I don't do 6am temple

19 June 2010

Another long, exhausting day.  This morning I was woken up by Rajan at around 6 am with “Temple?  Go to temple?”  Ugh.  The Catholic Church invented noon mass for a reason- we’re not all crazy (or old) enough to go to 6am mass.  Needless to say I was not happy, but I ended up going anyway.  It was actually kind of nice to walk (it was about 20-30 minutes, by my terrible estimation and recollection), seeing as how I’ve been sitting in uncomfortable positions all week.

The temple was pretty small and not crowded, which was nice.  It was also much better to go in a large group of Nepalis rather than my usual large group of Westerners.  There was one really cool part- on the way down, the path passed through this narrow rock passage.  Mekh got some video of everyone coming out of it.  I was mostly surprised that I fit, seeing as how I’m bigger than most everyone else here.

We got some tea and crackers there, and also bought water as our water supply at the house ran out and the refill truck hadn’t come yet.  By the time we got back to the house breakfast was pretty much ready.  Unfortunately, instead of pancakes it was dal bhat.  I think when I get back to my host family I’ll beg Kaki for no dal bhat for a couple of days (as it was lunch and dinner as well today).

Finally, after everyone was fed, we went over to the big house to start the workshop again.  We started off today by going over everyone’s work from yesterday and doing critiques.  It was pretty neat to officially see everyone’s work, and also hear how ideas had changed over the night.  The one thing that everyone had failed to do was show interiors (my inner set designer cried; also because nothing was scale).  We broke from the conversation after reviewing everyone’s work to fine tune the models and show how the interior space will function.

Piero and I continued to work with Rabita on the cup and saucer idea, which is becoming much cooler by the day.  We ended up re-creating the model entirely, using something more durable than paper.  Also, Ashmina wanted us to be able to show a sort of cross-section of the interior, which would have been nearly impossible with the paper model (I say nearly because I’m sure there’s a way to do it, but I’m not going to bother to figure it out).

Along the way we took a ‘brief’ (brief for us is usually in the 1-2 hour range) lunch break and then went back to work.  Before lunch, though, we were having a little fun with our model, creating the Leaning Tower of Guggenheim (it looked like a cross between the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Guggenheim Museum), a funky lampshade hat, and watching Piero ‘drink’ out of a giant teacup (once we put the handle on).  After lunch we continued to work until around World Cup time, which still wouldn’t work.  Oh well, it will still be on when we return to the city.

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The Leaning Tower of Guggenheim!

We sat around for awhile, watching the one channel that would come in- Kantipur, which shows so many World Cup ads but not the World Cup itself.  Once the power went out, we sat around waiting for dinner.  I ended up observing a conversation about art and its politics which got summed up in translation every so often.  The power ended up coming on before dinner was served, which was a nice change.