Malaai brain man parchha... so stop killing it with Nepali!

8 June 2010                          8:22am                  Kathmandu

Yesterday we had our first language class since being in Nepal.  It was hard, I felt like my brain was melting.  Luckily, Adam’s classes helped out, but we found a lot of gaps in our knowledge.  Hopefully once I start my internship and get settled into a family I’ll be able to manage.  Although Adam taught us a lot of questions, for some of them we didn’t learn the answers.  We learned those with our new teacher, as well as professions, numbers, and family relations.

After class I was brain fried, so I went back to the hotel to rest a bit.  A group of us went to lunch together at the Korean restaurant across the street.  It took us a couple of tries finding the place- the first time I’m pretty sure we walked into someone’s house.  Then again, the Korean restaurant appears to be run out of someone’s house, but the first one was pretty much non-commercial.  Whoops.

My first experience of Korean food was interesting.  I ordered sweet potato noodles, which came out nothing like I was expecting.  The taste was decent, but the consistency and texture was something that I just couldn’t handle.  So, in reverse of usual fashion, everyone else started eating my food.

Once lunch was over, we went back to the hotel to meet the group to go to our roundtable discussion at Social Sciences Baha, featuring a Maoist and a member of the Nepali Congress.  The talk was very enlightening and interesting, mostly because we got to hear these ideas from the people involved themselves, not from a third party.

After the lecture we went to the Pashupati Temple, also known to English tourists as one of the monkey temples.  And there were a lot of monkeys.  The temple complex was very interesting to see; it is apparently one of the holiest temples in Hinduism.  It is right next to the Bagmati River, which is the holiest river here but also unfortunately extremely polluted.  Cremations are done next to the river, and as we were there we witnessed two cremations and the preparation of a third body.  We also listened to highly entertaining renditions of Hindu myths by Kashish, which were way better than anything I ever heard in religion classes.  Some classics were, “because I’m Shiva!” and “…he took her to Sri Lanka, and then Sita had problems getting a visa…”  I’m voting that Le Moyne makes their REL 200 classes like that- people might actually pay attention!