Swayambhunath Temple (aka The Monkey Temple)

More touristing.

Me: Noah, what did you enjoy today?
Noah: Seeing the MONKEYYYYYSSSSS!!
Thom: Ah! Ah! Ah!

Mooching and Shopping in Old Kathmandu

You know how when you live in a place, you tend not to do the touristy things? When I lived in Stratford on Avon I NEVER did a walking tour or visited Ann Hathaway's cottage, even though I walked past it on my way to work every morning. And we'd lived in Llangollen for several years before I went on the steam railway there, and then only because my best mate was visiting with her littles.
But here, yes, we are doing the tourist things - and loving them.
In the UK we could visit friends and family, escape to any number of amazingly beautiful, wild, green spaces ( we lived on the Welsh-North Shropshire border - just beautiful!), spend happy afternoons pottering about parks and play areas, swim easily and using child friendly change rooms, and if all else failed there were hours of delight to be found at the local soft play area (plus squishy sofas and decent teas and coffees for the grown ups - none of your chairs-bolted-to-the-floor-squalor!)
But here none of those things are available, and even though we have a happy home with plenty of fun inside it, sometimes we feel the pinch of it and need to get out.
So we reach for the Lonely Planet and find a walking tour, and hey presto, we are challenged, overwhelmed, and ultimately refreshed. Grubby but delighted. Tired but elated. We got out, we negotiated a taxi, we found our way through the unfamiliar labyrinth of streets and alleyways - yay for us!
(Um, and I spent the birthday money my mum gave me on some GORGEOUS shawls and a pashmina - photos another time.......sshhh )

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.....)