. We woke up at 5 in the morning to watch the sun rise on the mountains, which was amazing because it was so nice and clear. After that we had breakfast. I'm going to have to make a side note in here about Nepal restaurant food. I am a general fan of breakfast, and ordered a (normal, right?) scrambled eggs and hash browns. The hash browns were pretty spicy – alright, it’s Nepal, oh well. The eggs were SWEET. Somebody please help me out here, you’ve never heard of sweet scrambled eggs, right? Except for you weirdos who put syrup on everything? I thought, well maybe there was a mistake and they mixed sugar in instead of salt, and they’ll bring me new ones. I called the waiter over (we were the only customers) and said, in Nepali, “Oh, these eggs are sweet! How did they become sweet?” and he was like, “yeah they’re sweet” as if this is completely normal. I pressured some more, did they put sugar in the eggs?? No, apparently since they don’t have regular milk for the eggs, they used the powdered milk, which is sweet. Now, to me it seems like it would be far better to just break the mould and make the eggs without the powdered milk, without any milk, than to make sweet scrambled eggs. I guess this cook must have been trained, and they told him that for scrambled eggs you need milk. YICK. It’s like when I went to have “pumpkin pie” at a restaurant specifically because I saw the sign for pumpkin pie in the window. They bring out pumpkin quiche, complete with vegetables on the side, and act like I’m completely crazy when I tell them that I was expecting a dessert. I’m trying to help you people out by explaining how foreigners interpret these words! Ahhh. My mom made up for this though by bringing me lots of cheese, and cooking things like lasagna, and soup using the vegetable bullion cubes she brought. Once while we were shopping at the vegetable bazaar a mouse ran from one stall to another, and my mom screeched and said "musaa musaa!" which was great, she remembered the Nepali word for mouse even in a time of 'crisis.' Also she saved me by bringing a lot of warm socks and sweaters, for which it would have been a gigantic hassle to go shopping, and without which I would surely have frozen into a gigantic ice cube here in my concrete apartment.

For my birthday she bought me, among other things, a pair of jeans. Two years ago I would have never even thought about wearing this style of jeans (almost exactly the same type I’d wear in America), but now in Kathmandu you see at least half the girls my age wearing pants. So now I get to wear jeans sometimes! Speaking of clothes, my mom bought about ten kurta suruwals from my didi’s sewing shop. This meant that my didi and her best friend had to sew up the kurtas pretty fast, but this proved easy enough and my mom actually got to wear kurtas a lot of the time she was here.

We bought plane tickets to go to Pokhara, and in the morning of our flight we were walking through the fog to the intersection to find a taxi, when all of a sudden my mom gasps and I look up and there is an elephant walking down the road towards us. I have seen elephants in Nepal before, but in the jungle quite a ways from the city. This elephant must have been an inhabitant of the zoo, and judging from the load of branches and leaves it was carring between its trunk and tusks, along with the man perched behind its ears, this one was bringing back some breakfast for some of its elephant friends. We steered clear off to the side of the road so it could go by. I was soooo happy that my mom got to see an elephant, since we didn't make plans to travel down to the jungle area. And I know it is silly to imagine that fate sent that elephant just for my mom, but honestly, what a coincidence! I got teary-eyed, too. In Pokhara we went on a little trek up to an international Buddhist ghumba, and I finally convinced her it would be a good idea to buy my brother a khukuri, traditional knife of the Ghurka soldier, for Christmas. (For a somewhat romanticized and misspelled version of khukuri/Gurkha information, go to http://www.nepalesekhukuri.com/gurkhas.html ). They’re interesting to look at and sharp, and I figured he could impress his college friends with it. Actually, I’m not sure if Mom was ever really convinced it was a good idea, though he does like it.

I should be able to post photos soon from my mom’s visit.