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...."