The Day to Day

Ok, so now onto more of life here in general. Lets start with...........HOME!

The program was orgnanised to give us two weeks worth of orientation before work started. In that time we had sessions on Security, Earthquakes, Health etc. We also had time to house hunt. It's pretty intense though to try and find an apartment/house you'd be happy living in for 3 months minimum without knowing much else at all! - where the parties are, how to get to the work, who your friends will be and so forth. I was therefore lucky in that someone who used to work at my organisation (ENPHO) had just moved to Bangladesh with his family to take up a position with the UNDP. Knowing my predicament, my manager - Rajesh - organised with Dr Roshan (the guy who owns the house) for Carole and I to stay there for as long as we like. Pretty neat. Now this ain't no ordinary home either. It's actually a UN accredited ECO-Home which Dr Roshan built about 10 years ago as an example of how you can live more sustainably. All power is solar or hydro, hot water is solar, organic waste is composted, grey water is filtered through reed beds and reused for toilet flushing, rainwater is collected, dug well water is pumped through a bio-sand filter and used during periods of little rainfall. Not bad huh. The only condition of living here is that I look after the house and the various eco installations - and for those who know me this is right up my alley and something that interests me greatly - although I've rarely practised it back home! Whilst a little further away from Thamel - which is the main hangout and general entertainment area, we are close to one of Kathmandu's main temples, Swayambhu, which is nestled upon a hill and boasts some of KTM's best views. This morning Carole, Prabin (the nephew of Dr Roshan) and I got up at 6am and walked around the temples perimeter for an hour or so. So nice and something we plan to do a lot more of - if not for the beauty of it but to work off my curry gut! The other bonus of living here is that we have found a special niche in the neighbourhood by being a guest of Dr Roshan. The Nepali's are very communal people so we either have various family and community folk over at our place just hanging around or we go to there's for some broken banter. Since Nepal's power is derived from Hydro, the dam's gradually drop in level during the winter months (when there is little rain), and by mid winter Nepal is without power for up to 20 hours a day! Crazy hey. Such power outages (or load shedding) have just begun so we are now without power for about 2 hours a night between 6pm and 8pm. During this time you simply head to the street, someone makes a little camp fire, and joke about. Beautiful moments. The local corner store owner brought us out some Nepali style digestive tea which contained lemon, sugar and some black salt. Sounded interesting but man alive it was horrible! The initial taste was like rotten egg before the salty lemoness kicked in. Needless to say we couldn't finish it! This morning however after our walk around the temple, the store owner invited us in for some more tea. He made a special point of telling us it was a milk tea (as I think he wanted to improve the response he got from us last night!) so we couldn't decline an went inside his kitchen to have tea. Well, what an improvement. It was delicious. A masala styled sweet tea. As we were sipping the tea, one of Prabin's friends arrived with an Enfield 350cc Bullet motorcycle. This is the exact motorbike I want to get so ofcourse we went outside to inspect. It was BEAUTIFUL. Sooooo cool. A bit of banter followed before he asked if I wanted to ride it. Ofcourse! So I took it for a spin around the block. It purred! Im def getting one - but perhaps the 500cc model ;-)

Anyhow, that's our home!

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