Manakamana

           Yesterday my family and 2 other families visited a temple near Kathmandu called Manakamana. The temple dates back to the 17^th century and is one of the most popular temples in the Middle Hills region of Nepal...its also reachable by a cable car! The day started out really early: we woke up at 3am and like any other normal (aka dysfunctional) family, we didn’t end up leaving until 5:30am. Thankfully we had reserved a mini van for all of us, so we got to ride the 5 hours in comfort. I shared the front seat with my little sister and one of her friends and was able to just plug into my ipod and relax/sleep the whole way there. Unfortunately the rest of the bus was not so lucky. As I think I have said in earlier blogs, Nepalis are almost notorious for their motion sickness. I may have been 2/14 people in the car who didn’t vomit literally the entire 5 hours. My poor 11 year old sister must have thrown up at least 15 times. We arrived at 10:30am and found that the place was packed. I’m talking Disneyland packed. Nepali families and the occasional white foreigner were all over the place, trying to form the semblance of a line to get tickets, except that it ended up just being a mass of hot sweaty bodies fighting to get ahead. We ended up waiting in line for 5 hours. Thank the lord above I had my umbrella with me because I would have been a lobster otherwise. The dads of the group were such troopers and stood in line the whole day while many of the moms and kids and me sat in the shade and ate ice cream. My 11 year old sister and one of the other younger girls actually never stopped throwing up the entire day unfortunately, so we all took turns running around trying to find plastic bags for them. They were such little troopers…my normal reaction when I am nauseous is to cry unfortunately, so I would have been a bawling mess if I was them. 

Beginning of our wait in line

The Austrian-designed cable car

Ok, so fast forward a really hot sweaty 5 hours and we finally reached the cable car! Its an Austrian-designed gondola and even has a special gondola car for the goats that are taken up to the temple to be slaughtered. Looks like any other gondola you would see at a ski hill or something. Nine of us crammed into a car and off we went! The ride in total took about 10 minutes and we went over 2 hillsides before getting to the top. My 9 year old sister started out the ride politely being like “Neha didi, nachalnus. Malaii dar laagyo” Neha didi, don’t move. I’m scared” After 5 minutes of the gondola ride I had to shift my weight and it it turned into a screaming “NACHALNUS!!!” DON’T MOVE!  My bad. My other sister and her friend continued to throw up into their little bags the whole way.

Cable car fun

Manakamana Temple

Unsuspecting people with a monkey over their heads

So we finally get to the top and we greeted by a little tourist village surrounding the temple. We took a family picture in front of a backdrop of the temple and when I saw the result, lets just say I’ve taken way better pictures in my life. Also everyone kept saying how pale I looked.  Not my fault. We reached the temple and proceeded to do puja, which is basically a worship of the temple. I kind of hung back and took in the scenery, mostly because there were so many people there but also because incense was so thick I could barely breathe, trash littered the ground, and goat/chicken/pigeon blood was splattered everywhere. The scene was awesome to watch though and the temple was just filled with massive amounts of people ringing bells and sprinkling rice everywhere. 

Our gifts for the temple

We visited on a Saturday, which is also Nepal’s holy day, so the temple was extra crowded with people sacrificing their animals. After snapping some pictures and receiving tikka (red rice on our foreheads) we grabbed some food and headed to the cable car to rejoin another impossibly long line to get back down the mountain. My little sister and her friend threw up all the food five minutes after we had eaten so 4 of us were able to cut the whole line and get back down early so she could rest. During this process, I got yelled at by a bunch of angry people and was confused because I was like why the hell cant I understand what you are saying, and then I realized they were speaking Hindi. So I just ran away.

Aastha and I at the end of the day

      Cue to 7pm and we finally leave the temple. Thus began one of the worst bus rides of my entire life. An hour in my stomach really started to hurt and I was like noooo this cannot be happening we have 4 hours to go. Long story shot, I made my bus pull over 3 times so I could avoid shitting my pants. Two of those times we stopped on the side of the road where my available facilities were a ditch and leaves. Woops, too many details there.  We finally got to Pokhara where we stopped for food and I sat curled up in a little ball of agony on the restaurant couch while everyone else ate. I finally took some medicine I forgot I had and managed to make it the 3 hours home without major disaster, and instead spent my time with my head out the bus window because I thought I was going to throw up. We got to town at 1am and then had to walk 45 minutes home and I really wanted to die. Our whole group was a mess. My little sister Aakirti had to be carried the whole way back because she hadn’t eaten anything the whole day, and all of the other women in the group had thrown up the whole way back. We were a sorry sight to see. I got home and passed out hard in my bed. And that was my trip to Manakamana! It was honestly a really great day spent with my family, except for the being ill part on the way home.

May happenings

All ive eaten the past 2 weeks is rice and potatoes. Good thing I take a multi vitamin everyday or else I would probably be dead. Also now that I’m 8 months in I’ve calculated ( subtracting 3 weeks approximately for time spent outside site) that I’ve eaten around 460 servings of rice so far. Disturbing.

Today while bathing at the water tap I looked up and this giant grey monkey was just staring at me. It was alone, and it continued to watch me bathe for the next 20 minutes and not move. It was creepy, and its like when your dog stares at your while you are naked. Having an animal twenty feet up in a tree peering down on you is unnerving. Also the snakes are out in full force..I came across a five-footer in the path the other day and immediately ran away. The beginning of monsoon season is slowly beginning and my family says that sometimes they even come in the house. So grateful I live on the second floor. Now, people who know I worked at Reptiland the summer before senior year may wonder why I am a scaredy-pants when it comes to snakes, as my daily itinerary at reptiland included holding lots of snakes, feeding snakes, and cleaning snake enclosures. But for me, theres something about the uncontrollability of the situation that creeps me out when you see a snake in the wild. Its not my choice to encounter it and so it’s a shock when you come across a particularly big one. At reptiland it was a controlled situation. If I wanted to hold a snake I could. But here I almost run into them and it scares me. I like watching them from distances and I still would love to see a python in the wild, but I would really like to not encounter them in the courtyard of my house.  

