By tierneybb
Last week we began our independent research period. Handed conspicuous envelopes fed fat with rupees we were wished the best of luck and told to keep in touch. A fellow GW student happens to be staying in the area as well, so we packed up our bags and hailed a cab across the river to the incorporated city of Patan. While housing (especially on a student stipend) in Patan is limited, we have contracted a room in a guesthouse with a communal kitchen (yes, this is my worst nightmare, but at least we have our own bathroom, GW dorms have set my standards a bit too high). But our room is two blocks from Durbar Square, and next to a large market street that turns into a major thoroughfare.
While the logistics of living in a city that has been around since 200 A.D. without any colonial influences or major destruction (other than the centennial earthquakes) can be challenging (aka I get lost fairly often in the tangle of streets, which are un-named), the arts and culture here have been spectacular. Nearly every night this week we've gone out, and stumbled into live music or excellent food and company. My favorite by far was Jazzmandu's concert at the Patan Museum, which we stumbled across online about five minutes before the event started and figured we could swing by before dinner.
The tickets ended up being a little pricey ($15 is an exclusive high society price here) but we've been saying YONO for a while now (you only Nepal once, this despite our scoping out of expat life here, which is increasingly tempting). The concert was phenomenal, it featured artists from around the world in collaborative pieces an Jazz that flowed through the night making the hours seems like mere minutes completely insufficient time to appreciate the quality of music. The beats of Dizzy Gillespie were swung high on a traditional violin-like instrument, and the pops and punched of fingertips on a type of bongo electrified the crowd, holding us captive while he played so quietly I hardly dared to breathe and risk missing the beats. A middle aged Indian man, his traditional crisp white linen suit accommodating a comical pot belly provided vocals, and while he played a bit of a diva, the vocals were surprisingly perfect for the classic jazz numbers. The runs and scat in Hindi were completely different from the gravelly baritones I was used to, but his voice was just as worn as the best crooners, and smooth as well, but distinctly exotic as it stayed within the Indian chromatic scale. Just as the vocal solo for a number towards the end of the concert was building its crescendo, the other musicians nodding and bobbing appreciatively and the cliche dancing toddlers held up by their parents in the crowd, the power cut. The crowd sighed and deflated with disappointment, the vocalist disappeared in a huff, but the brass section was unfazed. In only a minute of rearrangement they had formed a huddled group slightly offstage, starting small and quickly back into full swing each instrument throwing out improvisations, they floated back towards the drums and by the time the generators recovered the saxophones were braying the final notes of an excellent number. My roommate and I bought the CD from last year and have been listening to it all week. At the end of this month is Artmandu and I hope I can make time to volunteer or at least attend. While Nepal may be only just building up it's international events they are super easy to get involved in and always open and fun.
But it's the requirements of daily living that have made me reflect on America the most. The large street a few blocks from where we're staying gives me a form of anxiety I can only assume is the culture shock that I skipped at the beginning of the semester. What could possibly need a building more than 5 stories tall? And wider than two apartments? Though the street has no formal arrangement of lanes I suspect it would be four lanes wide in the US, giant for here. It's my first inkling of what returning to America will be like, though perhaps not as the chaos of construction and constant danger of being run over is not so much a thing in the calm organization of DC. The other overwhelming experience was trying to stock the kitchen with food at Nepal's chain of giant grocery stores, again, giant is relative: it's smaller than any American store but bigger than the garage front counters where I've been buying snacks. Paralyzed by abundance and choice, it probably took over an hour to do a basic shopping trip. That number does not include the time spent riding the escalator in amazement to the department stores above, or when I mistook a mirrored surface for another room. It's actually like we're wolf-children being shown civilization for the first time. But I prefer to buy produce from the street markets, where people pile their vegetables high in a basket and walk to a public square, around one of the intricately carved water sources and set out what they have. With only a few words of Nepali and buying small amounts of food I get laughed at a lot, which is ok, and not as bad as if they knew how epic my failures in the kitchen later are. But in my defense I have mastered a delicious milk tea, and roti may be just flour and water but it is surprisingly nuanced for that (as in mine is a brick). But we're slowly improving, and it's fun to laugh at our own ineptitude, I just hope the learning curve speeds up.