Last updated on June 16, 2009 by Shannon
The Nepali New Year dawned bright and early during my third week of living in the small village of Pharping, Nepal. Amrit, the charming man running our guesthouse, invited the volunteers staying at the guesthouse to celebrate the New Year with his family.
The plan was to hike a nearby hill for views over the Kathmandu Valley, and once there we should share in revelry and food. My cousin and I were both teaching at local monasteries, (and I’ve been documenting the details in a Nepal Travel Guide if you’re planning a trip); both of our monasteries were closed for the New Year festivities.
Without Amrit’s invitation, we would have been just four lost souls living in a fishbowl. Heh. Or rather, four painfully obvious foreigners wandering on the periphery of the familial New Year festivities taking place all over Nepal.
Instead, Amrit, Carna (the guesthouse’s cook), and a team of Amrit’s Nepali family members descended on the guesthouse kitchen. They took the day’s task seriously and the family spent hours cooking a small feast.
Amrit handed us a slapped-together breakfast and shooed us from the guesthouse just as the spicy scents of our picnic lunch wafted through the rooftop patio. Amrit wanted us gone until the hike, so he handed over a hand-drawn map of the path up the hillside to the huge picnic area overlooking the Valley.
We set off on the walk and were soon met by Amrit’s younger cousin who indicated that he would lead us through the dry rice paddies and up the steep hillside. About a quarter of the way up the hill, I freaked out and turned around.
Breakfast was just a piece of small fruit and with my serious hypoglycemia, I wasn’t doing well. I hadn’t planned my food intake for a strenuous 45 minute vertical hike. It’s not the first time I’ve had to abort situations because of my blood sugar, but I was disappointed that I would miss the gathering.
Luck prevailed, however. I was halfway to the guesthouse when Amrit pulled up on the motorcycle to zoom me up the dirt pathway that snakes upward to the topmost monastery on the hill.
Once everyone was settled, Carna dished up the freshly cooked food. And being a holiday, the food was different from the usual. For the first time ever, Amrit ate a meal that didn’t include dal bhat!
Our meal consisted of puffed and pounded rice, lightly curried veggies, potatoes, a pav bhaji type mix of crunchy toppings, and an ice-cold beer in a tiny plastic cup. Dal bhat is the main food staple here in Nepal, and people throughout the country eat this lentil and rice dish usually twice a day. It’s hearty and affordable, although the tastiness depends on the cook.
The food was tasty, but our luck didn’t hold. The overcast sky unleashed its fury in a sudden downpour that sent us all huddling beneath thin covering provided by an anemic outcropping of tall trees.
After minutes of standing and wondering about a next move, Amrit led our group further up the hill. The rain changed to a light drizzle so we decided to seek shelter at the large hillside monastery, hoping to escape the full downpour moving toward us. We made it to the entrance gate of the monastery before another 10-minute downpour trapped 30 of the picnickers under a small awning.
One Nepali guy saved the day by pulling out his guitar. He serenaded our group with an eclectic mix of highly weather appropriate English songs like Have you Seen the Rain, as well as and patriotic Nepali songs, like Nepali Ho by 1974 A.D.
My fellow volunteers and I latched on to the Nepali Ho song—which translates as “I am Nepali”—with a devotion that was only overshadowed by the passionate belting put forth from every single Nepali person in the vicinity. They deeply, deeply love this patriotic song. The locals joined the guitar strummer by shouted the chorus and finishing with an emphatic, “Nepali ho!.“
In the fun way of travel, this song would become a bonding experience and a trump card when we bargained the locals selling wares in Thamel and Pokhara. If they wouldn’t lower the price, or if my Nepali language skills started to falter, my cousin and I would bust into the chorus of this fiercely patriotic song.
We would be sure to put a lot of passion and conviction to the end, where we would pronounce to the vendor—and the entire street—our inner “Nepali-ness.” And it worked! They ate it up and always joined in for the chorus. Their demeanor would often change, they’d invite us to share a chai tea, and they’d give us an “expat” discount.
The rain eventually lifted and our ragtag group left the shelter of the monastery to rejoin the main group. For all the weeks we lived in Nepal, my cousin and I were both committed to improving our Nepali. It’s a fairly easy language to learn when using the Roman Alphabet and I was obsessed with becoming proficient.
One phrase my monks had helped me assemble was a rough guess, but I wanted to try it out on Amrit, who had a great sense of humor. Even so, we took him by surprise by busting out with the phrase tapaai:laai pagal ho.
Pagal is a Nepali word with many different meanings, apparently. Urmila, our Nepali language teacher in Kathmandu, indicated that we could use this phrase to tell a friend that they were being silly. The monks confirmed this was a general meaning.
Amrit was floored when we told him what we thought translated as “you are silly.” He processed the phrase and then keeled over in uncontrollable laughter.
Although pagal can mean silly in some circumstances, it actually means crazy/mad/insane. When I told Amrit, tapaai:laai pagal ho, he heard “You are going insane.”
Or in Amrit lingo, he translated it as, “You are going to the mad.” This little video clip is Amrit’s reaction to our little display of Nepali language ignorance:
All in all, it was fun. We didn’t let the rain stop us from having a pretty rocking time, and it was an intriguing way to celebrate the Nepali New Year. Unlike the way we ring in the New Year in the U.S., this was a family day.
There were no fireworks nor partying, and beyond our picnic lunch, the day was chill and relaxed. It centered on spending quality time with friends and family. At least, that was the way of things in our neck of the woods, a small village an hour outside of Kathmandu.
