An Unedited Look Into Our Lives

11/29/09: Kathmandu, Nepal

I am prefacing this post with a boring (but I think necessary) explanation. So you see, now that we’re done trekking and will (fingers crossed) have consistent, decent Internet access for the remainder of the trip, I have strongly suggested to Kevin several times that we need to come to an almost-real-time schedule of posting. Though Kevin agrees with me in theory, he sees a very serious problem with not having a post for every single day of our trip. For example, he recently noticed that we had not written anything for the 23rd and compulsively went back and wrote an entry for it. To wean him off of this madness, I suggested to him that I write ONE SINGLE POST covering three days (the 27th through the 29th), explaining to him that we would never be able to catch up to almost-real-time if we wrote a post every single day. He pondered this irrefutable logic at great length and reluctantly agreed. Now, I didn’t realize that it was contagious, but Kevin has become a control freak. He has a template for each blog post, and he already had the template for this post ready. It read as follows:

“11/27/09 – 11/29/09: Kathmandu Nepal

Black Friday/Saturday, Why Kevin needs daily posts”

I, in an act of unwifely insubordination and defiance, deleted the first half of the date section. I am writing this on the 29th! We will NOT have a post for the 27th and the 28th, and it’s ok! And maybe this way, someday in 2010 we’ll actually physically be in the same country as the blog would have you believe!

Ok. So that’s that. Now for the post. Thanks for reading.

Since we’ve spent the last six days in Kathmandu not doing much of anything besides eating, I’d like to share with you some of the conversations that we’ve had so you can see just what our lives are really like.

While walking down the street in Thamel:
K: So, the Nepali have this really conservative culture, right?
Z: Yeah?
K: Then why do they have these shower dance bars everywhere??
Pause
Z: I think to answer that question we’d have to know what a shower dance bar actually is.
K: Well, obviously it’s a dance bar with a shower.
Z: Is the water hot? (thinking of the lukewarm shower I had at the hotel)
K: (knowing that I am now thinking about going to the shower dance bar) YOU aren’t in the shower. The DANCERS are.
Z: Oh.

After buying insanely adorable yak wool booties and finger puppets as a gift for one of Kevin’s expectant friends:
Z: Awwwwww – look at how cute and tiny these things are!
Pause
Z: We should get some for our kids!
Pause
K: … We don’t have any kids.
Z: sighs. Yeah. I know.

While playing Scrabble:
Z: That turn took way too long. Next time you take a 10-minute turn, you’re going to pay.
K: Oh yeah? How so? With my life?
Z: Yes.
K: Wow, you really know how to strike the fear of God into a Scrabble player.

While sitting quietly at lunch one day:
Z: Hmmm… (thinking about what to order)
K: Oh, did you just have a Thought?
Z: Not really. I already have a Thought ready for my next post.
K: Yes, but you should remember them anyway because some days you won’t have ANY Thoughts at all.
Z: Speak for yourself.
K: (ignoring me) I already have TWO Thoughts ready, but I think the one I just thought of is better.
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Thought of the Day: There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. But not when it comes to pepperonis.
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Pictures of the Day: Kevin looking down on me; me looking up at Kevin.

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Turkey – Er, Steak and Salad Day

11/26/09: Kathmandu, Nepal

Thanksgiving Day started out inauspiciously with me curled up in a ball on our hotel bed (we think it was caused by a bad chocolate donut), croaking out to Kevin, “I’m dying… Please, shoot me now. I’m dying!” Kevin, who is familiar with my absurdly melodramatic manner when even the least bit sick, paused and questioned me. “Is it really that bad?” Forced to consider the actual reality of the situation and not just the reality in my head, I grumbled back, “No. But my stomach does hurt. And it’s not fair because it’s Thanksgiving.” Because nobody should have a stomachache on Thanksgiving. Unless it’s because you had fourth and fifth helpings of everything, and then, well – what did you expect?

Despite the dramatics and the croaking, I felt good enough by dinnertime to indulge in our pre-planned Thanksgiving dinner extravaganza at a fancy Kathmandu restaurant. In my mind, only two things are required in order to be considered a fancy Kathmandu restaurant: toilet paper in the restrooms and entrees that cost more than four dollars. K-Too, a relatively well-known and punnily-named steakhouse in Thamel, met both of these criteria, so we decided it would be our splurge (we spent $19 for our meal, over twice as much as our previous most expensive meal in Nepal). In honor of Thanksgiving, they were serving a traditional three-course Thanksgiving dinner, but I decided that twenty dollars for turkey in Kathmandu was pretty much equal to extortion. Plus, can the Nepali really do stuffing? They can carry 100 kilos of stuff on their backs and beat me up the mountain, but stuffing? I have my doubts. So I contented myself with a salad (topped with REAL bacon!) and onion rings (with tangy barbeque sauce!), while Kevin had a steak (with two eggs on top!) and fries. The onion rings were perfectly golden and crisp, the bacon was oh-so-bacony, and the steak was juicy and tender. (But I’ll have to admit that I would have paid some good money for quality stuffing.)

 

We meant to take this picture before we ate any of it, but then we didn't.

