Friday, May 22, 2009

Facebook Account for Pictures

I am having a hard time posting pictures on here but my facebook account is working so there are some pictures on there I have made everything public for while I am here. Go ahead and take a look.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=541310456&ref=profile
May 22, 2009

Last night we went to go the tailors with Uma to be fitted for some Nepali clothing. (this was the second night in a row we have gone but it was closed the night before). We went to the road just outside of the house and found a taxi to take us to the shopping mall where it is located. The road that we were on to begin with is a very narrow road. Before we got onto the main road we got in a jam with a large truck. We had to maneuver very slowly. Josh was sitting in the front seat of the car and was telling the taxi driver how much room he had between the wall and the side of the car. Both of the side mirrors were already folded in. At one point Josh told the taxi driver that he had tons of room and held up his fingers to show how much room was between the side of the car and the brick wall on the side it was about ½ in. That was about the same from the other side where the truck was and the distance the other side of the truck was from the brick wall on the other side of the road. It was hilarious they drive so close to people and other cars here.

When we got to the tailors it was closed again. Uma asked us if we would like to go to Themel which was our original plan for the evening. We told her that we would like that and she told us to get out of the taxi and get another one because she was going to go home. It was really funny. She dropped us off on a corner and said good-bye. When we were standing on the corner deciding what we wanted to do. She poked her head out the window and told us that we could also walk and to just go straight ahead it is not far maybe 20 25 minutes. (Everything here is “not far maybe 20, 25 minutes.”) It took us about an hour to walk there. We have come to expect it to take us a lot longer than we are told to get places. We walked through what was like a street bazaar with people all over the sidewalks selling tons of different things. One of the people was selling what looked like used underwear. One pile for men and one for women.
Once we finally got to Themel we just walked around. Themel is one of the more touristy areas . We went into a bookstore and looked around and picked up some more postcards. All over the streets there are people walking around trying to get you to buy bracelets and singing bowls and all kinds of things that I did not recognize. They will follow you around trying to convince you to buy things from them. We found an Italian restaurant on a roof over looking the street and ate some amazing food. I had goat cheese raviolis in a garlic white wine sauce and josh had gonococci that he said was the best he had ever eaten. It was all very inexpensive, we paid less than $4 for our meals.

Because it was dark when we finished eating and a long walk back we found a taxi to take us back home. It was the CRAZIEST taxi ride ever. Most of the taxi rides here are an adventure but this one was nuts. Our driver would go really fast and then slam on his brakes inches from hitting people, cars, motorcycles, and rickshaws. He honked almost the entire time we were in the car. He was swerving around people on the narrow streets into the other lanes to get around cars. (Keep in mind that there are brick walls on both sides most of the time lots of corners and winding streets and no street lights). We were sliding all around and jerking back and forth in our streets. And there are no seatbelts in cars here, I don’t know why. I look every time we get in one. We decided that we were not likely going any faster than 20 or 30 miles per hour at the most but it seemed pretty fast when it is dark and crazy like that. We decided that it was like a ride at an amusement park. We were laughing the whole ride home and we were making the taxi driver laugh at us too.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

You...Baby...Come?

We just got in from school and we went to say hello to the children. The first thing Sangmu did when she saw me was poke my belly and ask “you…baby…come?” That is the second time I have been asked since we have been here, last time was the day that the baby birds were born. The same question was asked then they made a baby coming out motion and a whoosh noise. It was really funny. I guess that I am not using my best posture oh well.

Today I taught my first English class at the school. We were learning about where things are in a room, for example front, back, middle, in-between, to the right of, to the left of, outside, inside. I also taught the lesson on climate. It was about the monsoon weather in Nepal and how it makes Nepal a good climate for growing food. It difficult to teach when I don’t understand what they are yelling at me. The class was insane. I had to try and describe what a walnut, millet, barley, and tobacco was. The Headmistress of the school sat in for the class and wanted me to draw examples of them. Overall she said that I did a fantastic job teaching and see liked the lesson a lot. I was kind of hoping that she would think that I did a bad job so that we would not have to teach any more.

