Gardening

Gardens are food for the soul, eh.
And gosh do we need it here sometimes..... The roads are potholed, rubbish-strewn and dusty, and it's not easy to find green spaces for the children to run and me to daydream.
So, here is The Garden of Dreams, an oasis on the corner of Thamel, the main tourist hub of Kathmandu. Not very wild, as you can see, but a beautiful and refreshing place to spend a morning (and admittedly expensive but deservedly yummy lunch) with the littles and one of Eve's school friends.




Kites are the thing here at the moment - I think it's something to do with Dashain, the main Nepali festival which is being celebrated at the moment, but it could just be good kite-flying season. As you can see, Noah and Thom haven't quite got the hang of it yet....




And here are some happy rascals in our garden. Eve plays with Momentha (sp?), our guard's daughter a LOT - Momentha's English is coming on really well; Eve's Npali not quite so much.....
They were all delighted by the teeny baba snail they found:

Spiders, Monkeys, Soldiers and Faeries

Two months into our Kathmandu-ing and we finally got it together and went for a little trek with our little people. Harv and Eve started school a week after we arrived, and finished term one at the end of last week, so we haven't had much time to explore - it's been heads-down-and-run-for-it.
This was 5km of track up through forest to a temple on the rim of the Kathmandu Valley. As well as the slightly ewwwwy spiders, we came a cross a wee faerie door, a troop of monkeys in the treetops above our heads, and a small group of armed soldiers (the king / ex-king lives in the forest somewhere - it's a national reserve) who were fascinated by the littles, Thom in particular. They were very friendly and, in spite of the guns, much less scary than the spiders.
Thom has a handful of words in his repertoire of communication now, but his monkey call is his most accomplished. The children were all enchanted by being able to watch monkeys in the wild.
A great day.

More Painting

We went to a party at Paula's house on Friday and the very clever and talented Natasha was there with her face paints - so we had to have a go! She was all the more clever as she managed to paint all of these after sunset, during load-shedding (scheduled power cut) by the light of an eco-torch. Isn't she amazing?!
Her work has been in Hello! and OK magazines, and more recently in Friday! the Kathmandu entertainment paper, which this week had Eve on the front cover with her International Day costume on and not-matching-but-delightful face paint. Wow.

The party at Paula's was lovely. We were up on the roof terrace for most of the evening and I got my first glimpse of Himalaya through the distant clouds.

I also managed to leave Thom's sandals there (well, it was dark.....) There's never really been any doubt that I have made the full and complete transition to 'mother' - but here's proof if needed - I used to get drunk and lose my own shoes at parties, now I have a couple of shandies and lose my kids' - oh dear....... He'll have rather sweaty feet for a couple of weeks until we go back to school after the Dashain holiday, but won't, I think, hold it against me....


Here's our friend, Ash, first:





If you look really closely to the left of the tiger's chin you can see Noah's tummy scar from his op as a teeny:

Harv Marathon

Sorry - dreadful pun.

Harv ran the Kathmandu Half Marathon last week. It started very early - he left the house about 05.30 and was running by around 06.45. The kids and I walked up to Jawalakhel Chowk, jammy breakfast toast in the littles' hands, to watch him run past. Just as we arrived, I saw the familiar silhouette running down Kumari Parti towards us - we were really lucky to make it in time to see him. The littles were delighted to see Daddy running past waving and blowing kisses.

It's a bit different to marathons in the UK. They don't close the roads here, but there are extra traffic police who just sort of slow the traffic down a little to let the runners through. And there were nowhere near the amount of runners doing it, and not much in the way of spectating either. He said it was a kind of lonely race. The air quality was very poor on the ring road. He ran it in around 1 hour 50 (not exactly sure as there were no official times that we know of...!) which is about 10 minutes slower than he ran in Cardiff last year. Considering the extra 1400m of altitude and the air pollution, this is pretty admirable. He raised enough money for another cleft repair operation for our family charity, Operation Smile. He also beat several Ghurkas. Jolly good show, old chap!!

More house

Here's our sitting room. It's a bit, um, orange.....
I have always been pretty safe / lazy before - most of our house in the UK was cream.
I thought we'd have a green sitting room here, but obviously it hasn't turned out that way..... But I like it. Apparently the winter nights here are very cold, so my thinking is that this room and a hot toddy will help to keep the cold out. It feels rather studenty to be using throws over scruffy but functional furniture, which I also quite like
Since I took this photo I have caved to peer pressure from Harv and swapped the mat (which I really liked) for a Tibetan rug (which I grudgingly adore).
Apart from the curtains it's all Fair Trade, so that's another good thing.....
Also, Noah's favourite colour is orange (although it has to orange with dinosaurs to get a guaranteed vote).


(And yes, that's Jungle Book on TV, with a stripy tiger to match the rest of the room.....)

Autumn Season Swap

Just a quick post to show my season swap, sent to Joxy in the UK - I am so chuffed it finally arrived - about two weeks late, I think..... I really thought it'd gone to the post box in the sky.
Three little Autumn ladies, with a pumpkin, a squash, and a flower as a way of including the very different Nepali seasons. We are just coming out of monsoon here and the flowers are blooming. These blue ones on the vine are the ones I was trying to copy - they are perfect pentagons.

International Day

It was International Day at Eve's School today, so the children went into school in national dress.
Now, technically she's a little Welsh girl as she was born in Wrexham, but for the sake of this day, the fact that her family are all English, and that I couldn't foresee myself being able to make a stovepipe hat and shawl etc, she was definitely English today.
It's not easy deciding what is national dress for an English girl......... I googled a bit, then decided on the outfit below, which, thanks to some serious corner-cutting I managed to rustle up by hand as I don't have a sewing machine. We thought she looked a bit like Miss Muffet so she screamed at the spider sitting beside her for the first photo.
But then decided that long sleeves were just too hot, so went for a slightly Victorian look this morning.
(Don't you just love the way she poses and gazes beneath the tree...)
There was a big parade at school this morning and a fair with lots of amazing food to try this afternoon, as The British School has something like 37 nationalities represented in its cohort. (The Korean food got my vote.)
And then she got a real treat - having her face painted by Natasha - Eve heaven!