Peruvian Eats and Treats

Among my college friends (or girlfriends of my college friends), there are four food bloggers. On one hand, I think it’s pretty cool how the internet allows me to keep an eye on my friends’ hobbies and the life events they’re cooking for, and I do love the long list of recipes to try when I have a kitchen again. On the other hand, the combination of the amount of time I spend reading food blogs and my history of extremely picky eating has positioned food as my top homesickness trigger this year. Luckily, Peru has been easier in this regard than Nepal. Here, I have silverware, foods I recognize (plus a few new delicious ones), and a garbage disposal of a boyfriend to eat the excess portions.

I suspect that our eating patterns are about to undergo a complete overhaul when we leave San Bartolo (more cheap street food, less fresh fish), so I figured it was time for my travel contribution to the food blogging world, starting with the day-to-day eats and moving on to Peruvian treats…

Breakfast always included cereal (which all pretty much tasted the same—basic rice puffs—regardless of the shape, size, and color), bread with butter and jam, and fresh juice, sometimes plus an egg or cheese. On special days (some Sundays), we instead had a sandwich of chicken tamale and sweet potato (yum!). For me, the highlight of breakfast was always the juice. Fresh juice has been a weakness of mine since a family trip to Costa Rica during which my brother and I drank our body weight in pineapple juice. Here, fresh tropical juice is an everyday item instead of a luxury and even on slow juice days, you can count on pear juice.

Lunch and Dinner are pretty similar meals, though eaten later than I’m used to, with lunch around 2 or 3 and dinner around 8:30. Typically the meal is three-course: soup or salad, a main course, and a fruit desert. Peru’s a pretty meat and potato heavy place, though since we’re right on the water the meat is mostly fish. I’m starting to get a bit sick of fried fish actually, but if I’m going to eat it twice a day every day, at least it is as fresh as can be: There’s a fisherman who comes straight from his boat to the door and sells Cecilia fish still bleeding in a grocery bag for what seems to me to be a ridiculously low price (about 8 dollars for a big bag of fish). Sometimes we mix things up with chicken, hamburger, a meatloaf-like meat, or ram. The potatoes come in many different varieties (27 different types are grown in Peru, according to my Lonely Planet) and my favorites are the sweet potatoes, some of which are purple! Rice is also a big staple, along with super-sized corn on the cob. The food is a bit bland for Cole’s taste, which means it’s perfect for me. And though the portion sizes are predictably too big, as Cole explained to Cecilia on the first day, meals are a team activity—I eat as much as I want and pick the best fruit for desert (sneakily, of course), Cole eats everything else. 

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Twice, we had the awesome experience of helping Cecilia cook some Peruvian specialties. The first was Pachamanca, a traditional dish cooked for religious ceremonies to pay homage to the earth. The dish is heavily marinated meat (in this case ram), cooked with potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, corn husks, lima beans and a boatload of herbs. It’s traditionally cooked in an earthen oven of hot rocks for several hours, since according to tradition, by using the earth to cook the food it pays respects to the land. (We cooked it in a Dutch oven on the stove top instead.) Along with the Pachamanca, we made four different kinds of salsa and sweet tamales from scratch for desert. The meal was absolutely delicious, though the Panchamanca and my stomach did not get along in the end.

Prepping the Panchamanca

Grinding the corn for the tamales

Wrapping the tamales

Salsas

Pachamanca ready to eat

Our second culinary adventure was preparing Cerviche. The preparation of this dish is really easy: mix fish, lime, chili, and onions, wait three minutes, eat. Cerviche was described to me as raw fish in lime juice, but that’s not technically correct, because the lime juice oxidizes the fish the same way cooking it would. The result is much tastier than I thought “raw fish” would be, though I couldn’t bring myself to drink the “tiger’s milk”—the leftover fish-flavored lime juice.

Cerviche

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Since the summer I had Door to Door Organics delivery, I have loved trying new fruits and vegetables and finding new favorites. The tropical fruits here make for an ideal testing ground. Every time we’re at the market, I pick a fruit I don’t recognize, bring it home and ask what it is and how to eat it. Here are some of my favorite finds (I don’t have individual pictures of them, so the Wikipedia articles are linked):

Fruit, fruit, fruit!