There is a separate volunteer group at the school that is a Jewish program and they work with the students teaching dancing, drama, singing, and are doing projects to better the school grounds. We are trying to start working with them so that we do not have to teach any more English. We are ending up just doing the teachers jobs for them and they do so much better because they understand everything that the students are saying. They do a fabulous job most of the time. Some of the sentences that they and the book come up with are hilarious. In class today for homework they had to answer the question “The boy had the cobbler …… his hair (cut, to cut, cutting). She is very cruel she….her children to polish them (made, make, to make). We sit in class some of the time and just try to resist the urge to laugh at the teacher and the book.

We are doing really well here and adapting to everything. Today as we were walking home from school which takes about 25 minutes, about how we are not afraid of the busses taxis, and motorcycles that are coming full speed right at us. We just kind of step out of the way and expect them to swerve away from us. It does not faze me at all anymore. We walk to school in the morning go home for lunch and back to school after lunch and occasionally we will walk somewhere in the evening so we are doing tons of walking and getting used to the traffic. The traffic as well as the dogs that are sleeping anywhere they want to, the trash on the streets, fruit people everywhere, meat stands with whole chickens, bowls of chicken feet, and goat heads. We still have not figured out what the goat heads are for they kind of look like shrunken heads if you know please tell me.

I did my laundry for the first time here 2 days ago. It really makes me appreciate my washer and drier ,and now that I am wearing my clothes, my fabric softener. I did it with a bar of soap and lots of water and then hung them on the roof to dry. I did my laundry in the afternoon after class so the sun was starting to set by the time I had finished so in the morning when I went to go and get my towel it was still sopping wet. I had to dry off after the shower with wash clothes.
Anyway all is going great. Can’t wait to share more experiences. Let me know if you have any questions..Miss you all

Namaste

Amanda

Kathmandu

When I was planning for this trip to Nepal tried so hard not to have any expectations for what I would experience here so that I would not be disappointed or freaked out. Being here I have realized that I did have many expectations and none of them have been even remotely correct. I was expecting a peaceful country with some people moseying along. Lots of Yoga and Meditation. A clean country with poor but clean looking people. SOOO WRONG. This is the loudest place that I have ever been. Everywhere you go there are tons of cars and motorcycles. The roads here are super narrow so people and cars have to share the space. There are so many traffic jams here with cars and motorcycles going both directions in the wrong lanes. To let people walking know they are coming they honks so there is so much honking and some of them are ear-splitting loud. Yesterday on our way to the monkey temple in a taxi we ended up on a road that was just wide enough for our very tiny taxi to drive on and parts of the way he had to fold his mirrors in so that they would not hit the walls on the side and we had to have Rabindra (our language tutor) guide us through the road. It was hilarious. So far we have not seen any accidents or major problems caused by the traffic so it is just an adventure to be driving in the car. Josh found out that to drive here we would not need to have anything except for our drivers licenses from home. The idea of driving here seems so crazy to me. There is litter everywhere on the streets and some terrible smells come from it. There are so many people everywhere you go anytime of the day. But mostly when school starts and ends. There are meat markets along the road that we have to walk on to get anywhere. On the tables there will be whole chickens or buckets full of chicken heads and feet. There are some tables with whole goat heads (we still have not figured out what they do with them but they are disgusting to look at). The temples here are amazing though and they are kept fairly clean considering that there are so many people there all the time and there are street dogs and tons of monkeys there all the time that are allowed to do whatever they want to and nobody ever stops them. Today we saw one of the protests walking down Kalimati when we were coming out of the school for our lunch break. There were so many people and they were carrying flags. Some of them here chanting something about the government but that is all I got from it. Uma our host here in Nepal was telling us that the protests are not anything that we need to worry about because most of the people that are involved in the protest are from towns outside of Kathmandu. The people that are organizing the protest will find people that want to be paid to go to Kathmandu for a couple day and walk the protest for a couple hundred rupees. So the people involved generally do not care about the issue at all and are not violent they just wanted to get into the city to see family and make a little money in the mean time.

