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.