• Lúcuma is a popular ice cream flavor in Peru, like strawberry in the US. The fruit itself has a yellow or green skin and orang-ish insides that taste kind of like maple syrup. I don’t really care for lúcuma the fruit, but when it’s mixed with milk and sugar and frozen into popsicles, it is delicious.
• There are these little red fruits that we commonly have for desert—Cecilia and her friends call them cirula, though apparently they’re also called camu camu. When I first saw them, I thought they were cherry tomatoes, but actually they are a delicious acidic food (maybe a cross of a lime and a cherry?) that's good for cleansing your guts.
• Tuna in Spanish is not the fish but prickly pear, the fruit that grows on cacti! You cut the ends off, then slice down the middle, then eat the insides. It doesn’t have much flavor but definitely has a bunch of water and really thick cactus-like skin.
• Granadilla was my first random fruit purchase, and when we brought it home, one of Cecilia’s friends cut it half and showed us how to eat it with a spoon, like a kiwi. Now I see it all the time at the preschool, and those kids just hit it on the table until the shell breaks open, peal it just a bit, then hold it by the stem and slurp all the insides out. It’s a funny sight, a kid with his whole face inside a fruit. Granadilla’s kind of like a pomegranate, the shell is light orange and very tough and the guts are hard black seeds inside this weird clear slippery goop. I’m not sure how to describe the taste because the textures are so overwhelmingly strange.
• Cherimoya is another pretty strange fruit. It’s bright green and has little indents, like a big golf ball. The skin is soft, so you just kind of rip it open and then eat out the guts. The meat is really sweet with a sherbet-like texture and I made a huge mess trying to eat one walking down the boardwalk. I probably looked just as silly as the kids do when eating granadilla.

I hope this game will continue as we travel around the country! Though I’m sad to be losing my in-house Peruvian fruit experts, it’s really fun to try all these new fruits and it’s a nice daily reminder of how far I’ve come since forcing my mother to eat every meal in Paris at a hippo-themed American restaurant.

Where the Sidewalk Ends

March 29, 2012

If you had asked me a month ago what my worst nightmare was, I probably would have said being surrounded by small children. I have friends who love kids and who are amazing with three-year-olds and it completely boggles my mind.  I’ve never been particularly fond of children, nor have I ever known what to do with them, and I actively avoid interaction with anyone under the age of 14. It occurred to me in Nepal that this is not an acceptable long-term personality trait because even if I never have children, someone in my immediate family/friend group will. I am bound to have to interact with miniature irrational humans at some point. So when I was thinking about what to do this spring, I thought forcing myself to interact with children fit nicely within the scope of my gap year: it’s certainly out of my comfort zone, it’s an area I would never give up time/brain space in my everyday life to improve, and there are lots of volunteer opportunities with kids.

Today marks the end of my fourth week in Peru—and my eleventh day working at a preschool! I now have thirty plus hours of child herding under my belt! This may not sound like much to anyone else, but for me, it is huge. I am proud to say I have not injured anyone (a claim Cole cannot make), mistakenly called a girl a boy (as I did my in my last child-interacting role) or done long-term damage to anyone’s psyche (I think).  And what’s more, some of the kids even seem to like and listen to me!

Photographic proof: me with a small child

The preschool we’ve been helping at is in a part of San Bartolo very different from the area in which we are living. There are no sidewalks or paved roads or landscaping. The houses all have electricity but are just four basic walls and a flat roof of shoddy-looking materials. Instead of ocean views, the houses back up to the Pan-American highway with no barrier between the cars and the kids. Apparently the neighborhood developed illegally on public land and the residents pay little or nothing to reside there, but now it is so developed that it would be hard to get them all to leave. Regardless of the zoning legitimacy of the area, I like our time at the preschool because it feels much more like an area that needs help than the sufficiently church-funded Centro Pastoral. The preschool was built with public dollars but the money was used up before the grounds were completely finished. The result: a basic cement classroom and bathroom next to two other incomplete classrooms; a playground with huge piles of sharp rocks; and two unidentified “death holes” in front of the buildings.

Where the sidewalk ends

School grounds

The majority of the kids are three, with a few four- and five year-olds mixed in. If everyone shows up, there are eighteen kids in the class (on most days there are about thirteen). It turns out that playing with small children is pretty easy. Teaching them and disciplining them seems crazy hard, so luckily the class seems to have a pretty good teacher.

Start of school party

In the first hour of school, we just play. The kids love to build things, so legos, tanagrams, foam blocks, etc. are quite popular. The second hour is for work, which in preschool means coloring something or gluing yarn to paper. And the third hour is snack time and recess. I spend the majority of playtime playing a game I like to call “Where does it go?” which looks a little like this:

            Elena picks up a lego or tanagram.

            Elena: Donde va? (Where does it go?)

