More pics from the school run

I love the school run - here are a few more things which have caught our attention.....

These bikes with trailers are used loads - sometimes for deliveries, like this one, but also quite often for recycling cardboard or suchlike, which doesn't seem to happen in any official way here. Quite often you'll see a huge mound of rubbish at the roadside and people picking through it, separating out things which can be recycled. The next picture's not a very good one - I was trying to get some lovely washing blowing on the line on a rooftop.... Then a table tennis match; one of the many free range chickens; and a couple working on their house - we see quite a lot of women here on building sites - they'll be carrying really heavy loads in the same way as this lady - pretty tough ladies....

Mama Made Monday

Look away now, Jen, if your package hasn't arrived yet.........



I love making things for new babies - there's something really special and emotive in knitting for someone who hasn't yet arrived. This hat is on its way to Joe, my third little nephew, who arrived safely just over two weeks ago. I am currently working on another little something to go with it too.
And the card matches the ones I made for Jack and Tommy when they were born.
I'm definitely more of a knitter than a sewer (although I'm not even really qualified to call myself a 'knitter' - I just like it!) but I do like occasional cross stitch. I customised a hand made paper card I got here, to act as the mount, and didn't do a particularly good job of it, but I think you can feel the love - which is the whole point after all.....

Bhaktapur

A beautiful medieval town. We did the Lonely Planet walking tour and enjoyed the quiet, and better air quality. Bhaktapur is 'pedestrianised' - in as far as the roads are basically too narrow for traffic, except motorbikes which seem to pretty much count as pedestrians here anyhow.
It's quite a funny feeling - we attracted so much attention, being white / blonde and having a doubledecker pushchair. We get stared at way more than we stare. Which is why I felt a bit more confident about asking people if I could take photos of them - I was especially fascinated by all the knitting ladies - there were SO many sitting and chatting while they knit beautiful hats, socks, fingerless gloves etc on their double pointed needles. I kind of kicking myself now that I didn't ask anyone where they got their yarn from - although it was pretty apparent that hardly anyone spoke any English there and Harv and I have about 5 Nepali phrases we can use, none of which include knitting.

Looking Up

I hope I can be excused by the puddles, mud and potholes - I spend most of my walking here focused firmly groundward.

But today - perhaps it was the novelty of blue skies - or the daydreaming afforded by boys snoozing in the pushchair - I lifted my gazes.

So, here to share are some of the sights: a typical Kathmandu building, but isolated, standing alone and overshadowed by the huge Chinese development behind it; a cucumber plant thriving on the side of another building; and another new development, with bamboo scaffolding. Can you see the builders near the top of it? It really made me catch my breath when I saw the, vertiginous on their behalf.

Golden Temple, Lalitpur, Kathmandu

We all enjoyed the time we spent here.

The tortoises are guardians of the temple - I really wasn't sure about whether they should be touched - but the lady that the children met obviously thought it was ok.....

Oh, and the boy in the photo with Thom wasn't about to get Karate Kid on him - he was just kind of fidgeting about on the steps. Check out Thom's 'please leave me alone and don't make eye contact with me because I don't know you' squirm. He gets a lot of attention here (as do Eve and Noah) because of his colouring, so he does this squirm a fair bit. He's starting to get a bit more blase about it but I do still feel quite protective of him. He's my monkey boy!

The Tom and Jerry mural wasn't in the temple.........

Food Shopping

I was pretty daunted by food shopping here at first. We started out in a hotel for the first ten days, where we ate almost all of our meals, so when we were finally let loose into our own house, I didn't know where to start - the shops and food all seemed so different at first.
I'm still not cooking much - our Didi is a fabulous cook and Harv and I both love Nepali food so I'm only cooking for the children and at weekends (I need to do a whole other post on how FANTASTIC it is to have help in the home).

Anyhow, I'm learning......

So - we walk Eve to school, then stop at little shops on the way home. You can get longlife milk here, but the fresh stuff comes in plastic bags, as in the photo and is much cheaper - less than 20p a pint. It's homogenised but advises you on the packet to boil before use. So I carefully boil it, then let it cool before storing it in a plastic jug in the fridge.
And the veggies are all very seasonal - I got tomatoes and I think, some wild sorrel, the other day. We soak all the veg and fruit (and even eggs when we buy them) in weakish iodine solution to kill any bugs, then rinse in filtered water, before putting them into the fridge (where we keep everything fresh during the warm monsoon months). This might seem a bit OTT but the veggies etc are often watered with 'grey' water - and the mains water is certainly not guaranteed 'clean', so this is just what you do.....

Very mundane daily details, but I thought I'd share - so different from the UK supermarket experience....

Our new school run