My first post in 2008!

L-R: A young goat roams the hills of Budhani Kantha / Nepali children love posing for pictures / On the way home near Tripureswor, the sun goes down / At Ratna Park, a volunteer tries to control the rowdy crowd during the first mass rally that aims to campaign for April’s elections

I keep repeating myself in e-mails so a blog has never been this useful! It’s exactly a month since I left for Nepal, and this new journal is going to be monumental in that sense. Not an intention to start anew but something went haywire with the old wordpress… Well ’tis a good beginning for the stories and the pictures to roll all over again :). Some notes from the city of chaos:

- For starts, I’ll have to say it’s hard choosing where to begin, and as with all unseasoned and amatuer travellers I get wowed by every sight and sound (speaking of sounds, things are pretty horn-y here for the lack of a better word). There’s just so much to say and every experience is worth keeping forever. But as I recall Tiff’s words (the little Shanghai baby!), the more glorious the moments, the more impossible it is to record every expression, thought or feeling even if you want to do it so badly. At best, I often end up documenting the day in point-form, leaving the emotional bits to memory. This is going to be a challenge.

- Being Singaporean, transportation is a must-have theme ain’t it? ;) In brief: there’s the tuk-tuk (they call it tempo), micro (a mini-van), bus and taxi. Instead of bells and buzzers, there’ll be someone hollering out the names of locations. Want to get it to stop? Hit the metal roof of it. So far I’ve hardly perfected the art, so if there’s one thing I could do for this place it’ll be installing some buzzer technology. Also they try to accommodate as many people as possible into each vehicle so that means frequent squeezing or standing and very likely, both. That’s really the good part considering the cold weather — you don’t get this kind of warmth anywhere else!

- The young people here are really positive. Though many of them are trying to get out of the country to study, they do want to come back to change their country for the better. There’s really a good vibe going on, as opposed to Singapore where people often complain that we’re moving too fast for our own good or that our education system pigeon-holes us. It’s really made me more appreciative of progress despite its anal order of things. 

- Electricity is scarce because of winter and a lack of rain, so we can have up to 11 hours of power cuts in a day. They call it load-shedding, but it’s more like a bucketful of tear shedding for us. Once at an Internet cafe, the computers shut down without warning, and it’s almost like your parents turning off the lights and shoo-ing you to sleep — you just aren’t left with any choice.

- It’s beautiful how this place is so messy and yet people don’t get by without carrying along some good-naturedness. I gather it might be the newbie syndrome where I’m still fascinated with everything and everyone, but I hope the wanderlust never goes away. I think, I’ll like to be continually amazed. Now, 30 days into this foreign land and I have yet to get down to some serious work… Falling in love can be such a distraction, but I promise it’s no stopping them stories. :)