Temples, festivals and paragliding

Happy Nepali New Year (2066) ! We brought in the new year in the Busy Bee bar in Pokhara serenaded by a Nepali rock cover band and surrounded by prayer flags... This was possibly one of the funniest events I have ever attended. It was completely surreal to be surrounded by Tibetan prayer flags, Nepali motorcycle clubs and the rock band. Apparently teh Nepalis love rock music, however the rock band was hilarious. Picture the scene, there is a young boy with long hair wearing traditional Nepali dress head banging to Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon), surrounding him are a couple of other lads (they honestly looked no more than 12) in various degrees of western dress playing the guitar and the drums. In the audience stand women in saris and boys in jeans and t-shirts with the motorcycles club logo all head banging. Once Pink Floyd had ceased there was an awkward pause while the lead singer changed page to find the words to his next song - I'm afraid I couldn't contain my laughter when he started up with Chris Rea, Lady in Red! This was followed by Aerosmith and then Celine Dion... After I had got over the shock and the hilarity of the situation we actually had a really good evening. We met up with the paragliding instructors from earlier in the day and chatted about flying.

The next day we caught the bus back to Kathmandu which took 8 hours winding through the hills - I decided it was prudent to take the tourist bus this time to avoid 8 hours sat on teh roof! We were met with a traditional Nepali new years day celebration in the school. We ate a feast of Momos (dumpling like food with spicey vegetable filling and spicey tomato sauce), Paprika (I admitted that i had actually never eaten paprika before, much to the amusement of the children), mangos, coca-cola (a delicacy) and Dal Baht. We were made to feel so at home it was just wonderful. Then we progressed to dancing and playing Nepali games.

There are still a couple of days until we start teaching so we have spent them visiting various temples and the older parts of Kathmandu. My Nepali has now improved to the point of asking directions ( and understanding the answers), asking prices and boarding buses ( although this is still a little haphazard, today I managed to go teh wrong way round the ring road - twice!)

The temples are amazing, only in Nepal are teh Hindu and Buddhist faiths so closely related, you can be happily enjoying a Hindu temple and round teh corner there are hundreds of Tibetan Buddhists worshiping on the other wall. I think its really amazing how tolerant and understanding of other religions the Nepalese people are. Despite my wonderment at teh colours and the architecture of the temples it can also be quite a gory time. I have seen more animal sacrifices than I thought possible in such a small amount of days and today i also witnessed 3 Hindu funeral pyres. Teh Hindu people believe ( and I apologise for anything i have got wrong here I do not mean to offend anyone) that the cycle of life, death and rebirth can only happen if they are burnt on a pyre lit by the oldest son of the family. The corpses are carried to the temple on teh day of death and surrounded by incense, offerings and flowers and then placed on a stone pyre according to which caste the deceased belonged to ( the higher the caste the closer to teh temple the stone slab is). The fire is then lit by the son won walks around teh body chanting Sanskrit incantations. Quite interesting but also quite macabre to watch. Particularly macabre was all teh western tourists crowding on the bridges to get a closer look and shoving their telescopic lens in the faces of the deceased family - sometimes I am ashamed to be a western tourist in lands such as this.

It was also interesting to note that further DOWN steam from the funeral pyres people were washing their clothes and collecting water for cooking. It made me realise just how poor some of the people are here. It is very easy to forget that Nepal is very defiantly a developing country as everyone is so positive and friendly and there are so few beggars, but sites such as people washing and cooking surrounded by rubbish in a river really bring it home again...