Tips for walking around Kathmandu

1. Always walk with your mouth closed and watch your step
2. Be aware of wandering cows (see #1)
3. Don't bother covering your cough because the person next to you is hawking up a spitball (see #1)
4. Bring a change of shoes (see #1)

Cave-like temperatures

If you look at the average winter weather in Kathmandu, you will find it quite reasonable. At the coldest time of year (now-ish), it gets into the low 30's at night and up to the 60's during the day. 


Despite this salient fact, if you take a vote of expat residents, you will find a majority say that they have never been so cold. Seriously! This is scientifically proven by people from Wisconsin, upstate New York, and Finland independently stating that they have never been so cold as in Kathmandu.

Why is it so cold if it doesn't even freeze? (I won't even mention the fact that it is often sunny). 
#1: Short days mean the cold, concrete brick-built walls of the house spend more time losing heat at night than gaining heat during the day.

#2: Draftiness of windows, particularly in the bathrooms, and exterior doors.

#3: No central heat. You can heat up a room with a space heater, or build a nest of blankets right next to one as my child and dog are wont to do, but the plan fact is that the STUFF in the room does not heat up. Chair - cold. Bedsheets - cold. Jeans -cold. Floor tiles - cold. Etc. 

#4: (Not applicable to those of us so lucky as to be in USG housing) The power goes out. A lot. In fact, at peak times of "load-shedding" a home might have power for 8 or 10 hours out of 24. "Load-shedding" is a term that means "there is not enough electricity to go around from our hydro power plant during the dry season so you have to take turns." Bye-bye electric space-heater, hello indoor parka.

It goes like this. One night, you notice a nip in the air when you go to bed, and turn the space heater on when you get up. A few nights later, the indoor temperature is a bit lower. A week later, even lower, as those concrete bricks start evening out with the nighttime air temp rather than the daytime air temp. Now, you turn on the heater when you get ready for bed, too, and be sure to get your clothes for the next morning out of the closet because it is REALLY cold in there (Andrew is using it for our wine stash). By morning, air temp in the bedroom is 55 F. Just try taking your tushy into that drafty bathroom that is noticeably colder than the bedroom, and you, too, will begin your day saying you have never been so cold. 

Stuff! And lack thereof.

I'm not kidding about the parade! Nine guys just
 in this picture, but they each had their job.

On Halloween day, five little trucks drew up to our house, each holding a shipping crate or two. In a symphony of belching trucks, hammers and crowbars, shoes slipping on and off, our boxes were paraded into the house.


After having gone through all our boxes, we have discovered an assortment of items that just did not make the trip from Nairobi. Pinched by the movers? Pilfered at the port? Misplaced in a cabinet, drawer or closet during the packing of boxes? I have my suspicions but just don't know. Here are some of the items that didn't make it:

• 2 brand-new in package pairs antibacterial kitchen shears
• Assorted pantry items, like powdered cheese and unopened 3-gallon bottles of olive oil
• A chenille rug that was down in the guest room (the matching pillow made it)
• One girls size 7 rain jacket
• All our salad forks (yes, all the other silverware made it)

Adjusting

I have to admit to having a bit of a hard time settling in to Kathmandu. One reason is that, from the moment you are cogent enough to remember in actually speaking to anyone after a jet-lagged arrival, everyone at this very friendly post asks, "So how are you settling in?" You don't really know these people, so you say what is expected. It's going well, of course.

But in truth, I feel like we are having difficulty finding the ending to the phrase "home is where the...".  Our household effects seem to be taking their sweet time getting here. We don't have our car, and won't for a while because somehow it didn't get put on the manufacturing list for August, and will be manufactured this month. Supposedly. And life at the French school has proven to be a real challenge for the little one. Just about every blessed thing is in French, unlike the 50/50 plan they had when we enrolled. Mixed in with dual culture shock (Nepali and French), my little type A is finding it very difficult to cope. The advantages of gaining a second language and having a short commute to school are starting to lose weight.

We are also in "Daishan" season in Nepal. This is a huge family holiday - the Nepali equivalent of Christmas. Everything closes and everyone goes back to their home, be it city or village. There is music, lights, lots of marigolds and people dressed in amazing fancy saris. It feels very festive. Which makes me a little sad. We haven't been here long enough to have "people", we can't get around to go anywhere, we quickly tire of the near-falling-apart taxis in the insane traffic, and the kiddo is terrified of walking, on account of the motorbikes buzzing and constant honking used as a form of traffic communication.

But today I saw 3 kites being flown from rooftops. Apparently kite flying also goes with the season. Made me smile. We'll see how tomorrow goes.

Nelsons Roll

I have to admit that I am doing a little back-dating blogging. I started several posts and didn't get them finished - time to catch up!

