citrus fire, food faves and a story

Sometimes Every day for six hours, the power goes out, and we chill in the dark. One time, we were romantically eating some oranges by candlelight and I divulged to my host dad (who already knew) and young host brother and sister that if you 'spritz an orange peel into a flame, the spritz will burn! So we played with fire. I especially like that Roshni just ate a really sour bite in the background, and is making a funny face!

A coconut cookie with peanut butter schmear and a pile of Craisins. We consumed almost a pound of peanut butter in this fashion on the trek to Gossaikund.

Here I am in the kitchen, eating a Mamri. This is the stuck-to-the-pan crust that is leftover from making a dish called Dhendo, which is just flour and water cooked into a sort of thick porridge. Since my host mom uses a huge bowl-shaped metal pan to cook, the Mamri comes out as a huge bowl. Before eating, we filled it (not the whole way) with fresh buffalo milk and honey from host dad's hives. And then I ate it! Truly, the land of Milk and Honey.

This is a wedge of yak cheese, bought straight from the maker, on the way back down from Gossaikund. That was a rock solid trip, foodwise.

How I ended up awkwardly averting my eyes from a semi pornographic motorcycle ad while sharing coffee with some Nepali NGO leaders:

Recently Micah (MCC Nepal Rep) organized an All Partner workshop, in which members of all the NGOs who partner (aka receive funding or volunteers) with MCC got together and had a bunch of meetings. The meetings were....well they were meetings. Nuff said.
However, we spent one morning of the workshop doing a service project, in which the twentyish NGO workers volunteered to help paint the courtyard walls of Elim Kids Academy, the school where Kelsey, the other Nepal SALTer, works. It was fun, and nice to get our hands dirty after hours of sitting in the conference room the day before. What happened after the painting was done was hilarious.
The painting only took a half day, and we had a whole afternoon of talking about MCC's financial reporting requirements ahead of us. I needed coffee. I asked Micah if he wanted to go to the 'lil bakery cafe' that I'd seen on the way to the conference place. He invited two of the honchos from the other NGOs, and we walked 100 yards down the dirt alleyway to the shop.
The place was belching christmas flavored smoke. There were probably fifteen hipster youth in the tiny cafe, all smoking "Blacks" clove cigarettes. Adding to the weird, brothelish demeanor of the shop were the two life sized fake skulls on the window sill, a pile of at least 300 packs of those same clove cigarettes in the shelves, and a HUGE poster of a naked woman straddling a motorcycle.
I don't know who decorated that place...but it felt pretty comical for me to be sitting there sipping instant coffee from plastic cups with these classy NGO dudes.
They kinda snickered, but didn't seem too perturbed. We bolted our coffee and left.

Anatomy of Dal Bhat

Dal Bhat, my muse ;-)

These are the Elements of Dal Bhat:

Rice: a big pile of white rice (Bhat).

Dal: The bowl in the upper left is full of soupy lentils (Dal) cooked in a pressure cooker with spices. That gets poured on top of the rice before eating.

Vegetables (tarkari): the mound at the top of the plate is mushroom curry with tomatoes and lots of mustard oil, turmeric and other tasty spices. Mushroom season is just beginning in Chapagaon (where I live), and Ram Hari (host dad) says that during peak season my neighborhood sends about a metric ton of mushrooms to market per day. Yum. Mushrooms vary in price from 70 rs (1$) per kilo to 350 rs ($4.50ish), depending on the day's yield.

Saag (leafy greens, lower right): I usually think of Saag as meaning spinach, but it actually refers to any kind of leafy greens, and really, they all look the same when they're steamed this intensely. All the saag we eat in my household is grown in in the kitchen garden, right outside the house.

Lapsi Achaar: Those two little lumps in the upper right are made out of a fruit called Lapsi (Choerospondias axillaris), which is a small, green, plumlike fruit. As far as I can tell, "Achaar" just means "sauce," and there are many varieties of it. This one is made by boiling lapsi, removing the skin, then pickling the flesh (still on the large seed) in mustard oil, red chili pulp and all manner of other spices. Achaar is strongly flavored, and usually eaten by taking a big bite of rice and a teeny bite of achaar for the added taste. This is definitely my favorite achaar, but there are dozens of types, not all made with lapsi, and most are delicious.

TANG:  The cup is full of steaming hot pineapple flavored TANG (astronauts!). Its hot because we have to boil water to drink it, and the water usually gets boiled right before mealtime. So I get a lot of hot TANG.

