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.