Starting with our home-leave: "Home-leave" is an official term meaning "minimum four weeks of extra paid vacation for the foreign service member so that you remember what it's like in America and also so you still think this job is cool after a few years' hard labor."

We Nelsons have been trained not to count on where we expect to be living or working in the future. For now, we can absolutely assured that we have a whole month to be on vacation in the US. Seize the day! Believe it or not, many foreign service members decry their enforced home leave... Why you ask? Because they have forgotten what it's like to have only 10 days' annual vacation? Probably, yes, but also because it is expensive. The majority of people would have trouble spending more than a reasonable one or so weeks at their in-laws, and  other places to stay generally cost money.

Our solution to this was to stay the one or so weeks at the respective in-laws', to travel between said in-laws' homes by our car which is wisely cared for by my parents while we are out of country, car-camping on our way from one to the other and back again. Thus, our schedule looked like this:

1. A week in Europe on the way, where we immersed ourselves in wine, bread, cheese, art, Parisian charm, and Disneyland

2. A few days in NM doing crazy-mad shopping that is hard for those not living in 3rd world countries to comprehend, as well as dentist and doc visits

3. Driving, camping, driving, etc, to include the following stops:

• Rock climbing in the Jemez, NM
• National forest near Pagosa Springs, CO
• Mesa Verde National Park, CO
• Arches NP, UT
• Zion NP, UT
• A'le'inn cafe along the Extra Terrestrial Highway in Rachel, NV (a quick stop so we could get out of NV before the tires melted)
• Mammoth Lakes, CA (in a BED)
• Yosemite NP, CA



The accomplished Junior Ranger in her favorite milieu.

• San Francisco, baby!

4. 10 days' worth of playing, 7-yr-old birthday celebrating, and avoiding forest-fire smoke inhalation at my in-laws' in OR

5. Driving, camping, driving, to include:

• Boise, ID, and a visit to an old college buddy of Andrew's
• Yellowstone NP, WY
• Grand Tetons NP, WY
• An night with a hotel shower and laundromat in lovely Laramie
• A few nights at one of our favorite haunts, my grandfather's house in CO

6. Back to NM for the last of the crazy shopping, packing, eating, and telling everyone we see how awesome our trip was.

Now, my dears, now, I sit in a lovely home in a cloudy city on the other side of the world. A city crammed with people, motorbikes, and houses that go UP; with rooftops where people gather, work, eat, and stare at us; where the dogs, roosters, and the locally-made horn blowing keep waking us up at night; where prayer flags flutter from buildings, marigolds decorate doors and gates, and people, dogs, and cows walk around with the red tikka on their foreheads. We can see the hills surrounding much of the Kathmandu valley from our own rooftop. I look around, think back to just 2 or 3 weeks ago, and wonder which experience is the dream. 

T minus 23 and counting...

23 hours from now, a plane will take us away from Kenya, probably forever. There have been a lot of mixed feelings in our house this week. For the little one in particular, it's been tough balancing her excitement to travel to the States soon with her sense of loss. End result: child's behavior is alternately enthusiastic and downright awful.

For me, I have realized that this is the first move we've made where we may never set foot in this city - or country - again. We'd be crazy to pay for a trip to come here, when we've already seen and done so much (and there are so many other new places to visit!). But this sense of finality is really putting a damper on my own excitement to leave.

On the bright side, we have pulled off one of our lowest stress moves of all time (thus far). Our stuff was pretty much organized / sorted / tossed / sold before the movers came. We seem to have everything now we planned on having, and all that we have fits in our suitcases - or in strategically timed care packages to family.  The house is clean, the laundry is done well before midnight, and we have time to host a goodbye cookie-party at the playground before we leave tomorrow.

Tomorrow's journey starts with a week around Europe, then a 4-week trek across the Western US. This is one of those times...home is where the family is.

Cute-isms

This one's for you, Mom.

Amidst the overwhelming number of details to take care of in getting ready for the international move, a few weeks of life without "stuff", and a vacation in Paris on the way to home leave, the kiddo has come up with a few questions. Most of them revolve around the schedule, which is complicated at best. But some of them reflect how truly she is a third culture kid.

For example, when on the phone with her grandparents, who have talked about taking her fishing or panning for gold in the lakes and rivers, she asks,
"Are there any hippos there? What about crocodiles?"

A wise question from her usual milieu.

This past weekend we were doing one of our "why didn't we buy this stuff before" shopping trips, and we went right through a big fancy new Nairobi interchange, which happened to have a cell tower  in the middle (a REAL one, not a pole with guide wires). The child asks,
"Wait, are we in Paris already?"

When we expressed confusion, she points out the cell tower and says it looks like the Eiffel Tower (it does, a bit), and notes, "It must have been that this road was so smooth I forgot we were still in Kenya!"