We ended the day by watching a little bit of the CNN International coverage on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. When the live segment in New York was over and cut back to the anchor sitting at his desk in London, he informed us, “Thanksgiving is an American holiday. It falls on the fourth Thursday in November and has been an official holiday since 1863. The first Thanksgiving was in 1621, when the American colonists invited the Native Americans to a feast. They had seafood, venison…”

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Puzzles for Postcards

You Won’t Actually Find Any Lions Anagram

A Human / Lion Mainstay

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Thought of the Day: Pomegranates are a very violent fruit. They bleed all over your hands.
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Picture of the Day: We went there because it’s “probably the best steakhouse” in town. Probably.

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Food. It’s What’s for Dinner

11/24/09 – 11/25/09: Kathmandu, Nepal

There’s an unstoppable force heading toward the streets of Kathmandu, and Zhou and I (more specifically just me) were one day from being part of the problem, not the solution.

That’s right, you too can soon fly thousands of miles to an incredibly cheap city and overpay for food that you can get a block from your house. But if you do, bring your Sunday’s finest to wear, as today’s soft opening was attended only by important businessmen and what I can only assume were famous Nepali celebrities. The Colonel’s food here is only for the big wigs (not the big pigs…), as it appeared to cost about three times as much as the local cuisine.

…

Speaking of unstoppable forces, we were told that after spending several days over 3,500 meters that we would feel like Superman when we returned to a lower elevation (“the altitude of the common folk”). Since our trek though, we have felt quite the opposite. All we want to do each day is eat and sleep and sit in motionless positions. (It just occurred to me that perhaps in other countries this is what Superman does!) It has gotten so bad that today we moved rooms from the third floor of our hotel to the first to limit the number of steps we climb. (Ok, our computer also reaches the wireless down here so we’ve been able to update the blog.)

Perhaps one of the reasons we spend a lot of our day waiting for our next meal is that the food has been so good here in the city. I really haven’t been able to get enough of the momos, chowmein, naan, cinnamon rolls, chocolate croissants, falafel wraps and everything else we’ve discovered around Thamel (the backpacker district in Kathmandu).

On a slightly related topic, here’s one of the conversations Zhou and I had that stemmed from my new-found compulsion to eat every last bit of our meals:

My reaction to Zhou passing me the remains of her roast chicken (not from KFC).
“You know picking the scraps off chicken bones is not my specialty.”
“Like it is your brother’s?”
“Yes, and that’s his only specialty.”
A half-second silence, just enough for me to possibly switch topics, possibly stay on the same – you be the judge.
“You know, I’ve been thinking of adding a ‘Thought of the Day’ section to the blog. I have so many great thoughts in my head but they all seem to be lost on you.”

There you have it. As long as I keep having thoughts (and keep remembering to write them down), we’ll post them above the Picture of the Day so they can be shared with the world.
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Thought of the Day: A good drink can really be ruined by a poorly constructed straw.
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Picture of the Day: 76 days since my last haircut and 21 days since my last shave, I finally bit the bullet. Whew knew straight-edge shaving was so easy?

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Kathmandu Day 1, or, In Which We Use a Cow to Navigate the Streets

11/02/09: Kathmandu, Nepal

We arrived in Kathmandu last night too late to do anything but get to our guesthouse and fall asleep. So this morning we woke up bright and early to explore the city. And as soon as we stepped out onto the streets, Kevin was promptly run over by a pedicab.

Just kidding. But it wouldn’t surprise me if stuff like that happens all the time here. In the backpackers’ district, Thamel, the roads are narrow and crowded and shared by buses, motorcycles, pedicabs, bicycles, dogs, the occasional cow and tons and tons of pedestrians.

Kathmandu itself is noisy, colorful and crowded. It’s a bit overwhelming at first – there are so many signs and shops and sounds and smells and people – very different from anywhere we’ve been so far. The most interesting thing is attempting to get around. The streets don’t really have names and our map was pretty useless (this could be due to the fact that we didn’t know where our guesthouse was on the map for the first few hours). But despite this, we did manage to get to the post office (our one errand of the day!), mostly through sheer luck. Emboldened by our success, we decided to take a different route back to our guesthouse – and we immediately got lost. Kevin, being the alpha male that he is, insisted on using the direction of the sun to help us navigate. This method was thrown out the window after I pointed out that it was one in the afternoon and that his “northwest” ended up taking us southwest instead. Fortunately, at this point we started recognizing things. Unfortunately, the first thing we recognized was a cow we had seen wandering the streets earlier in the morning. When I pointed the cow out to Kevin, he scoffed, “Yes, that’s very helpful, because cows don’t move.” I was hurt, especially as this comment was coming from Mr. Navigate-using-the-sun. But my point was proven a few minutes later when we saw another landmark we recognized – a picture of Jennifer Aniston randomly jutting out from a building nearby. From there, we did manage to get back to our guesthouse – how exactly, I still don’t know.

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Puzzles for Postcards

Where am I? Name the island.

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Picture of the Day: Regretting my hasty “curd with chocolate sauce” order for dessert

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