            Small child, after a long thinking pause: Aqui! (Here!)

            Elena picks up another toy and puts it somewhere silly, like the kid’s head.

            Elena: Va aqui? (Does it go here?)

            Small child bursts out laughing.

            Small child: No! Grabs object. Va aqui!! (No! It goes here!)

I love this game because it is within my Spanish capacities and because the kids never seem to tire of doing the same thing over and over again. During work time, Cole and I each man a table and make sure the kids stay on track. During snack time, we open packaging, try to keep kids from stealing other kids food, and wait for the inevitable beverage spill (who sends a three-year-old to school with a wide-mouth soda/juice bottle?). And during recess, we play games, chase kids, and spin the broken merry-go-round the best we can.

On a more serious note, even without any background in educational policy, the small amount of time I’ve been hanging out in the classroom has been enough to see some of the “duh” structural improvements needed in the educational system (here or in the US). It makes me really wish our policymakers were forced to spend one day a month in a school or health clinic or community center, not as a photo shoot but as a chance to observe the real-life fallout of policy decisions. Here are a few of the things I’ll be keeping a closer eye on moving forward:

1. Class Size. This one’s always seemed logical to me, but now I understand better which kids it matters most for. Bright, self-motivated kids are going to well no matter what. Trouble makers are going to get attention no matter how many other kids are there. But the kids in the middle—especially the quiet kids in the middle—are the ones truly at risk of falling through the cracks in a high student-teacher ratio classroom. The teacher in our preschool doesn’t even consistently call the quiet kids the right name. Granted we are only a few weeks into the year, but still, how sad for them.
2. Importance of Preschool. At the health foundation, I learned that Head Start and other preschool programs can have an unbelievable impact on a child’s future educational success. Now I can see why: preschool teaches kids how to learn, how to exist in a structured environment, and how to listen to and follow directions. It’s amazing the difference between the kids brand new to preschool and those who are on their second year. Less crying when the parents leave, better listening, and an understanding of the cause and effect between doing work and getting to eat a snack. I can only imagine how difficult kindergarten must be for kids who don’t go to preschool—especially when they are in classrooms with those who have.
3. Safe School Grounds. If I could endow a foundation, I would spend all my money just to go around the world completing half-completed school construction projects. So often I see foundation or government funded projects that begin construction and then run out of money and never finish. The ironic thing is that I’m pretty sure an old building is safer than a new building surrounded by death holes. And what’s more, San Bartolo regularly has large groups of volunteers (missionaries) from a church in Boston—this June, they will planting trees at the already immaculate Centro Pastoral. Seems quite superfluous after a morning at the preschool.

Small children playing near death hole #1

All in all, I've found the preschool experience fun and educational, though exhausting: First, working with such an impressionable age group makes me feel like we're actually helping. Second, I've learned a ton about the education and development of small children. Third, I have confirmed my career decision to leave the education of and responsibility for small children to others (not that this was ever in doubt). And fourth, most importantly, if a close friend were to have a baby tomorrow, I would no longer treat it like a pariah.

Small children!

Bienvenido a San Bartolo!

San Bartolo is a beach town about a 30-minute taxi ride south of Lima (or 1-hour bus ride) right off the Pan-American Highway. It is not at all a touristy spot, but it is a popular weekend and vacation destination for Lima locals. The coast line is squiggly so each bay created by the rock peninsulas has a distinct beach area, each one a little different. The beach closest to where we are staying is mostly occupied by fishermen and we are walking distance from a surfing beach, a sandy beach for swimming, and a very calm beach overrun with older adults. San Bartolo feels to me a lot like a ski town: there are wealthy pockets right on the beach and the corresponding increase in the cost of living makes life hard for the poorer parts of the community.

South San Bartolo, the beach closest to us, full of fisherman



Behind us is North San Bartolo, popular with surfers



Santa Maria, a good swimming beach just south of us

My friend William lived and worked in San Bartolo for seven months after high school and kindly connected us with the woman that he lived with and the community center where he worked. We are staying with a very nice lady named Cecilia (and her husband Juan and daughter Luciana) who runs a hostel one block from the beach.  We have a nice room overlooking the ocean with a balcony, Cecilia cooks three meals a day for us, and the family has been great fun to talk to and explore with. Though none of them speak much English, they are great about speaking slowly and I can understand much of what they say.



Our room



View from the balcony



Front of the house and our balcony!

