Yesterday , Sunday, all the other volunteers arrived. We have people from Scotland, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, and France. Three of us will be doing the medical program in the city of Chitwan: Me and two other French Nurses. We are all going to be placed in the same hospital and with the same family homestay. I am excited because the other Nurses have lots of experience. One of them has been in Africa volunteering in Mali!. The other Nurse only speaks basic English, so I might be able to learn some French with her. I am also excited to go to the city of Chitwan because it is close to the jungle where the elephants are.
Today we all had breakfast and then we had Nepali classes. We learned about the different costumes of the country like marriage, religion, eating habits, language etc. I wish we would have had this class earlier, because I did a very stupid thing on the shower. The water of the shower was super hot, and I was hoping to cool it down. So, I mixed cold and hot water in a bucket and bath with it. Once I got out of the shower, I found out that the bucket was used by Nepali people as a substitute of toilet paper. It was horrible! I had to shower again. :(
Then we headed to the Monkey temple (actually it has other name but there are so many monkeys that everyone calls it the monkey temple). There we learned that the flags the we see everywhere are prayer flags and that each color represents a different element ( blue-sky, red-fire, white-water, yellow-sun, and green-earth). We also learned more about the singing bowls and about the "Thanka" paintings. These are paintings that take months to make and they are used for meditations. The artist do not use any tools at all to make the lines and circles. They also differentiate into student, master and grand master by their level of expertise. It take about nine years of practice to get out of the student category, and each student specializes into a single kind of Thanka pattern. All the patterns are used for meditation. Some of them are similar to the lotus flower while others narrate the story of Buddha. To meditate with them, you are supposed to stare in the middle while you try to clear out your mind.
After, we went for dinner, saw different traditional dances, learned to eat with our hands instead of having cutlery (the Nepali) and we drank rice wine. :)