There was talk that the Kumari (more on her here) made one of her 13 yearly appearances in the courtyards around Durbar Square. We were away from all that madness however, and enjoying the isolation of our remote valley town.
In addition to celebrating the day with our new Nepali friends, here are a few things spending time with them taught us:
Learning of Nepali Fashion
Although I am not the most fashionable person in the world, Carna opened my eyes to the trends and times around me in Pharping. Carna seemed hip with the local trends—he wore trendy Western-style clothes and always sported the latest in Nepali fashion. One day, as he served dinner, I noticed a series of band-aids stuck to the bottom on his shirt. The placement appeared deliberate and even artful.
When asked, Carna explained that band-aids are hip right now, but only when you wear them on your clothing in a creative pattern.
Over the coming weeks I would notice that crosses and exes were most popular, though if the wearer designed a more elaborate pattern they got mad props. Carna himself evolved with the trend. The band-aids steadily migrated across Carna’s clothes, moving from the hem of his long button-down shirt to the calf of his jeans, sometimes appearing suddenly on a pocket or hemline.
The trends are unique to Nepal, as I didn’t see any of these trends when backpacking through India for two months. I’ve noticed a few other interesting trends, including long gelled hair and long pinky fingernails. There’s a particular use for long nails in the U.S., and when I asked Amrit if the nail also indicated aspects of drug culture, he assured me that the Nepali youth are growing out one single two-inch long nail for fashion’s sake. It’s so normal and on-trend that several of the older monks at my monastery also sported the long-nail, although I didn’t spot any of them wearing band-aids on their clothes.
Coping with a Lack of Power
If the new friends and locals in Pharping were the highlight of living in the small village, then the country’s power situation was one of the tougher aspects. As one of the poorest countries in Asia, Nepal has some issues. And while many of those deal with human rights, tourism development, and a range of other things, the power situation undoubtedly exacerbates all of these issues. It’s a well known issue and one that has great possibilities considering the potential for hydroelectric power. But even in the many years since I visited, the power situation remains plagued with issues. During my initial three weeks in Nepal, the government allowed each region of the country eight non-consecutive hours of power a day, given in four hour blocks. But the kicker was that no one ever knew when the power company would activate the electricity.
Each day, electricity would run from either: 12 to four, four to eight, or eight to 12. Once the first block of power came on for the day, locals were relatively certain that it would come back on at the same time that evening. As an added bonus, since rainy season had just begun across Nepal, the power company gifted everyone with a few extra hours of power each week.
Suffice to say, I used my handy headlamp every day and was so happy that I took others’ advice and packed a powerful headlamp as a “just in case.” Turns out, it’s needed on round the world trips! It was invaluable when I camped in a treehouse in Laos. And during my months in Nepal, I carried this with me at all times from dusk until dawn. Well, I carried it at all times after that one time that I was caught sitting on a toilet in the pitch black darkness and my headlamp was on my nightstand.
Each evening all of the daily tasks most often took place by candlelight. I learned how to take a bucket shower by the tiny illumination of a small headlamp. My balancing skills allowed me to read a book by the glowing light of a dim candle without lighting the pages on fire!
Every day when I would walk to my monastery, one of the local Nepali men would share with me his favorite joke: What is the most romantic country on earth?
Nepal, because they treat their wives to candlelit dinners every night!
Ok, I know it’s corny! But this hunched-over-ancient-little old man would beckon me over to his morning perch on a rock wall and delight me with this joke. It’s a testament to his sincerity that I was able to listen to it with a grin on my face every day, and offer him a genuine chuckle each time I heard it.
Hunting Down Internet
During my last few weeks in Nepal, the Indian government agreed to sell more power to the country. The government bumped up the national hours for electricity to 12 hours each day, instead of eight! That meant a lot to me as I attempted to work from the road and keep my client happy. But it meant even more to the locals.
Each day, when the fluorescent light in my room flickered to life, greeting me with glorious illumination, I would snatch my laptop and scurry to the internet cafe three shops down from our guesthouse. I knew I’d have a couple hours to post my work, update my website, and furiously whirl my fingers over the keyboard in an effort to get as much done as humanly possible while the electricity lasted. Internet in the village was slow but inexpensive.
At just 25 rupees an hour, roughly 40 cents, I would sit there for hours and sometimes even let the clock run while I talked to the very sweet shop owner. One wee little girl frequently played on the floor of the café while I was online. She sensed that am a sucker for children and each day she chanted didi at me, meaning big sister, and try to rope me into playing endless games of peek-a-boo with her.
Celebrating the Holidays
Holidays have come and gone over the past seven months. Some passed unnoticed without Hallmark commercials to jog my memory. Others, however, made for interesting opportunities to create interesting new traditions and also adapt traditions to the current circumstances. The other volunteers and I decided to celebrate Easter in our tiny Buddhist town. We bought eggs and asked Carna to them for us. He was confused when we insisted that we weren’t going to eat them, so he brought them to us with salt and silverware. Then we colored eggs with markers and nailpolish —we created a tiny celebration to mark the Easter holiday. Then, we treated ourselves to curd and honey for dessert and we ate our eggs for breakfast the next day.
For one of our birthdays we bought brown bread and taught Amrit and Carna the joys of French toast.
During the Nepali holidays, we joined Amrit and Carna on the top of a nearby hill and celebrated with food and pretty views.
Nepal Travel Guide
A guide to everything I learned while backpacking Nepal. From Kathmandu to Pokhara—and a lot in between—here’s where to go, my favorite places, and everything you should know before you go.