Nepal Day 7

Me and Josh have now been in Nepal for 1 week. Today is Sunday here in Nepal. We started our teaching assignment today. The children that live in the orphanage that we are staying at attend a private school so they are gone all day there. Because of this we have an assignment to teach at a public school where the teachers are not as good because they are not paid well enough. Today we just observed some 7, 8, 9, and 10 class English lessons. Tomorrow I will be teaching class 7 and Josh will be teaching class 10. It is very fun to be able to work with this age group at the school after working with the Jr. High students from Hillcrest Jr High at the library every afternoon. It is fun to see how similar they act here to the students in Utah. The children that we are working with, in the orphanage range from 5 to 10 they are so cute. Everyday they come home from school at around 3:30 they change into their after school clothes and wash up outside. One of the girls Sarmilla always takes the longest to do anything she dawdles and is in her own world the entire time. Pangum loves to clean up after school she takes forever and will slick back her hair several times and make sure that it looks perfect and and puts clips in it. Nitisha who is 5 and the youngest loves to laugh she is so super giggley and is always so happy to be around. She is constantly singing and dancing around and talks about a mile a minute. Sujan was sick the first couple of days that we have been here so he was home with us. The first day I asked him if he wanted me to read him a book. When I started reading it to him he interrupted me and read the whole book to me. He is so sweet and always hollars SEESTER!!! To me to come and help him with is school work or to read books to the other children or finds stickers to share with the others. Rajesh is the oldest and always looks out for the other children. He is a great older brother to them. He loves to play basketball and we will dribble the ball and steal it from each other in the drive way. I think that he could play all afternoon. It is hard to do that here with 5 other children demanding attention all the time. He is pretty good at sharing the time though. We did get a chance to sit and play Uno together last night and talk just the 2 of us I think that he really enjoys time like that. Sangum is the shyest child here I have not spent a lot of time getting to know her yet but she is super sweet and looks out for her sisters she is the oldest of the girls. The more time that I spend with the children the less I feel sick for home. They are really making this experience fantastic.

Nepal Day 1

Nepal Day One

Last night we got into Nepal around 9:30pm and went through a health check for Swine Flu (Flu A, H1N1) as their sign said. From there we applied for our visas picked up our luggage and went through customs. Everything went very smoothly a man that knew English spotted us and went through the whole process with us. From there we went to find our ride. It was a man who knows Uma. He took us out to his car to load the luggage. Next to his car was a little boy who was around 7 or 8 who kept watching us and smiling I am thinking that he was trying to beg for money but did not say anything. The surroundings in the dark reminded me of some of the scenes in Slumdog Millionaire.

The roads here are very narrow and they drive on the left side of the road. Right now Kathmandu has power restrictions so there is only power 8-12 hours a day and at night time for the most part. Because of this there are no street lamps so the roads are very dark at night. To pass cars here you signal and honk to let the car in front of you know that you are about to pass them. It was a very noisy journey. Along the side of the road you have to stop every so often to have the car searched by police. As I lay in bed writing this there I can hear lots of honking in the roads.

We arrived at the orphanage around 10:30 and were shown our room and we went straight to bed. I woke up in the middle of the night to rain pounding on the tin roof. It was so loud and kept me awake for a while. The beds here are very hard so are the pillows I was thinking about it this afternoon about how I would describe my pillow and it reminds me of cornmeal all packed together tightly. I think it is really cotton but it is very very hard. The whole sleeping situation is going to be very hard for me to get used to. Right now I have the blanket provided under me and the one I brought over me.

This morning I woke up to so many different noises. There is a parrot that hangs out outside of my window and likes to talk to the children and to the neighbors and it was trying to get their attention. It is a small green parrot. There were lots of other bird noises. One of these mornings I am going to write down all of the noises that I can hear. I also felt like I could hear monkeys but Uma said that they do not come here very often so it might have been a bird I have never heard before.

At 8 o’clock (I was already showered and dressed and had been awake for at least an hour, which is so not like me) we ate breakfast with Uma she prepared Josh and I eggs with onions and peppers in them and toast. It was a pretty good breakfast, Uma told us that the Nepali people do not take breakfast and eat lunch at 10 instead but she takes breakfast and will do so for us every day as well. The table that they eat at is very low to the ground and you sit on pillows cross legged. This was very hard for me and Josh we are both really sore from sitting like that all day. (Especially after sitting on planes for the last 2 days).
We started our language study today. We have a tutor who is going to be coming for 5 days to teach us basic Nepali. The language is very hard there are lots of sounds that are not in the English language that we are having to learn how to pronounce. We learned greetings, how to ask names, family, numbers, some verbs, and a few nouns. To ask “What is your name?” you say “Tappaai ko naam ke ho? And to answer I would say mero naam Amanda ho. We studied for around 3 hours. It was very tiring. But I think that I am catching on ok. I think that I will have an easier time pronouncing things from my language book now that I have learned a little bit.

