Playing catch-up

Well, given the rather sporadic and inconvenient allocations of electricity over the past few days, this post will perhaps be longer than most, and followed up with as many photo uploads as possible before I over-tax the router, which would most likely result in its combustion. This would, of course, be quite the problem given the recent water shortage as well, but alas! Such is life in Nepal.

Photos referred to in this post may be viewed here:

Pen pals, Mountains, Jam

Friday, February 13 (That is the day that this post is about. Ignore the date above)

We had a wonderful, lazy, late morning. I had plenty of time to do some exercises, play guitar, eat too much breakfast, the usual.

After our relaxing morning, we made our way to Durbar Square to Adarsha Kanya Niketan school to do the pen pal project! For those that don’t know, this seemingly innocent project is actually rife with obstacles to its success. When I entered the project, we had just received letters and photos from the Nepali kids to their American pen pals, in all-digital form (meaning the Rotaractors had to scan 90+ letters). I had to print each letter, get prints made of each photo, match them up, stuff the letters, and write names on them. My dad and I then went to Meadowdale High School and Forest Ridge School to distribute the letters, videotape each kid, and then get a still photo. Then, we collect letters and print photographs (I had to sort for the Meadowdale kids, the teacher at Forest Ridge did this for us...whew) and stuff them into envelopes. Then I also have to assemble each clip into a cohesive video to show the kids here. Then, we have to actually assemble all the kids in one place here (they are from two different schools), procure a generator AND a projector to show the video, show the video, hand out the letters, and hope I haven’t screwed up something major. In the end, it was a vast success. Check the photos.

After the whole pen pal project, I went to have a meal and a beer with Penny and Len at a roof top cafe, and luckily for us, the mountains came out from the haze during our meal. On one side, we had the sunset over Durbar Square, and on the other side we had the Himalayas over Kathmandu. Absolutely fantastic. I posted some photos, but they obviously don’t do justice to the real thing.

After my dinner, I had a jam session near Sachin’s house, which is a different location from where we practiced before in Durbar Square. Sachin had electricity this night, so we could play with a full drum kit, two electric guitars, an electric bass and a microphone. Needless to say, I had a blast. Some songs we played:
-Roadhouse Blues
-Every Breath You Take (yes. by Sting)
-With or Without You
-Sweet Child O’ Mine
-Bombtrack
-Wicked Game (HIM cover)
So, a very eclectic (and excellent) selection of music. I might also add that Sachin has an AMAZING singing voice. He’s fairly soft-spoken and, you know, normal sounding, but he can sing and sound EXACTLY like Axel Rose. Photos of the jam have been posted as well.

Penny used the word ‘ensconced’ today, and I wrote it down, feeling that I should use it more often. Ensconced ensconced ensconced.

One short story I forgot to mention when it happened occurred the morning of the first trip we took to Durbar Square with Penny and Balram. Balram came to the house early to have a short meeting with my dad about the school for the deaf that he works at, and came by bike. We were all going to meet Penny at her house and walk to Durbar Square. The main problem with this is that Balram and my dad are both rather large (meant in the best way possible, since neither is fat), and would have trouble squishing onto Balram’s bike by themselves, let alone with me dangling off the back. But this is Nepal! The people here are nothing if not...space efficient.

And so, off we went, bottoming out over every pothole and scraping the ground over every speed bump. We received more stares than usual, and were twice outstripped by passing school children (no, this is not hyperbole). Annnnd that’s about the end of that story. Short, as I said. And that’s all for this day! But as the electricity has just come on, I shall be making another post immediately after this.

‘Til then,

Carey

p.s. I HAVE proofread this, but please look past any mistakes or mis-wordings. It's late and I'm tired, but I wanted to get this updated.