#there's the oc and there's instagram videos with the other woman and there's whatever urged me to go look into jeff buckley more and there's

[ilargeicontradictmiself]

The way Jeff Buckley deciding to cover Nina Simone and Leonard Cohen songs has affected my daily life is insane to me. Catching both brainrot from someone you've never met and getting the evolved version with them ingrained in it is such an experience

[storytimewithtina-blog]

Week 1

**I wrote this after our first week, but had to take everything down and recreate my blog, so only posting now**

This one is also quite lengthy so bear with me!

We arrived in Kathmandu just over a week ago and it’s been such an adventure already. Everything is different here; the roads, washrooms, people, buses, running water, food, language, I could go on. Day to day tasks have become such interesting learning experiences :)

Roads

The roads have no rules; if you are on a main road, you do whatever you need to do to get to where you want to go. If you are on a smaller road with limited visibility, you honk as you approach an intersection to warn other drivers and pedestrians. There are stray dogs everywhere, at least 3 on each street corner, and stray cows near the main roads. On our first day we saw a cow just sitting in the middle of one of the busiest roads in Kathmandu, it seemed so quirky that it made us laugh, but since then we’ve noticed that it is a common occurrence.

Washrooms

We are incredibly fortunate to have western-style toilets in our homestay (I had to catch myself there, I had the urge to say “normal toilets”). Our work has latrine-style toilets, similar to camping outhouses but a slightly tougher workout for your glutes and hamstrings. (It’s worth mentioning that this is the set up in a newly built office)

People

I came with another student, but our experiences have been slightly different when interacting with locals; she has features typical of Nepali people, while I have much paler skin, brown hair and hazel eyes. This poses different challenges for both of us; people approach her speaking in Nepali and don’t believe her when she says she is from Canada (because of the stereotype that everyone from North America is light-skinned with light hair). I, on the other hand, get stared at walking down the street on our walk to work or around the area where we live, because it is a bit removed from the downtown tourist area. This also means that we get charged tourist rates which can be anywhere from 2x to 10x what the locals pay, which is can be a bit frustrating, because we are students on an unpaid internship, but it has strengthened our bargaining skills (especially with taxi drivers).

We have made a few attempts at bargaining so far, by watching and observing our friends and coworkers, and we haven’t been able to bargain down to the local price on our own, but as first attempts, I think we did pretty well :)

Buses

The buses here are nothing like OC Transpo. Some buses resemble school buses in size and seating arrangements, but most are smaller transformed minivans, with room for about 15 passengers squeezed in the back, and sometimes during rush hour you can see over 20 people squished into one bus, with people hanging out the windows or on the roof for longer trips. The other day we rode in a tempo (a small bus on 3 wheels with an industrial-type box behind the drivers seat, where about 10 people can sit closely). Instead of a button to press or a string to pull when you get to your stop, you knock on the top of the metal roof to let the driver know you are getting off.

Water

The water situation is tricky to understand, especially since we’ve only been here for a week. Our homestay has a filter and we have access to filtered water whenever we want, which is not at all the norm. We have to be careful about what we eat, and make sure that everything is either boiled, steamed or fried. We’ve been warned to stay away from fresh fruits and vegetables, unless we buy, wash and peel it ourselves. Showers are a bit tricky, we do have a water pump and hot water at our homestay, but we limit our showers to a maximum of 5 minutes with a small current of water. The hot water takes sometime, so morning showers are “cool and refreshing” but we’ve gotten used to that pretty quick.

Food

The food here is absolutely delicious! A lot of it is baked, boiled, fried etc. because of the water issue, but we’ve been buying fruits, and our hosts always have apples and bananas in the kitchen. I know everyone else that blogs about Nepal and the surrounding area can’t say enough about how good the milk tea is, but I’m happy to hop on that bandwagon. It is black tea with milk and sugar (which sounds pretty simple) but there are spices added that take it to a next level. The housekeeper at our homestay makes us milk tea (ciya) every morning and you can’t really have a bad day if you start it with milk tea. This is definitely one of the things that I will start making when I come back home.

Work

As for work, the work varies from one day to the next, and we meet with our boss every day at noon over tea to discuss progress. One of my endeavours here, as a part of the youth outreach goal, has been to create an Instagram account and work on engaging people on our social media platforms. It is day 3 of our Instagram account and we received 20 likes on a picture we posted earlier this morning; It is a small victory, but it feels so rewarding! I’m familiar with the struggle of getting the word out from the charity club I run on campus, and while I’m incredibly grateful for my friends who will like posts that I link them, it’s such a nice feeling to know that people have seen and read about your work and are genuinely interested in it. Next week I start animation for our promo videos and I’m honestly really excited :)

Bumps in the Road

We went to a festival in Patan our first weekend, where a woman distracted me and my friend by asking our help with something while either she or her boyfriend somehow got my phone out of my front pant pocket. It’s been quite nice not having a phone for a few days, but I went to the shopping district and bought one the other day. It’s hard to get by without navigation and Toodle (the motorcycle version of uber). It’s a low-quality android that gets the necessities done, which is just what I need.

I’m incredibly impatient and expected to grow and change right when I got here but it’s only been a week, and I keep having to remind myself of that. Despite having my phone stolen, I think it’s one step closer to the social media cleanse that I was hoping for (and kind of dreading at the same time). I’m already using snapchat less (mostly because my replacement phone has a really poor camera), next up is Instagram; wish me luck!