Arjun’s Note: Here is part 2 of my good friend Dougal’s dispatches from his semester abroad in Nepal. I hope you find it interesting. You can find part 1 here.

- A story: One of the program directors is this guy from eastern Nepal. When his dad was like twenty, so maybe fifty-ish years ago, to get to and from Kathmandu, there was no way to do it but by walking…which took three or four weeks. Not an easy walk, either — a not insignificant portion of the people who tried never made it. His dad went, though, to look for a job. Once he finally made it there, he had to wait in line to actually get a job offer. The way they did it, apparently, is that they would have a wood-chopping or long-jumping contest — to get a clerical job. He did win one of those long-jumping contest, but then he couldn’t read or write, which makes clerical jobs a little harder. So, he went out and learned how to, and then by the time he retired, he was a judge.

- The temples are amazing, and we saw like ten million monkeys around one of them. Also some musk deer, which are tiny — there was a baby musk deer and a baby monkey running around next to each other, and they were the same size.

- Two of the kids on the program just walked past on their way back from Kathmandu. They were on the bus there and some guys were trying to collect money for some political organization. Nobody gave them any, so they got mad and started beating up women and old people, as in punching in the face more than once, before jumping off the bus. We drove past some Maoist youth group yesterday marching down the street.

- The caste stuff is pretty intense, though some of it I’m sure is just cultural differences that make it seem worse. We went on a tour of Patan yesterday, and the (high-caste) tour guide dude just stopped and pointed out things related to (low-caste) people’s cultural things — how some of them had tatoos on their legs, etc. He was grabbing at one guy’s ear talking — in English — about his earrings, and didn’t even talk to the guy until afterwards. He did know his stuff though, and it’s hard to tell whether that was actually really offensive or not. I just know that we were all really uncomfortable about it.

- We also saw these artist people, who make amazing metal statues, and saw a little bit about the process and stuff. So cool.

- There was a bat circling in our room the other night, and a giant spider outside one of the girl’s room’s today. Both left (or were coerced into leaving) peacefully.

- Prices here are weird — a 150ml soda, about the size of a can in the US, is 15 rupees; a 650ml beer, twice the size they are in the US, is 135.

- We’re moving into our Nepali families tomorrow, which could be as much as an hour’s walk away. I’m kind of scared — we really speak very little Nepali, and there’s so many little things I’m going to do that are going to be offensive. But we also went to a “village dinner” the other day with one of the host families, and that was a lot of fun, and the food was also amazing, so we’ll see.

- Apparently they teach us how to make traditional food stuff before we go — very excited about making that this summer, when there’s no Sharples.

Arjun’s Note: So I know I haven’t been doing a lot of my own writing lately, but I’ve had a lot of stuff going on. I recently brought you Federalist Paper No. 420, by my good friend Jeff. Now I want to bring you something entirely different; another one of my good friends, Dougal, is abroad in Nepal for the semester, and occasionally sends dispatches via internet cafe. Here is his first one.

Part 1

I’m in Nepal now; have been for almost a week.

We’ve been living at the program house, which is this awesome little courtyard with a few buildings in the middle of this pseudo-suburb — it’s like a rural village, sort of, but also not at all. On Monday, we move into our family stays; haven’t found out who it is yet.

The scenery is amazing, and it’s still too foggy to even really see the tall mountains.

We’re learning Nepali really quickly compared to a college class, but that’s probably because we do it two to five hours a day, six days a week, plus practice with each other and actual Nepalis outside of class. The class sizes of two to three also help.

Very different, in a lot of ways. The eating with your hand is fine (the food is awesome, so much better than Sharples — it’s amazing how much variety you can squeeze out of dhaalbhaat, rice with lentil soup), “charpi business” (charpi = toilet) isn’t as bad as you think. Nepalis don’t like dogs a whole lot but they’re all over the place, possibly with rabes, and every night they bark nonstop form nine to sometime after midnight. (I’m not really sure when, because I’m generally in bed before eleven, and up before seven.)

There’s way more demand for electricity than there is supply, so each of six regions gets only about eight hours of power a day. This is fine except for the computer / phone situation, because we’re busy all the time and the only internet access is at cybercafe type places (which actually aren’t cafes, generally, just computers; it’s way cheap, though, and there’s one right down the street).

The program has 13 kids: 7 from Pitzer, 3 from Pomona, one from Wesleyan, one from Colorado College, and me. Everyone’s pretty cool.

The caste system, officially illegal for the past 40 years, is still definitely in place. The low-caste (and poor) kids who live nearby, who some of us have made friends with, are uncomfortable coming into the program area because the landlord, who’s a highest-caste priest, would get mad.

Everyone is really nice, though, especially to Westerners. (Little kids wave and shout “Hello” as we walk down the street to get the bus to Kathmandu.) The neighbor kids are also fun; I played badminton with a few today. Karomboard (I think?) is also fun — similar to pool, but you flick little poker chip-type things. Much harder than it looks.

I’d post pictures, but the internet here is soooooo slow. Maybe it’d be faster from a place in Kathmandu. Kathmandu, by the way, is crazy — bustling city, tons of traffic and very crowded streets, vendors selling everything imaginable for way cheap, and then you turn a corner and there’s a sixty-foot tall pure white tower, a guard tower from at least five hundred years ago. I bought this cool touristy traditional Nepali shirt for 250 rupees, or about $3.25.

We’ve also had cool lecturers, including one who is currently involved in writing the new Nepali constitution. This guy is a former education minister and top development planner, and he’s been speaking at our program for thirty years….

Still not really sure what I want to do for my project, but I have a month or two to find out.

Family stays next week, and then in March, we go to Chitwan National Park, where we will ride elephants.