...and we're back

It's been awhile since the last post. An embarrassingly long while, actually. And after travelling back to Canada for an extended vacation this summer, I realised how many people were interested in reading our blog. So, I'm back online and will try to not give up after one or two more posts.

In order to cover all the ground I missed in the last 10 months, I will have to break up all our news and Kathmandu excitement into smaller, flashback type posts.

News item (and post) #1: In April, we moved out of our lovely flat and into a HOUSE. This is our house:

Ganesh shrine beside our gates

We loved the house at first sight and were swayed by the many windows, the out-of-the-way community feel, and the fact that not only was the living room a former yoga studio (complete with an Ohm symbol still on the wall), but the house gates are located right next to a Ganesh shrine.

Ganesh is the elephant-head Hindu deity who, according to wikipedia, "is widely revered as the remover of obstacles, the patron of arts and sciences and the deva of intellect and wisdom". Could we find a home with better Karma??

a glimpse of our garden

Reasons for move:

1. We wanted a garden.
2. Ironically, a house plus garden would actually be cheaper than our all-inclusive-still-kind-of-living-like-a-westerner-style flat
3. More news, our 3 in Kathmandu will soon become 4. More space is therefore needed. After all, where would the grandparents stay when they come halfway around the world to babysit??

We were so excited to move from a space that we had grown out of and began to feel more 'local' moving into a mainly Nepali area. Unfortunately, within the first week of our move, these are the things we discovered about living in a house rather than an all-inclusive-still-kind-of-living-like-a-westerner-style flat:

1. Cockroaches. Big, creepy, very un-North American cockroaches. I know, I'm a wimp. But really - they look like this:

I have now have had my toes tickled under the bedsheets at 2am by a cockroach, found one in my water glass in the morning, and boiled one in my coffee. BOILED COCKROACH COFFEE.

2. Unlike Toronto, Water doesn't just magically 'arrive' in your taps. (Clearly, one would think they know this). At our house, we have a 10,000 litre underground cistern that is supposed to be kept filled by water that comes flowing underground from the city. After moving, we learned that although we pay a monthly bill, the city water hadn't come in 4 months. So, in order to get water (not drinking water - tap water, showers, dishes, cleaning, laundry etc) we have to call a private tanker that winds its way down our tiny street then two Nepali boys drag a hose to our cistern and fill it up for about 15$. This lasts about 10 days to 2 weeks.
Wait! I'm not finished. Once there is water in the cistern, we then have to turn the pump on to pump the water to the rooftop water tank which takes about 30 minutes to fill. No water in the tank means no water in your house. And no electricity means no functioning water pump. With a load-shedding schedule that got up to 12+ hours a day without power in April means a person needs to be on the ball when it comes to water. Thank goodness we have a fantastic didi who mostly takes care of it.

Custom, locally made mango furniture in our former yoga-studio living area

3. Furniture. We moved into a house that had nothing but curtains. Western-ish style furniture to our taste doesn't come easily or cheaply and its been a slow process to furnish our house. We finally decided to enlist the local carpenter who made our table to also custom make us many pure mango wood items including an Ikea-copied kitchen island, a beautiful bookshelf and a very high, very unique, very hard bed.

and 4. The Ganesh Shrine. Not that we don't feel privileged living so close to a place of spiritual worship, but in Nepal, paying homage at a shrine tends to happen in the early morning hours. And, like almost all places of Hindu worship, our Ganesh shrine comes equipped with a bell so devout Hindus can announce their presence and invoke the deity. Our bedroom window is about 10 meters from said bell. Needless to say, we tend to rise early now....

Despite the challenges and a long settling in process, we are becoming accustomed to household life in Kathmandu and we have come to LOVE our house (bell and all), which we now call 'home'.

Oh, and it has a guest room! Visitors welcome in exchange for a few hours of babysitting...