Hello to me and mum because she will probably be the only one that reads this! well this is my first blog entry and I have been travelling already for 5 months. WOW! Well I will just start from Nepal, I have now been in Nepal for almost 2 months and have been spending most of my time in a small village called Ilam in the far east of the country. It is one of the most beautiful places ever! I am in the mountains, it takes 4 hours drive to get here around the winding mountains from the terai and boy is it worth it. The place I am staying in is Greenview guest house which is right in the tea fields. I look out my window (well the restaurant window because next to my window is a school where I can see kids working... truly moving) and all I sea is endless mountains covered in tea. I have been doing some volunteer teaching at a local school here, Prajna Sadan, which has been absolutely wonderful. The kids I have gotten to know are beautiful and I have had alot of fun with them as you can see from the photo. :) I was able to teach a few classes english which was great, a different experience... which is the best way to teach them and what works.. so forth. In my spare time I would just sit in the nursery class, this is kids that are 3 and 4 years old who are sooo gorgeous and they go to school 6 TIMES a week from 9-3. They can sleep but they rarely do. crazy! Assembly would start at 9.30 am which is very military like... hut, attention.. bla bla. Quite a strict school, hair has to be cut a certain way with no colours, uniforms have to be ironed, enclosed shoes, girls must have white ribbons in their hair and they cannot speak Nepali in the playground or in the classroom or they will get a smack and have to 'catch their ears'. The first question the kids would ask me is, what is your name and then what is your cast. My cast?? I would reply that I am not a hindu, I am christian and I don't have a cast. They are quite confused by this and would just repeat the question where I would jsut say my last name... richards... which they are more confused by and end up just leaving it. I have met some pretty cool people here, at the start of my trip here I met a Finnish couple who were so lovely, we would occassionally meet up for a drink and western food apart from the usualy dal bhat (rice and soup and vegetables) every day. So happy to have met them or I might have gone mad. I also have found that on my travels I usually establish a shop that I can come back to when I'm not doing anything where I get to know the owners and wont get asked the same questions over again. They become like a small family. Here I have found a small restaurant with a few tables run by a small family that I usually come back to. They have helped me out alot here. I have also met 5 Americans, 4 of which are engineers doing a project out here, building a septic tank for the hospital to help with the water management. Pretty awesome. The other girl, Sanjena, has just come here to help a community centre and do some reporting. Oooo, I also met a Dutch couple, Kiki and Rutger, that are doing a medical intership here in some community hospitals. They were really fun to be with so I actually went to where they are mainly based in Dharan to visit them again. It was Kiki's birthday too so I was able to be there for that and help celebrate it with her. We went to the ONLY club in the city- well the only one that didnt have prostitutes and drug dealers- which was a totally weird experience because for one, we were the only ones there and the music choice by Dj Lalit was strange. Well I think he just had a good 20 songs that he would put on repeat. Justin Bieber, Kesha... it was off the hook. It turned out to be a fun night though, me and Rutger were being monkeys, bulls, sumo's and did a bit of line dancing and some rapping. oh dear. I also discovered how annoying some Nepali guys can be... so much drama. One of them bugged me so much that when he asked me to sumo him or whatever, I just knocked him to the ground.. oops. One really creepy thing to have happened there was the night that I stayed at their flat I woke up at 1 am to someone looking in my window. :0 It was pitch black and pouring rain. I was so shocked, I told him to go away but he didnt budge, he then said something I couldnt understand and then kept repeating himself. He kept saying I f**k you, I f**k you.. I couldnt believe it, I just turned over and he was like, excuse me, miss, I f**k you. He then came around to the door and tried to open it and banged on it. I was so scared that I woke Rutger up to check it out. We then just shut the curtains and I kept a knife next to me incase he came back. Don't know what that would have done but it seemed right at 1 in the morning. CREEPIEST thing to happen to me ever.
So anyway that is pretty up to date with what has been happening so far. So now for some more recent stuff. The school I have been teaching at has exams now... the nursery class even has exams!! They have to come out the front one by one and have to sing a nursery rhyme, colour pictures, tested on english and Nepali and they have to dance. OMG! So for the last week I have been digging with the engineers because there isnt any excavators here to clear a big hole, it is manual labour. I have confused alot of people in the last week with being sooo dirty when I am usually clean in my nepali dresses. I had one guy come up to me and say "dee dee (sister) I think you should wash your clothes, it is raining, there is water, you should wash clothes." I was like "yeh but I am digging every day in the mud so they will just keep getting dirty"... which he did not understand and just kept repeating himself, so I left. It is also the middle of the monsoon now so there is sooo much rain, therefore no dirt but instead mud. Which I have learnt is absolutely horrible, it sticks to your shovel, you get stuck in the mud, I have been stuck up to my knees in it. It is full on. The digging has become so much apart of my days that I am now dreaming about it. eek. Still a bit sore, I have felt some muscles I never knew existed. I have also learnt to tie rebar and mix concrete. The way they do concrete here is all manual, they mix it with shovels and then put it on trays and pass it along and then to wherever it has to go. Quite a slow process.
So for today. I was cutting reeds for their reed bed today. Quite a mellow job instead of digging in the 'trenches'. It was market day today so a slow, cruisy day. The workers had the day off so we just went and did a few jobs and had a long lunch and played cards. Such a good lunch, we had cheese balls and I had a cheese toastie. Yummy. I have also been getting cultured with the Americans on their lingo and such. Very strange some of the things they say. They call a bum bag a fanny pack ;S they also have a restaurant in the states that is supposed to represent australian food, on the menu there is 'blooming onions' and 'shrimp on the barby'... they also think that the maps we have are all upside down with us on top of the world instead of 'down under' and the only australian words they could say was "dingo ate my baby" and "put some shrimp on the barby". They also believed paul hogan when he said 'forsters is australian for beer'. gahh. lord help them. We then went and planted the reeds and came to my house for tea, toast and top gear. YAY. We watched the US Special and the Middle east special. I have now just been on the internet, I have had my Dal Baht and am now sitting with my little friend Pratush who I do ninja with and try speak Nepali to. He is 2 years old, absolutely gorgeous. I am also right now uploading Lee evans on youtube so I have something to watch in my room. SOoo exciting. :D