this city is getting a little dull. we have been here now for just over 3 weeks, and the constant noise, pollution, and lack of open spaces is beginning to do my head in. our course has 1 week left, but it looks to be a busy one. starting tomorrow (sunday!!!!?) we have our fourth teaching practice, 40 minutes of teaching to a class of 30-45 12 to 16 year olds, then 3 more over the rest of the week. the good thing is that they get easier the more you do, so by friday we should be ready to actually get a job... thats the point i guess. its been interesting seeing what people understand, or dont. there is no weekend here. saturday is usually a day off, but i got some bemused looks when i asked students what they were going to do in the weekend as part of an exercise. not being allowed to mention beef is interesting too. a whole new minefield, the cultural one. we spent the weekend out of town, with luke (our only classmate) we grabbed a taxi and drove 40 km into the hills (2 hours on really bad and then really narrow roads). it cost us about 25 bucks between the 3 of us. awesome. and we could fit 4 passengers into a tiny suzuki if we needed. love the total lack of road rules or regulations. the town we ended up in is called nagarkot, at 2000 metres elevation, it usually has views of everest, but not this time of year. as the sun set it threw light on some mountains in the distance, but who the fuck knows what they were... so i guess im one of not very many people who might have seen everest. with things like that youre usually sure what the hell youre looking at. we got the only guesthouse in town that had other foreigners staying, but unfortunately they were british girls who didnt feel like hanging out with us, so we went for a walk and ended up at the restaurant at the end of the universe, so we had some whiskys as the sun set. then we had dinner in the dark that came in two servings because the restaurant ran out of gas and had to go get some more to finish cooking the meal, and the sporadic gusts of wind blew out our candle whenever we relit it, while the dogs mustard marmelade and ginger fought each other around our feet for the bits of chicken that didnt taste right. but there were fireflys!!!! so overall a pretty different night. our guesthouse owner keep luke talking and when he learned we were training to be teachers, he told luck to make sure the girls know about personal hygiene... dont know what kind of teachers he thought we were going to be!
so this town like everything else in nepal is infested by the army. from the observation tower at the top of the hill where we didnt see everest, we passed at least three separate army bases, and a huge number of pillboxes. i think the army here is overfunded (like most places i guess), overstaffed, underemployed but overly paranoid. not a very good situation...
one of the highpoints of the expedition was the bus ride down. we had seen lots of local busses with people riding on the roof, so waited till it was about to leave so they couldnt do anything about it, and jumped on the back, climbing up to the roof as it started rolling. it was an awesome ride down two hours of winding one lane road down the terraced hilsides, ducking the occasional powerline that threatened to decapitate those not paying attention. the dude taking money for tickets climbed onto the roof to take our money from the doorwell, charged us 25 rupees (45 cents) each, and climbed down with the money in his teeth. no worries! tranzfuckingrail should come here to see how its done. after a couple of hours on the best bus trip ever we wound up in baktapur, looked at some more temples. amazing, but not really anything new, and took another bus home. cant wait till school finishes on firday so we can get out again and see some more madness. there are big drops of water falling from the sky. the monsoon hit the other day, but it only rains one day in two so far, so trekking is still looking pretty promising.