I eat some version of this meal twice per day, around 9:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m.
I was worried, initially, that I would get tired of so much rice, but the opposite has happened. When I went trekking for a week in September, I didn't eat any Dal Bhat the entire time, and I craved it by the fourth or fifth day. I bought some at a rest stop in our 10hr bus ride back home....it was not nearly as good as home, and I was happy to get back to the host house for a good tuck-in.




The best part of dal bhat at the house is that LOTS of the food comes from our kitchen garden or the farm that my host family owns in a village about an hour away. They grow lots of mustard, most of which gets pressed for cooking oil. They have lapsi trees and radishes and different squash/gourds and various types of leafy greens.


I realized recently that I am living two dreams right now:
1: I ride a bike almost everywhere. The vast majority of my transportation is on a bicycle. Throughout college I often talked about how I wanted to "live somewhere where I could bike to work and everywhere else I needed to go." And here I am.
2: I eat local organic vegetables Every Day!




Good times.

Doodlism

I had a great feeling of 'flow' when I was drawing this, and I'm happy with how it turned out.

Wall Art

 

One of my favorite things that happens in all big cities is WALL ART! There's not a lot of good wall painting or graffiti around Kathmandu, but there's some. Here are some pictures of my favorites (so far).  This mural is near the MCC Office. Also close to Claire's house and John and Lynn's house. Hilarious, and also a good message.

This little toxic looking symbol reminds me of a pandabear for some reason. Something about that little face, or is it a bow tie, and top hat. I don't know. There's not a lot of cool graffiti around Kathmandu, but I think this looks pretty cool, and it is all over the Dobighat, Jawalkhel area where the MCC office is.

A gate into a residential compound. Cool bird art. Birdgate.

The shutter on a new made-in-Nepal bike brand's flagship store. The store's called Chain, and they make a nice mountain bike for a decent price (22,000 Rs).  FrogGate.

 This is another little tag that appears all over Jawalkhel neighborhood. Not totally sure what it means, but I like it.

...aand here's some communist propaganda imagery, probably from when the Maoists were campaigning all over the place a few years ago.

Fried Food

This is some fried goat blood that I ate during Dashain festival.

What goes around...

Funny graffiti on some spinnerZ at the Bouddha temple I went to visit on the last day of language class.  This was a month ago.

Here I am getting a Tikka put on me on the last day of Tihar festival. The last day is called Bhaay Tikka, which means "younger brother tikka" The colored powder on the forehead is a symbol of the blessing and wish for long life conferred by the older sister on the younger brother.

This is two stalks of bamboo that I tied together across a path we trekked on for awhile. I then placed a flower at the intersection. I'm no Andy Goldsworthy, but I like to mess with nature when I can.

This was a hotel we stayed at on the trek. The lit up space was the dining room where we sat around a little woodstove to eat meals. The building on the left, cut off, is where we slept. One of the most remote and rad places I have spent the night.

 

An epic waterfall and some local wildlife we saw on the way to Gossaikund.

Those buildings from the "lit up dining room" picture above are in the lower left quadrant of this picture. Nice scene for a cuppa coffee and a biscuit, right?

all i ever wanted

This is a cartoon I drew in homage to the style of Hugh MacLeod, aka @gapingvoid, one of my favorite cartoonists. Hugh MacLeod's website is www.gapingvoid.com

Hugh MacLeod writes a lot about having Smarter Conversations. As someone who has just graduated from college with a Journalism degree (try monetizing that right out of school these days), I've been doing a lot of thinking about how to have a smarter conversation with myself. A smarter inner monologue, really, and one that will allow me to be and feel productive without getting overwhelmed.
I am constantly flush with Ideas. There are millions of ways that I can think of to put my skills to use in Nepal, and infinite projects to embark upon that would hopefully, eventually, help somebody. Almost all of them feel impossible to actually accomplish. Many would take a lifelong commitment, or so it seems.
So I often feel defeated before even beginning to work on something.
That's what this cartoon is about. Homing in on something. Putting some things on hold so that all of my energy can be here and now and be used in the most relationship building, productive way possible.

I don't remember if I read the sentence "All I ever wanted to do was everything," somewhere, or if it just came to me. If I ripped it off from somewhere....erm...sorry? Creative Commons...?

Check out the companion cartoon to this one: "You Don't Need More Time...."

Full of Juice

This is an oft-served dessert in Nepal called a Ras Bari (sp?). It is basically a donut hole, completely saturated with sweet, sugary syrup, and floated in a bowl of plain yogurt. The name Ras Bari translates roughly as "juice full"

Name Change, Blog Change

This blog has been a haphazardly tagged slum of quasi chronological updates for its whole life.