Its also gotten so humid and hot here that just moving around makes me sweat and running makes me feel like im breathing in soup. Also I realized all I do is complain about the weather in my blogs. Sorry friends. Bought myself a fan in town last week which is fantastic, except that every other night we have no power so then I just lie in misery. (Ladies formerly of 211 3^rd St, its like the bucknell summer of 2011 when we all thought we were going to die in our house even with our fans).Today I flagged down a car going to town to get a ride and I was pleasantly surprised when it had air-conditioning!

My sister’s husband came home from Qatar last week and its been really fun having him around. He’s definitely lessened the workload for my sister and grandma, and he speaks a bit of English which is helpful. Its also the first time for me since coming to permanent site that we’ve had a male figure in the house for any extended amount of time. I admit I was a bit nervous before he came, mostly because men here often act very superior to their wives, and I did not want to watch my normally independent sister fall into the dutiful housewife role, but its been a nice surprise having him around. He also kills all the spiders in the bathroom for me. Ricardo is now dead but his millions of offspring seem to have inhabited the toilet now.

So, I’m 8 months in, 19 to go! I felt like all of these things just fell into place recently. That isn’t to say I still don’t think my language sucks or wonder occasionally what in the hell im doing here, but I feel like I have some things going for me now that I didn’t have before. I also knew that after IST if I didn’t start some sort of project or begin some sort of work I was going to go crazy. Anyways, my introduction of micro-irrigation was a success! I gave my presentation with my posters tacked up on the side of a charpi, or latrine, and it was raining the whole time but it went well! One of the men in my group had been trained long ago in the subject, so he will be useful for when we install the system, which is set for next week. Everyone seemed legitimately interested, which helped calm my fears that they weren’t just humoring me and letting me present something they didn’t care about. Additionally, the other day my agriculture group was tying up our tomato plants to bamboo poles for stability, and 3 women approached me about teaching them how to make compost tea. My aunt is in the ag group and had seen my bucket of compost tea at my house and was telling them about it, and they wanted to learn how. Hello legit work! I was so excited and I of course eagerly agreed, so we are hoping to do that this month after the micro-irrigation is installed.

Otherwise, not too much coming up in the next month or so, just staying at site and trying to get work done. My friend Chad is going back to the states for his sisters wedding in a week, so all of us volunteers are busy ordering things online to send to his house for him to bring back. My list: world map, map of the US, and about 40 lemon luna bars. I’m meeting another volunteer tomorrow in a town an hour away from me and we’re going to try and search for someone to make us the wooden stencils that are needed to form bricks for the improved cook stoves we are hoping to make sometime during our service. I’ll be in Kathmandu next month for Volunteer Advisory Council training and I might be able to sneak in a visit to Chautara and see my old host family as well! My sister got married since I’ve been gone, and I would love to see her and meet her husband.

This past week I was kind of in a funk. Anytime I feel down or just not myself, I really try hard and identify what the root cause of my issues are. Generally, theyre small things that would be inconsequential in the states, but here theyre blown massively out of proportions. Seriously, small things like missing snack can put me out of whack. My wise friend Voranan, a fellow PCV, stated what I was feeling in a way that I couldn’t form with my own words: “At times I feel that PC is changing me for the worse, but I realize how its not necessarily that. We’re constantly being pushed to the limit here so it brings out a side in us we haven’t seen or experienced before. We have to take it for what it is. At times we can ignore it and at times we can’t, but we have to be okay with that. Moments by moments.” She summed it up in a way I couldn’t, but I realized that was exactly why I was in a funk. PC really does put you in situations I would never have experienced at home, and so your personal reactions to scenarios are surprising. We haven’t seen these sides of ourselves, and it unsettling because oftentimes I don’t like how I react when Im pushed to my boundaries. But we can only accept our reactions, and hope to alter them slightly the next time. I also feel that I’ve become more comfortable in my surroundings and have started feeling more independent, which actually leads me to be a little more withdrawn from my family than before. Its all about a balance between your own down time so you keep your sanity, and pushing yourself to really get out there. Still figuring that one out. Additionally, I have found myself with way more free time than my first couple months at site, which I think is leaving me with too my time spent inside my head pondering everything and anything. For example, I read Ken Follet’s “World Without End,” which is over 1000 pages long in 4 days (fantastic book, I highly recommend it). Today I spent about 3 hours watching Nickelodeon in Hindi, as BBC has mysteriously disappeared from my tv. Its very strange to watch Dora the Explorer in Hindi while she teaches you Spanish. Having it be around 85 out each day doesn’t exactly make one want to jump up and starting hoeing in the fields either. Most of this free time is because the usual ag meetings are on hold for a bit while everyone gets their corn planted and whatnot, but things should pick up again soon and then I will be busy again!

Also I really want to get a puppy. L I miss my doggy from home. And my cat L I might have to settle for a baby goat, but I really would rather not become the crazy volunteer who took her goat everywhere with her on a leash, because that’s exactly what I would do. Which is why I need a dog, because its less weird to have a dog follow you around.

Andddd that’s the end of this post. I miss everyone from home!