The community center we will be helping at is actually a Catholic mission, but in addition to weekly religious services and on-site pastors (and pastors in training) they provide all the after-school services I’ve come to associate with CBOs in Colorado, so I’m doing my best to think of it as a Family Resource Center instead. The facilities are much nicer than I anticipated and it feels like the mission is really the center of the community. The intention was for us to help with the sports and the English classes with the kids, but Cole charmed the local women so thoroughly in the first few days that they lobbied around an English class for adults too.



The misson/communicy center



Cole and I have settled into a mellow routine that seems just about perfect for the six weeks we’ll be here (after Easter, we leave to travel around the rest of the country). For now, we will be working at the community center three days a week, Wednesday-Friday, in the afternoons teaching English and playing sports. That leaves the mornings for reading and writing on our amazing balcony, exploring the beaches, trip planning, and Cole’s Spanish lessons with Cecilia. And then the days we aren't needed here, we'll go explore the surrounding areas.

Tihar

October 28, 2011

Colorful Tihar decorations!

Another big Hindu festival, Tihar, is wrapping up across Nepal today. I stayed in Kathmandu this week to celebrate with my host family and though (again) it was difficult to get an explanation of the significance of all the rituals, I got to experience a ton over the five-day festival.

Day 1:

The first day is pretty mellow, food is set out for crows, which are thought to be the messengers of the god of death. Funnily, I was in Gorkha this day and a crow stole a potato from my dinner plate, so in a way I took part in this ritual.

Day 2:

Dogs are honored on day two--families give dogs tika, flower garlands and special foods because dogs are the gatekeepers for the god of death. My family does not have a dog, so I kind of missed this one, but I liked seeing the neighbor’s dog with red tika all over his head and a marigold necklace.

Day 3: (aka Diwali in India, same basic celebrations here)

Day three is when things really start to ramp up, with two main festivities. First, cows are given food (not that they are ever denied food) and flower garlands, since they are the soul’s guide to the underworld and the symbol of wealth (and the embodiment of nature, but that doesn’t play in here). Second, Deepawali (Festival of Lights) is when all the houses and shops in Nepal are lit up with candles, gas lights and string lights to guide the goddess of wealth so she can bless everyone with prosperity. For a city with irregular electricity, Kathmandu does holiday lights really well. The strategy seemed to be as many lights as possible. I asked what happens if there is load shedding during Deepawali, and the response was basically, “the electric company wouldn’t dare.” 

Lights around New Road

In addition, each home draws a kind of landing spot mandala/flower for the goddess of wealth and then a path to lead her into the house and up to the offering left for her.

At night (and actually continuing through the end of the festival), groups of kids come door-to-door singing and playing instruments and receive treats and small sums of money in return (a practice called “Diusire”). I kept asking people what they were singing (like, what the words meant) and kept being told “they are playing diusire,” so I have no idea what the purpose of this activity is. Manish said it was their equivalent of trick-or-treating on Halloween, which he knew about through Scoopy Doo episodes. Haha. I also got to experience a special treat: “modern version diusire,” which consisted of a full rock band coming to the door, complete with drum set and amps!

On top of the ruckus of many many traveling music groups, this is also the main night for fireworks, which Nepalis light off of their rooftops. Oh, and fireworks here do not have much in the way of fuses, you basically light the firework directly.

Day 4:

Day four is Mha Puja, a concept with doesn’t translate well to English but is literally “self-worship.” Most Nepalis stay home and have a quite day of reflection to prepare for the upcoming year and conduct private rituals. (The television was even off at my house, which is very rare.) The exception to this is the Newari caste, which celebrates the New Year this day. I went around town to check out the celebrations, and like the drum festival I saw in Patan, it was a complete madhouse. There were a ton of jeeps loaded up with Newari teenagers with drums and cymbals and microphones, each playing their own tune and driving their own route. A couple of times during the day there would be a celebration jam—all traffic came to a stop as two parties passed each other on the crowded Kathmandu roads.

Celebration jam!

Day 5:

The final day, Bhaai Tika, is the most important for most Nepalis, like Dashimi during Dasain. The main event is sisters blessing their brothers and giving them flower garlands, treats and tika in hopes of warding off death indefinitely. In modern Nepal, brothers now reciprocate and give their sisters a tika, though without the full ceremony. There were a lot of steps in this process, and I have no idea what they all meant, but here are some pictures!

