Interesting week this one. Following on from G's very sexist comments regarding shopping and clothes last week, we have spent a lot of time this week learning about the lot of Nepali women - not great to be honest! I'd already been aware that they do an awful lot of the hard labour here i.e. humphing huge baskets of greenery, wood, bricks, gravel etc on their backs but I'd assumed most of the men did too. That is the case for the lower castes to a certain extent ...

So another week slips by. Believe it or not, it sometimes feels like we're not doing very much at the moment - with endless days of school and Nepali culture. Then, when we stop and think about it (as we are at the moment), we realise we live in interesting times and have actually got quite a lot on our plates at the minute. Firstly there is the country itself to consider. Most of the results from the election are in now and it's pretty clear that the Maoists ha...

April 12th, one month since we left the UK. Some days it feels much less and some much longer! We're now back at the Pacific Guest House after 3 days of luxury in the hotel Varja for the VSO conference - first time in a double bed for ages! It was arranged for now to overlap with the election as all the volunteers were brought in from the districts just in case. Looks like most of it went smoothly after all which is good, and it will be interesting to see what c...

Staying close to our Guest House today as there have been a few bombs in central Kathmandu over the weekend, presumably by people who don't want the election to go ahead. These will be royalists as whoever wins the election, the monarchy will be scrapped and Nepal becomes a republic. No one has been hurt but VSO have told us to not stray too far and this seems sensible and as there are plenty of nice cafes round here it's not too much hardship. On Tuesday we are ...

So we have been here almost 2 weeks now and although not quite feeling "at home" yet, we're certainly beginning to feel like we're more than just tourists. We escaped our VSO colleagues on Saturday and headed off into the Kathmandu valley to do our first Hash with the HHHH (Himalaya Hash House Harriers). It was good to get out of the city, albeit a bit nerve racking as we didn't really know exactly where we were going. We took a taxi (which is quite a...