Henceforth, it will be a Food, Art and Language blog, based in Nepal, with other tidbits thrown in as I see fit. Since food, language and art (my own and that of others) are the things that excite me, that's what I'll write about and photograph!

I'll review restaurants in Kathmandu, post recipes for awesome Nepali foods and ask for advice on directions to go with my art projects. Sometimes I'll also write about development work, which is what I'm here for, after all.

Visual Peacemaking

 In every photograph, there is an implied comparison. Here to there, then to now, and especially in travel blogs: us to them.

            Howard Zehr, a founder of the Restorative Justice movement and self proclaimed “photographer at the healing edge” wrote in a blog post that “social distance allows us to objectify people, and then we can do all sorts of horrible things to them.”  (See the blog post here http://visualpeacemakers.org/index.php?/blog/entry/photography_at_the_healing_edge/ )
          
In traveling, especially for short lengths of time (anything less than a few months, really), the tendency is for outlandish visual experiences, stuff totally outside my normal range, to jump out and demand to be photographed. When I take these pictures and then post them to my blog and frame them as representations of a particular culture or set of circumstances, I walk a fine line between commenting on the visually striking, and building a wall between myself and what/whom I have photographed.
          
Photography can be used to communicate between people and cultures, but it can also be used to alienate one from another.

            For me, whether or not to photograph the butchering of a goat in my Nepali household was a dilemma. On one hand, it was a unique and visually striking experience for me. There was bright blood, a front yard decapitation and later fried eyeballs to snack on. It was utterly alien to me, and that made it interesting. However, in thinking about the imagery, I realized that not only would it shock some viewers, it would be taken completely out of context on my blog. It would look like a ritual animal sacrifice (which it was), but would be presented without the rich and long cultural heritage and family traditions that have led my host father, who spends workdays at desks and on phones, to be an adept and respectful butcher.

The reason I watched at all was because, eater-of-meat that I am, I was tired of the distance from the butchery process that is built into the American meat distribution/consumption system. I eat meat. I wanted to get real about where it comes from.

            So I didn’t take any pictures, and my itchy shutter finger had to deal with that.

Especially in the developing world, I have many opportunities to take photographs that would increase social distance between the cultures I’m trying to connect. A lot of the photographs would be emotionally impactful and aesthetically ‘good,’ but is their value lost if they alienate me from the people in either culture?

I am going to try to stop “othering” the cultures that I visit. I would rather use my photos in the diminishment of social distance and the promotion of that greatest glue of societies: empathy.

For more resources on the topics of othering and social distance, specifically regarding written and photographic journalism, visit Howard Zehr's Restorative Justice Blog ( http://emu.edu/blog/restorative-justice/2010/08/30/photography-at-the-healing-edge/ )   and the International Guild for Visual Peacemakers ( http://visualpeacemakers.org/index.php?/blog/entry/photography_at_the_healing_edge/ )

P.S. I am aware of the cumbersomeness of using actual URLs rather than just making words in the post into links. Maybe when Google's wonderful "blogger" tools get less stupid, or the internet connection I'm on rises above a whisper of a dream of bandwidth..I'll fix the links.

Illustrated Nepali Flash Cards

First I make a flashcard for an object, then I spell out the name of that object using letter flashcards. The one in the setup is kalam (pen). Hopefully they're all obvious from the illustrations.

This is how I've been studying Nepali lately.  I was getting fed up with not knowing a lot of words that I regularly want to say, as well as not being able to read or write Nepali, and so I made a set of flash cards.

1 card for each consonant
1 card for each vowel and its "consonant modifying symbol" (which I will explain later)
1 illustrated card each for a bunch of nouns I wanted to remember, and to know how to write down.

The Nepali alphabet works like this: There are 36 consonants and 15 vowels, though for practical purposes, you only need to learn 13 of the vowels, because 2 of them are pretty rare.


All of the consonants in Nepali have an implied vowel sound (a, but pronounced 'uh') built into the end of them. Wikipedia tells me the name for consonant sounds that cannot be pronounced without an adjacent vowel is symphona. The 'uh' sound is consistent for every consonant, and always comes at the end (coda) of the syllable (unlike in English, where different standalone consonants are pronounced with different vowels, P= pee, F= eff, etc., which may be at the onset or coda of the syllable).

However, each vowel symbol in Nepali has a companion, smaller symbol that can be fused right onto the body of a consonant, to change the implied 'uh' sound to any other vowel sound.