After the language lesson we took lunch with Uma and Rabinda (our language teacher) we ate rice with a curry sauce and vegetables. There were potatoes and chili peppers and a vegetable that I had never seen that Uma called lady fingers. They may be similar to orka but I don’t know. It was very good though.
Afterward I sat and listened to Uma and Rabindra talk in Nepali. (Rabindra could not go because it was raining to hard and he had to walk to the bus). I think the jet lag caught up with me a little bit because I went to lay down for a short nap around 2 or 3 and did not wake up until almost 8. We watched a little bit of television with the children. A lot of it was in English and some of it was in Hindi. It was interesting how much I understood what was going on even though I could not understand the language that was being used. Afterward we ate dinner and visited.

Right now I am laying in bed writing this in a word document hoping that I can post in on the blog. We shall see. We did not get out of the house at all today because of the rain so I did not get a chance to get to internet access. Hopefully tomorrow will be better weather so that we will be able to and to see the city we can only see a little. I will also try to take some pictures tomorrow and show where we will be staying while we are here.
Dhanyabaad (Thank you)
Amanda

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Nepal

I will get stuff on here soon I tried tonight but the word processor on here is not working for some reason. I am doing great though. I have pictures on Facebook check them out. Miss you all

Amanda

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Hong Kong May 2009















Our flight here was very smooth and we were able to sleep. On the flight from LA to Hong Kong they served us two strange kind of asian kind of not meals. We also had access the the movie bank and could watch as many movies on demand for free as we like. I ended up watching Benjamin Button, Yes Man, and 4 Christmases. It was fun. Right now we are at the airport waiting for our flight to Nepal to start boarding. Josh is sleeping I am working on staying awake till we get to Nepal and I think that I will have avoided jet lag for the most part. We shall see!!

We made it safe to Hong Kong and spend the whole day in the city today. Our first stop was to a giant Buddha in the foresty area above Hong Kong. We took a tram ride to it that took about 30 minutes it was so beautiful and lush and the whole way up you could see different shrines on the mountains that are really difficult to get to. We spend a while walking through the small museum in the bottom 1/3 of the statue reading about the enlightenment of Buddah. On the other 2 parts are more museaums and a restaurant. After we finished at the statue we took the tram to the old part of main Hong Kong. The city here is amazing and so different depending on what part of the island that you are on. In the old part it is tall skyscrapers that are older and poorer looking. We had to take a ferry across the water to get to the newer part of Hong Kong were the richer area is. The difference between the 2 areas was amazing. On the newer side of Hong Kong we found the LDS church visitor center and we are pretty sure that the temple is close by. We spent a large part of the day traveling around on the public transportation here. To use the public transportation you have to get an octopus card and put money on it. Then you just scan it on scanners everytime you board and exit busses, trams, and ferrys. The cards can also be used in local stores like 7-11 which are everywhere that you turn. I think that I spent more time on public transportation that I have my entire life (minus traveling to school on trax).

(Sorry the pictures are in a weird place I will figure this out in the next couple of days I am running out of time and energy to figure it out right now.)

Thank you everyone for your love and support. Happy Mothers Day!!

Amanda

Thursday, May 7, 2009

24 hours to go!!!


There are only 24 hours until i will be boarding the plane that will take me on this crazy adventure. Today has been full of packing and preparing but I think that i have almost everything ready to go just a few things to pick up tomorrow and then i am out of luck. The kittens have been watching me cautiously all day trying to figure out what is going on. Hopefully they will be good while i am gone and not cause any problems for toni and spencer. Anyway off to see a few friends before the craziness beings. Check back I am hoping to blog something while we are in Hong Kong. That will be sometime Saturday evening if it works out how I want to. If not somthing within the week for sure. Wish Me Luck!!!