Lukey is asleep. He woke at 5am this morning and discussed the rats running in the roof and where his precious daddy was and was there more booby, and is that rats running in the roof?
Tara is at school with her daddy. When Lukey and I left Boyd was explaining where we lived and the distance to the sea to a class of 5. Tara was studiously drawing pictures in her book. Lukey and I had been in the nursery room with the 3to 5 year olds. He had booby for the first 10 minutes, then he played with a little girl with blue pigtails and by the time we left the whole class was running in circles yelling "pi-cal-iii !!! pi-cal-iii!!!".Its not hard to get a Nepali class of 5 year olds excited. :-)
Tara is at school with her daddy. When Lukey and I left Boyd was explaining where we lived and the distance to the sea to a class of 5. Tara was studiously drawing pictures in her book. Lukey and I had been in the nursery room with the 3to 5 year olds. He had booby for the first 10 minutes, then he played with a little girl with blue pigtails and by the time we left the whole class was running in circles yelling "pi-cal-iii !!! pi-cal-iii!!!".Its not hard to get a Nepali class of 5 year olds excited. :-)
Yesterday it rained for the whole day. It rained in the morning so we huddled under the tin roof to have breakfast. It rained when Tara and Boyd went to school. It rained while Lukey demanded to go to school so we got dressd and put on boots and waterproof trousers and jacket and I contemplated the rain and he jumped in some puddles so we went on a mission to find buffalo milk. At Heaven Hill we are cooked 3 awesome Nepali meals a day. But sometimes chapatti and egg , Dahl baht and Dahl baht can leave a hole. The little shops here sell chippies and coconut crunch biscuits. So we asked Shamser if we could source anything here in the village and now we go every day to fill up a half litre pot with fresh Buffalo milk. When the dam is milked the calf sucks milk from one half of the udder and Bossanda milks the other..., a race to the. finish. We pay 50 rps.
Tomorrow we shall go for a family trip to Besisahar, partly to stock up on fruit and peanuts , and bandages ( I have bandaged up a few Nepali cut feet recently - glass and roofing iron etc) and partly to get the kids fit for a couple of trecks we are eyeing up. One is the first part of the Annapurna circuit and one in the region of Langtang where there is said to be amazing mountains, Tibetian villages and a Yak cheese factory.
I really miss cheese, and bread and chips and steak and mostly cheese. In our first week I would wake dreaming of eating and so often conversations would turn to Stilton and Mangos. I didn't expect to feel culture shock coming from Bangkok to Kathmandu. But there is a stark difference between the freshly swept tiles and almost OCD cleanliness of Thai people to the hawking and spitting, the rubbish, the dust, the honking traffic of city life in Nepal. Up here in the mountains I am still getting used to the hawking and spitting and get more than a bit twitchy when my kids run about without shoes, imagining their toes in the chicken poop and the spat boogies etc etc. But, like sitting by a fire, at first blinded and choked by the smoke, I slowly learn to adjust how I view Nepal and sit with the wind behind me . The last trip I made into Bessisaha., I arrived before 7am, avoided the western restaurant found a tiny blackened cafe bursting with Nepalese and received gratefully delicious potato Samosas wrapped in biodegradable newspaper.
We later found out this rainy cold day mentioned above was the storm that killed many trekkers further up the valley we face.
