House pictures

Pictures of my new place.

Umm...formatting is the bane of my existence

I can't get these pictures to do what I want them to...just to let you know that I know this looks wonky...

Floods and Foods

Speaking of good food…I have some wacky food pictures to share. Some ladies and I went on a shopping trip for cotton fabric Saturday, but we forgot that some stores are closed on Saturday, so our efforts were thwarted. We did walk through the neighborhoods near Durbar Square (the site of the old royal palace), which are basically markets selling spices and clothes and jewelry. We ate lunch at Fire and Ice, the legendary pizza place in Kathmandu, where I had the world’s smallest martini, which took about 35 minutes to arrive at the table. The reason given for the wait was that there was a “mistake” with the first one. But when you’re eating real olives, artichokes and mozzarella cheese during monsoon season in Kathmandu, you don’t really have any excuse to complain.

We attempted to buy fabric last weekend as well, but we were stuck in a shop entrancef because the street and sidewalks flooded. We had stopped to wait out the rain,

but even after it stopped raining, the rain didn’t go away. We eventually had to wade through it. I should mention that all of the tap water here (and some of the bottled filtered water) is fecally contaminated, according to the U.S. Embassy. So, I consider the flood water to be fecally inundated. I was wearing hiking boots, so I took those off and bought some flip flops to wear in the water. The locals just took off their shoes and walked and barefoot, but the thought of getting stitches in my feet after walking through broken glass and metal was terrifying enough to warrant spending three dollars on blue converse flops. (My friend Rachel has dubbed them my “poo water shoes.”)

On our walk this weekend we ran into some kind of festival. Despite there being about twenty volunteers wearing yellow Western Union t-shirts, no one could tell us what was going on. One of the small shrines that are all over the streets here was being decorated and a man was doing a ritual. There were lots of little girls wearing eyeliner, too.

We went back to fabric store yesterday, and took advantage of its proximity to a South Indian snacks and sweets chain store, where I had a dosa the size of a small child’s baseball bat. All south Indian food looks like toys to me.

Politics

We have now had class for two full weeks. My grammar teacher has been MIA since the third day of class. No one at the school has offered any info as to the reason for his absence, but we discovered through various channels (one of them being are substitute teacher, who is Tibetan) that he is in fact in jail because he was at a candlelight demonstration, or vigil, or something (it’s not clear) at the stupa. I’ve heard various rumors: that it was a vigil for the monk who immolated himself in Sichuan some time ago, or that it was somehow related to Saka Dawa…we basically don’t know anything. Every class has a foreign (English-speaking) shedra employee who also sits in on the class and helps teach when necessary, and ours has not offered any information. We don’t want to make her uncomfortable by asking about it. On the other hand, we also feel like we might be missing out on some important information.

The situation regarding the Tibetan community here appears to have shifted quite drastically in the last few years and is obviously the result of Nepal’s growing dependency on China. There are (at least) three English language newspapers printed in Kathmandu, and I have been reading at least one every day since I arrived. There have been several articles about the Chinese government’s insistence that the Nepali government control Tibetan political demonstrations. The head of the summer program here also came around to our classes to talk to us about the Dalai Lama’s birthday, which is this Wednesday. It sounds like she gave the various classes (there are three levels of Tibetan, plus Sanskrit, Nepali, and Buddhist Studies) significantly different information, so we’re a bit confused. She just told our class that we shouldn’t go to Swayambhu, where the birthday celebrations will be held, and that buses and taxis going in that direction have been turned around by police in the past. However, one of my friends said that they were told in their class that two shedra students on one of those buses had been taken straight to the airport and deported, never to be allowed in the country again. That’s a pretty significant repercussion that I would not have guessed was possible, so I’m surprised she didn’t share that with us. We thought maybe it was because, as she told us, we are the advanced students who have been to Kathmandu before and therefore her warning to us is “different.” Still, given that this political climate is fairly new, I would have liked a little more information. One thing we know for sure is that there will be tons of police in riot gear all around the Boudha stupa that day. I might take that opportunity to go eat good food in Thamel, the tourist district.

