A Little Holiday…Markers and Smelly Eggs
Happy Easter! As a quick status update to everyone, although I’m still posting about my adventures in India, my RTW trip has me in….Nepal! I’m actually in my volunteer program and teaching English to monks at a monastery about an hour outside of Kathmandu. There are two other volunteers at the guesthouse here and we all decided to have our own private little holiday celebrations since Easter is very much a non-event on this side of the world.
Laurel, a volunteer working at the local hospital, came home with six eggs for us to color – only three survived the boiling process unscathed but a fourth was good enough to suffice. The two eggs that didn’t make it were pitched as hard as possible over the balcony into the sun-scorched rice-paddy nearby. It was actually pretty funny – the cook didn’t
My Egg - "Tears of the Baby Jesus"
understand why we wanted the eggs boiled – it just didn’t compute for him that we were actually boiling them so that we could then draw on them. When they were ready he brought us the bowl of eggs with all of the accoutrement for eating them!
That gave us a hearty laugh and we left the salt/pepper and forks, napkins, and plates upstairs and carted the eggs back to Laurel’s room to cool while we went out for our Easter desert (we get dinner included so we ate the Nepali food they fed us). At the small local restaurant just four shops up the road we settled in for a spicy hot chai and a bowl of curd and honey as our desert.
Without all of the proper dying materials we instead opted for using markers and sharpies to color the eggs – Helen threw in our bottle of pink nail polish and we all pitched in a couple of bars of chocolate (obviously not for eating but rather for the enjoyment while we dyed the eggs).
We each named our eggs – Laurel’s is the “Eyes of Buddha,” “Starry Night” was designed by Kara, Helen drew the “Lilly Fields,” while the others insisted that I stick with the original name for my, “Tears of the baby Jesus.” Every time something adverse happens on the trip I’ve been known to announce to everyone that the baby Jesus is crying…so, well, hence, the egg with his tears…it’s a joke mostly but is quite ongoing and I actually have a list in one of my journals of all the time he’s cried.
Anyhow, Nepal is on a power shortage right now because of a lack of rain so we had to contain our celebrations to fit into the eight random hours each day we have electricity. I think we did pretty well all things considered. The next morning at breakfast we brought along our eggs to show the cook and Amrit, the guy who runs the guest house. Amrit’s reaction was pretty priceless – “Oooooo – I see. Umm… very nice. Yes, very nice.” We explained that this is a tradition in our country that many American children take part in – he tried to hide his amusement and befuddlement but, well, when you explain about Easter eggs and chocolate to a Buddhist, I guess it does sound a bit silly!