So each of the 36 consonants ends in an 'uh' sound, and to change that 'uh' sound into a different vowel, you tack on an extra piece to the written letter. Since the symbol used for a lone-standing vowel, or a vowel at the beginning of a sentence, is different from the one tacked onto consonants to modify their ending sound, you basically have 26 symbols to memorize in order to use JUST VOWELS.

Example:

This is the consonant "ka"

and...

This is the vowel "o" (left)  and its consonant-modifying companion symbol

 Combine them and you get...

"ko"

I felt pretty hopeless about learning this written language until I started making flash cards. Making them is so fun, though, that I do it all the time, and am memorizing symbols at a rate of about two per day.  One month and I'll be writing sentences!

Morning Fog

A foggy morning

frosted dome descends over

the early risers

Momos, and Fried Momos!

Since Nepal is pinched between China and India, lots of the food here is very India/China influenced.
Momos are one of the foods that have been successfully imported from China. They're super delicious, whether boiled or fried, and can be filled with Chicken, Water Buffalo, Vegetables....all kinds of stuff really. And the sauce that comes with them is usually approximately the right amount of spicy, with a good bit of sweet tang to it.
One of my favorite foods that I've encountered here. Above  are some momos that I ate at Kathmandu International Study Centre, where I've been studying Nepali for the past month.
(They also have real drip coffee, a rarity in Nepali households. So good!)


Due to this reporters error, a previous version of this post stated that Nepal shares a small border with Bhutan, which is inaccurate. Nepal is bordered only by China, to the north, and India to the south, east and west.

What a Teej that was

This past weekend was Teej, the Nepali women's festival, where many Hindu women wear all red and party like its 1999.
We went here...

and hung out for a while watching people dance and sing... and drum on the double ended drum depicted below, a traditional Nepali instrument called a maddar, or maddat...or something like that.

Then we went back home, and danced for a while, and the next day a priest came over and presided over a large, intense ceremony in the dining room/kitchen.

The ceremony involved a lot of red dye powder, fruits and vegetables and rice, candles, incense, bowls made out of dried leaves, reddish water, milk and fried "roti" bread. It lasted most of 3 hours, and there was much singing and praying in Nepali, which I didn't understand. But it was fun to watch, and no problem with picture taking :)
Before seeing it, I thought this would be a solemn affair, but there was tons of talking and laughing throughout. It was really more like a large social event with a religious aspect as well. People would occasionally bust out their cell phones, or burst out laughing when they didn't really know what to do (in the ceremony). Everyone was very chatty the whole time. A jovial atmosphere to be sure.

The remaining edible food (much rice, bananas, apples and other such things) went to the priest. I do not know if that was religiously motivated, or simply as payment for his priestly services. The inedible food was cleared away quickly and efficiently.

Teej Siddhiyo! (teej is over!)

Moi je joue

And now what you've all been waiting for.

ME!

Maxin' out by the river underneath that bridge from the last post!

Cheers to the Himalayan Watershed!

I have two weeks left of language lessons at Kathmandu International Study Centre (KISC) and then I'll start work in earnest at the Rural Institution for Community Development (RICOD).
Acronyms....

Last night I went for the second time to Astrek Climbing Wall, which is an outdoor (though protected from rain) climbing gym that is frequented by some of the expats here. It's a nice wall. Tall, with a good variety of problems, and it feels great to finally be back on a climbing wall after my foot injury last year!

"what?" you say?  www.lisfrancinjury.wordpress.com

My host family here are great, and they love helping me with my Nepali, which is a double boost for actually learning to speak it in a timely fashion. There are also some very cute little children in the family, and an aquarium with some excellent fish in it, and some GREAT views off the verandah, which I am still planning to upload pictures of later.

My typical daily schedule:
Wake up at 7:30, drink some tea.
Read for a while (Just finished Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, it was mind blowing).
Eat Daal Bhat around 9:30.
Read for awhile or do some Nepali Homework (The word for 'read' can also mean 'study' in Nepalese: paDhnu)
Cycle downhill across crazy roads and in crazy motorcycle/bus/ bike trailer/semi traffic while blasting a good pump-up soundtrack in my 'phones, into Kathmandu.
Language lessons from 1-4.
Cycle back (uphill....so...far...6ish miles) to my host household.
Read for awhile.
Eat Daal Bhat at around 8.
Chill out, watch TV, play snake on my phone....whatever, until bedtime.
Usually watch a 30 Rock rerun on my computer before bed.
Wake up and do it again.

My life is good. I have lots of time to play.