So...this is a blog about my summer in Boudha

Well, I’ve been here for nearly three weeks, so I suppose I need to post to this blog before my inclination towards procrastination ossifies the project completely.

My first week was mostly taken over by jet lag and orientation. Unlike language programs at Tibet University, this program actually offers orientation, which was surprisingly organized and useful. It’s like being at an actual school – imagine!

As far as that goes, the course has proven to be remarkably effective as well. In addition to learning a lot of new things, in only one week, I’ve remembered so many things that I lost during my five year hiatus. I even reunited with the woman who taught my private lessons five years ago, when I unexpectedly arrived in Kathmandu for one month. She is also employed by the shedra as a conversation partner. She told me that my Tibetan had gotten really bad, but that I was getting it back very quickly. She is a former nun who likes to make jokes constantly, even in the dharma conversation class, so I am always excited when I get to work with her.

We have two hours of conversation partner work every day, which is just unheard of as far as my experience goes. (Of course, I had that much conversation in Lhasa, but it was usually about food or Korean TV dramas that the girls who worked at the university liked to watch.) In regular conversation, people rarely correct you because they are just trying to have a conversation. If they get your general meaning, they just keep talking. However, “conversation partners” are supposed to correct you and teach you new things. This doesn’t always happen. What usually happens to me is that a partner realizes I sound like a Tibetan from Lhasa, and that is so shocking to them that they don’t bother to correct my grammar. My conversation partner yesterday just kept smilling and saying “hang sang byung,” which means “I’m shocked!” He said that I sound like a Tibetan girl…but unless people correct my grammar I will always sound like a five-year-old Tibetan girl.

Changing language partners is another excellent strategy that they use here. Instead of being assigned one language partner for the whole summer, we switch every day. In the advanced course here, we have four classes: a grammar, or colloquial Tibetan, class, followed by conversation partners; and a Buddhist text class in which a Khenpo (a monk who has finished the shedra education program at the monastery) reads through a text and explains it (in Tibetan), followed by a conversation partner class in which we discuss what the khenpo taught us. Some of the conversation partners are monks, but most of them are people who have studied Buddhism for one reason or another (former monks and nuns, college students, I guess).

So…on the apartment search front, I found one immediately that I thought was really wonderful. Then events took a sinister turn...During my first week of classes I had a crisis, entomological in nature. Those of you who know me, which is all of you because you wouldn’t know about this blog otherwise, will recall that I have an entrenched and highly irrational fear of large insects. Last week, three-inch-long flying cockroaches entered my apartment and terrorized me, forcing me to sleep in a wicker chair on the porch (with the mosquitoes). I’ll spare everyone the details, but after two nights, I bugged out, forgive the pun. I am now living in a room in the same house I stayed in five years ago, so it feels like home. Also, the kitchen is separate from the bedroom. If the bugs want to play at night, I don’t have to participate. There isn’t the nice view of the stupa that I had at the last place, but I can see the roof of the swanky Hyatt! (and all of the mountains around Boudha). It also comes with some very colorful neighbors with whom I share a bathroom and a kitchen. They are leaving on Friday. More about them later….

Oh, yeah, so Boudha. Boudha is the neighborhood in Kathamndu where I am staying and studying. It is somewhat removed from the bustling downtown area, and things are pretty calm out here. Everything closes down around 9:30 pm, so there isn’t a lot of night life. On the other hand, people are out on the street at 5:30 am. It was nice to go walk around the stupa that early when I was jet-lagged. But now I’m back to my old ways of struggling to get out of bed before eight o’clock. I don’t have class until 11:30 am, so this is fairly difficult for me. The neighborhood is really nice in the morning, though. The shops aren’t open, yet, so vegetable and fruit sellers set up their things and hang out for a while.

Time for class…I apologize if the writing is less than compelling, but I have to start somewhere. More to come…

P.S. The pictures above are of my old (roach infested) apartment and the view of the stupa from the porch. I am html illiterate, so I can't figure out how to post them through out the entry.