KOrea - Hanging in the south with little Kim's big brother South East Asia, Nepal, Korea

after leaving singapore airport, nepal really seems like another world. five or so abandoned and nasty looking aircraft litter the right side of the runway, one of them overturned. there is something about an aircraft with its wheels in the air that is so wrong that you cant look away. it goes some way to conveying nepals sense of honesty though i think. at least the fucked out planes aren't locked away in a shed where you cant see them. the airport building is thick with dust, and waaay too big. the contents of each office take up half the space that is available, and the dust is thicker than i thought possible. our taxi ride from the airport into the tourist ghetto of thamel was in a fucked out old corolla. brought back memories. this country is awesome. whats happened so far? shit... its been a long week. i took part in a maoist rally, not seriously, but just to see if anything interesting would happen. it didnt. pretty interesting that the people who support the maoists are generally just country people who get promised a free day in kathmandu with lunch and transport provided if they go and wave a flag. s they do, but they dont get transport home, so they have to walk back to their counrtyside. it reeks of the 'revolution' in chile where a thousand or so dudes are paid to protest on the street and everyone thinks the whole country is behind them because of the media coverage... its not a fucking revolution if they are doing it for the free lunch. had our first week of school. its a pretty hack job, but i like it we have one cool teacher who has a good handle on sarcasm, and one who is a bit of a tool, goes off on annoying and uninteresting tangents, and is a bit too obsessed with his masters degree from harvard or wherever. ah well. there are only three of us in the class, we hang out with a strayan dude called luke, who is into his death metal. weve got a local bar called namaste that we go to to do our homework. fuckin brilliant. the staff gave us all the answers, and thought it was a huge joke as we got drunker and tried to pick up some of their language for homework. the house band is fronted by a dude we call nepali jim morrison, he was real impressed that we came to see his band every night, and gave us heaps of info about underground punk and death metal in nepal to mine and lukes delight and lissas possible apprehension. our guesthouse is on the edge of thamel, which means that it should be quiet at night, but we have a gang of dogs on our street that begin their day when the cars stop. barreldog and neckdog are the leaders of the gang, and spend their day sleeping and sitting staring at the street butcher. amazingly well behaved considering how much raw meat and whole fish are sitting just a foot from their salivation. the view from our roof is pretty incredible. all the nepali houses have a flat roof, and the locals all hang out up there at sunset watering the plants and walking around shirtless with their bellys hanging out. the men anyway. we escaped the city for the first time yesterday (took a taxi after a whole lot of kerfuffel and confusion) up into the hills to a town called dulikhel (i think) where we wandered around for an hour trying to find the tank that was mentioned in the lonely liar. turns out it was a water tank. gutted. we wandered around for a while and wound up next to an english language school. the the girls who lived there all ran out to say hi and practice their english, and invited us in for tea. their grandmother made us some awesome tea and boiled eggs and they taught us card games that i couldnt win cause they kept changing the rules. they took us to the temple at the top of the hill up a thousand steps that is now occupied by the army. that was a bit strange. it had the most amazing view that we couldnt take photos of because i guess their position was 'secret'? they didnt seem too happy to be sharing their hilltop with a temple and tourists, but it was interesting seeing a fortified position from inside the wire. there is a huge military presence in the kathmandu valley, because of the maoists i guess, and it looks like an easy job for the soldiers, leaning over their guardtower walls to check out the ladies. tomorrow we have to go to a school and witness our teacher in action. then on tuesday its our turn. eek. had a few one on one lessons last week, which was cool. my dude was 6 years old, spoke perfect english in the present tense. his favourite animals are lion tiger eagle falcon. no boring ones here! and he wants to be an electrical engineer and have a fast motorbike when he leaves school, and his favourite colours are red golden and silver. what a dude! so apparently the monsoon starts next week. hmmm.