Moi je joue is a song by Brigitte Bardot that Catie Gliwa put on a mix CD for me before I left.
Other common songs on my daily playlists:
Electric Feel -Justice Remix
Be Here Now- Mason Jennings
The Gentlest Hammer-Mason Jennings
Hammerstrike-Lotus
Drops of Jupiter-Train
Chunk of Change  (full album)-Passion Pit

Bridge, Host Bros, Adventure

This is a pic of two of my host brothers, Saugat and Prakash (both Bhaays, which means they're younger than me) on the tallest bridge in Lalitpur, the district I live in. We took a long walk through gorgeous territory to reach this bridge.

Its a high bridge.

People drive motorcycles across it on their way to work...

Shudder.

Food Related Comedy

These first two are in Nepal, and are self explanatory.

Ok Ok. So this last one is a coffee shop in Italy. I actually took the pic like six years ago. But it never got the airtime it deserved! Ha!

Cha$e - Daal Bhat- New Single

"Daal Bhat" by Cha$e

Wake up in the morning feelin' like Daal Bhat

Grab my glasses I'm out the door, don't forget your Daal Bhat

Before I leave, brush my teeth with a tray of Daal Bhat

'cause when I leave for the night I eat a lot of Daal Bhat

...and so on.

Daal bhat is the traditional food of Nepal. It consists of lentils or other bean types along with many spices in a thin broth, poured over rice, usually with some kind of side, such as spicy vegetables, pickle pieces, or mutton.

The typical meal schedule here is to wake up early (7 ish) and have some tea and cookies. Then around 9:30 you eat a big plate of daal bhat. Then, in the middle of the day, you have sort of a small, snacky style lunch, and in the evening around 8, daal bhat again.

You eat daal bhat a lot here, so I consider myself fortunate that I really enjoy it. It contains more rice than I'm used to, but all of the flavors and textures of the different types of daal bhat I've had have been delicious, so cheers to that.

Soon I will post a picture of the view I look at when I eat breakfast on the balcony.

Then you will be jealous.

<3 Chase

p.s. for those not hip to "lame" cultural detritus in the U.S., my above album cover and song are parodies of Ke$ha's "Tik Tok"

Cycle Swagga'

I have been living with my host family in Chapagaon (10km south of Kathmandu, uphill all the way), and cycling into Kathmandu for a couple of days now.

A watercolor of my swaggadocious cycling outfit.

Gaijatra photo the second

A young child being given milk from a pitcher, which is a Gaijatra tradition. Many of the children, with fake moustaches, hair, and ascetic robes, were being carried or holding hands with their parents, sometimes with other family members walking alongside, carrying large bags of cookies, candies and other loot. Trick or Treat.

Gaijatra

This was during the festival of Gaijatra, in which young boys dress up like ascetics and parade through the palace square, often in honor of a deceased relative. Bystanders then give the young'ns treats, like candy and packaged cookies, as well as giving them drinks of milk, water or orange drink (Slice?) from periodically placed pitchers and coolers. It is vaguely reminiscent of Halloween in the U.S., and some of the participants had really good costumes!

Many Architectural Styles

Here are some pagoda style temples in Kathmandu, built to honor Shiva, and there in the background is a pretty tall apartment building. There are many architectural styles represented in Kathmandu, and hopefully also in Chapagaon, where I'll be moving on Friday.

We're going to a festival called "Gaijatra" today, so I'll probably post some pictures from that later on.

Cheers.

Esophagus-esque Architecture in Bangkok

Airport in Bangkok. This place looks like the inside of an esophagus.

A Quick Turnaround: Redirected

For the past six months I’ve been preparing myself for an 11-month placement as a Photographer/Storyteller in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh.
Some complications arose.
For the past three days I’ve been preparing myself for a placement as a Peace Program Assistant with the Rural Institute for Community Development (RICOD) in Chapagaon, Nepal, 13 km outside of Kathmandu.
I’m leaving tomorrow, and will be flying from Pennsylvania to California to Thailand to Nepal. This blog will be my main form of communication to friends and family at home though email will certainly be an option as well.
After spending a week in Akron, Pennsylvania doing orientation activities, and feeling some uncertainty in the face of rapid changes in plans, I am feeling ready to be stuck on a plane where all I can do is read and sleep (and play Gameboy:)
This week I’ve been consciously trying to reinforce the idea expressed in the title of a book by Thich Nhat Hanh: “Peace is Every Step”
With every interaction, I try to remind myself that the more peaceful interactions I have, the more peace there is.
Peace is every step.

note: this blog post was copied over from my old blog at www.chaseinnepal.wordpress.com  .  Due to some software complications with Wordpress and the internet here in Nepal, I've started using Blogger instead.