Photos from this time

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alisonjl/sets/72157628861085503/

Monkeys..blessing or curse?

This morning, as I was bringing up my peanut butter and honey covered chapati to the rooftop to enjoy in the sun, I was scared nearly to death by a GIANT monkey stalking along the railing toward the staircase. After a bit of a standoff where he tried to coax me out of my breakfast with insistent and or threatening gazes, I made my way back downstairs with my plate to finish eating in the less sunny and less warm dining room.

Nicky, the clinic director who lives here all the time, seems to have gotten very good at not being intimidated by him, making large noises and carrying on as normal. If I intend to be warm at all during the day, it must be on our roof in the sun, so I hope this is a life skill I can acquire quickly.

No littering. There are 83ish rupees to the USD

Here again

My last trip to Nepal was my first, but I swore it wouldn't be the only. This is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen, in more ways than you might imagine.

After reading a few posts from my last blog here, and remembering how I had felt coming here from South Korea, knowing I would be returning to Portland soon after 18 months of previous travel, I am realizing how different experiences are the second time around. This doesn't just go for travel, of course, but nearly everything. There is something important in knowing what to expect, or rather, in thinking you know what to expect. The second experience of something usually lets me be more comfortable in it, there is both the illusion that I know what is coming and also that it will be somehow different. There is a soft sense of expectation that replaces the nervous excitement.

Flying into the Kathmandu airport this time was somehow comfortable. I knew what buying a visa felt like, and about how long I'd have to wait for the luggage. I knew what the taxi situation would be and how the drive would look, and though waiting to buy the visas and waiting for the luggage took forever (we were on a plane with 3 Korean tour groups), it was familiar.

The drive to Thamel, where we will spend our first few nights, was alarming as usual, as the only traffic law is directly linked to how loud your horn is, and as we seemed to nearly hit or run over everything we passed, I was able to laugh and enjoy the ride, remember what it feels like to have to give complete control over to the moment and the taxi driver fate picks.

After we arrived and settled into the hotel for a bit, the two women I am travelling with and I set out into Thamel to find a dinner. It was amazing to me how much the same everything was, the bakerys and shops were in the same place (though there is a new shop with animal shaped wool hats!), and the streets seem to materialize from my memory. Finding curry and my first cup of milk tea (one of my favorite things, kind of like chai) was easy as I walking slightly ahead of the others as their eyes got lost in this detail and that.

I am grateful for this second experience here, for the remembering of what I knew and for the expectation that there will be some new things to add to that list. I am grateful for the comfort this second time brings, for the familiar smells and tastes and sights, I am thrilled to be able to take in more of what I saw last time, to bring my old experience to new light and to go deeper into this gorgeous place.

I say that Nepal is breathtaking in its beauty, and it is one of the reasons why I wanted to return, but I think I need to elucidate that a bit.

This is not a clean place. The streets are not well maintained, there is trash everywhere. There is trash in rivers and streams. There are children crying for their mothers, there is malnourishment and deformity and discomfort. This is not an old cobblestone street in Europe, promising hundred year old pastry recipies at the end of the alley, or a new flavor of gelato, or a castle with hidden passageways. It often smells bad.

there is beauty for its own sake, there are temples and offerings, gods and goddesses set up on unexpected altars. There are pastries and good meals down streets that are all the more appreciated because they are not clean or necessarily safe places to walk. The trash is not hidden somewhere (there would be nowhere to hide it), but everything used and discarded is present for observation--look, there is the wrapper for the sandwich you bought, and the container for the coffee, there is the baby's diaper and the candy wrappers and yesterdays newspaper. There in the street is what you no longer need, the used parts of an old life. It doesn't smell good, and it is environmentally horrible. The trash gets burned regularly and contributes a huge amount to the air pollution here.

But in the meantime, it is a reminder. It puts in front of you what you say you no longer need. It is a reminder that there are things not worth saving, better off discarded, better off burned. We have nothing similar at home. In the West, trash is hidden as much as possible, put into sanitary bags, lidded within trash cans and hauled off to somewhere most people never see. This lets us forget how much we use and how much we leave behind as we are living. We rarely give the takeout container a second thought after it is discarded--we never have to see it again. We have so much abundance that we are never forced to see what we leave behind, what we no longer need. We are not given the choice to see the remnants of our old selves. Often they haunt us having been invisibly hauled off by some trash service never met. Often, this means we never appreciate the difference between yesterday and today.

The trash here, to me, is beautiful. Growing up with anti littering campaigns, that isn't always easy. It would be easy to say that beauty cannot exist without its opposite, but experience this time lets me know that beauty and horror are really one in the same, the judgement is in the comfort found in either.

Old blog, new blog

When starting this blog for my current trip in Nepal, I thought about simply continuing my old one, from 2010, since the juxtaposition should be interesting. But after reading a few posts, I think my experience this time is different enough from my last that I may as well freeze that one in time.

Here is the link however: http://seektodiscover.blogspot.com

And here are the photos from last time: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alisonjl/sets/72157623324359144/#