Sisters preparing the offerings

The blessing setup

Radhakrishna and Sita receive tika from Radhakrishna's sister

Manish receives tika from a cousin (since his sister is in India)

Tika for me from Sita

One final really cool thing about Bhaai Tika: The prettiest spot in Kathmandu is arguably Rani Pokhari (Queen’s Pond), a gorgeous white temple surrounded by a green pond (a pretty color if you don’t think about why it is that color) that a Malla king built for his wife to consol her after their son was trampled to death by an elephant. Sadly, in modern times Rani Pokhari became a popular suicide, so the gates are locked 364 days of the year. But the temple historically had an important role in Bhaai Tika: it is the spot where only children can leave offerings and receive tikas to ward off death, so the gates to Rani Pokhari are open one day a year for the benefit of Nepal’s only children. I felt very lucky to get to walk around inside. 

Now I have a few days off from festival festivities, but on Monday I am heading down to Janakpur to celebrate Chhath (only celebrated in India and the Eastern Terai) with my host family’s best friend’s family!

Clothing

October 25, 2011

Women in Nepal still predominantly wear traditional attire—either a full sari or a kurta and salwar with a scarf. Younger women (less than 20) will sometimes wear Western clothing, and women about my age sometimes wear jeans and a kurti (a short kurta). Men’s attire varies depending on the area of Nepal and the age of the man. Sometimes they wear jeans and a t-shirt, sometimes a button down, kakhis and the topi (a little hat). And sometimes they wear the full kurta, salwar, vest and topi. I’m not exactly sure why so many more men where Western clothing than women, but one explanation I’ve received that seems plausible is that men are more likely to interact with Westerners in the workplace, so they have Westernized faster.

Last week, my host mom Sita, my neighbor Gita and three women who work with Sita took me to buy some Nepali clothing. It was a fun experience, mostly because Gita was the only one who spoke English so I had no idea what was going on most of the time, and because we went to this shopping area near New Road that I would never have been able to go on my own. All the shops look identical, and when I asked Gita how they know which to go in, she said that Sita does all the shopping for the joint family that I live with, so she knows the shop owners some places and can get good deals. After buying my kurta-salwar, we went to a bunch of other stores to buy presents for Tihar.

Yesterday was my first day in my kurta-salwar. Nepali women wear their saris or kurta-salwar for everything. Traveling around you see yak herders in saris and porters in kurta-salwar, so in typical Nepali fashion I went for a hike my first day in my kurta-salwar. In typical Elena fashion, this was unintentional—I got lost on my way to Gorkha Durbar. 

Kurta's first hike

I definitely still don’t blend in, but the attention I receive seems to be a bit different. Instead of blank stares, I got a lot of double takes. And people assume that I know my way around and speak Nepali (which I should by now, but it turns out that the one thing that has stayed the same since age 17 is that I am not good at foreign languages). Of course, it is impossible for me to do an adequate controlled comparison because I will not be going back to the places I had a hard time in Western clothing and I am indeed more competent in Nepal now than three weeks ago. The elastic waisted salwar pants are much more comfortable for 7-hour bus rides, though, and I like that my money pouch is more hidden under a long top, so I think this outfit will get a lot of use in my remaining time here.

Food

I had a weird (in a completely awesome way) experience this weekend. I was staying at a hotel in Nagarkot with a fixed Nepali Set for dinner and when they brought out my daal bhaat with a fork, I sat there for a good five minutes wondering how one might eat daal bhaat with a fork! I’ve gotten so accustomed to eating with my hands that I could not fathom how you would properly mix the rice, lentils and veggies using a fork. Eventually I started mashing things around with my fork, but it took me another couple minutes to figure out that I was holding my fork like a shovel rather than silverware. Haha, I think it safe to say I am adjusted to Nepalese dinning. Granted, I still have to sit on my left hand during every meal so I don’t accidentally touch my food with the wrong hand but my eating is no longer dinnertime entertainment, which I consider a great success. And with that, I suppose it’s time to do some writing about food culture differences.

The food was one area (maybe the only one) where I thought I knew what I was getting myself into. I knew before I left the US that Nepalis eat daal bhaat (lentils and rice) two meals a day, silverware is scarce, meat is the exception rather than the rule, and leaving leftovers is considered rude. But boy was I not ready for the quantity of food consumed here. A day of eating here goes like this: I wake up with the roosters at about 5:30 am, we have black tea with two pieces of toast and a hard boiled egg between 6:30 and 7 (I fondly refer to this as pre-breakfast), then the morning daal bhaat between 9 and 10. I get hungry around 2 or 3 pm, so I have a snack if I am out and about or at work we have tea and biscuits at 3. Then the second I walk in the door at home, whether 4 or 5 or 6, my host mom immediately comes to get me for afternoon tea and snacks. When I am not hungry, I try to come in really quietly to buy myself some extra food-free time, a strategy that never works but has earned me the nickname of the family cat. Afternoon tea includes milk tea, fruit and a heavy snack (I fondly refer to this as pre-dinner, and it is sometimes a egg and beaten rice, or Ramen, or cornflakes). And then evening daal bhaat is between 7 and 8 pm.

Basically I feel like I am eating all the time. And portion sizes are insane. Pre-breakfast and pre-dinner is more food than I eat for breakfast and dinner in the US and those are not even really considered the meals! When I first got here, I tried to eat everything on my plate but at some point I just couldn’t and Manish said it was ok to leave it. (Because you eat with your hands, once the food is on your plate, either you eat it or the neighbor’s dog eats it out of the trash.) The next meal decreased to a reasonable size but then every meal it started to increase until I hit the break point again. This happens every few weeks: My portions increase until I leave a bunch of food on my plate, my portion decreases the next meal and the cycle starts over again. Oui.

A couple weeks into my stay, I was talking to a cousin here about the portions and he said that everyone still eats like food is scarce because just 10-15 years ago, folks could not be certain when their next meal would come. In the Terai and Mountain regions, this makes some sense because it’s still primarily manual labor and they do need to eat as much as they can. But in Kathmandu, it’s ridiculous. And there is no way to work any of the food off, because it’s too polluted and dangerous to walk/run around the city and anywhere we would put a public park, Nepalis put a temple. Being overweight is a source of pride here, as if telling the world that you are well off enough to overeat. (My first week here my host father announced to the family that his goal was for Elena to be “fat like me,” said while rubbing his belly and smiling from ear to ear.) Another side effect of the food not changing with the times is that men are universally heavier than women: women eat whatever is left over when the men are finished, because historically the men would be doing the more intense field work. (House guests are fed with the men, I am always offered seconds before my host mom has even started.)

Regardless of my portion size battles, I try to eat what’s put in front of me. Sometimes I have no idea what I am eating (there are still things I eat regularly that I don’t know the name for) but like my Door to Door Organics adventure, I have discovered some great new foods. Guava, for example, who knew! And some foods that I can’t stand, like this strange pickled thing. There are three things other things about the Nepalese food culture I really like:

1. The biggest meal of the day is at the beginning of the day and if meat is on the menu, it is eaten in the morning. Nepalis think it is hilarious and ridiculous that Westerners eat a big meal so close to bedtime. The eating schedule in Nepal is designed to “fuel the day,” which makes so much more sense to me. Plus I've never liked most Western breakfast foods, so maybe now I have a solid excuse to eat real food in the mornings.
2. Instead of vegetarians having to ask for meat-free food, vegetarian is the default here. At my house, we eat meat maybe two meals a week. And at all the guest houses I’ve stayed at, the meal choices are “Veg” or “Non-Veg.” It threw me off at first, but how cool that meat is called non-veg!
3. Milk tea is my favorite part of the day. It’s really sweet, which I didn’t expect, and I historically haven’t been the biggest fan of milk, but the combo works. I’m considering an Ilam (the Nepali Darjeeling) trip in a few weeks so I can get some tea from the source to bring home. I was looking forward to a ski season of cold beers after a long day, but how about some post-skiing milk tea instead? Any takers?

Rice Harvest

Ok, so this may seem like a really mundane topic for a post, just bear with me for a moment. One of the interesting parts of this trip for me has been the closer interaction with where my food comes from. At first it was the meat. I think in the US I’ve gotten incredibly removed from what I am eating because I never have to think about it. There is this great line in the movie Leap Year (probably the only good line in the movie…) where Matthew Goode kills a chicken to cook for dinner with Amy Adams, and when she looks shocked, he asks “Well, where did you think chicken came from?” and she responds, “the freezer section.” It sounds dumb, I mean, I know chickens come from live animals, but I never have to think about it while eating my dinner! In Nepal, my dinner lives on the roof next door or eats grass next to us at a picnic or rides in the bus on the way to the temple with me. It really freaked me out at first, this having to actually interact with the animals before I ate them business, so much so that I almost turned into a full-fledged vegetarian. I’ve gotten used to it now, my vegetarian moment has passed and I’ve moved onto the next food whose origins I never thought about: RICE!

I have absolutely never thought about where rice comes from. All that comes to mind when I think of rice is dinners with Rachel and Melissa freshman year and the first time I tried to cook for Ryan and he ate two servings of 95% uncooked rice. Here, you kind of have to think about rice because it is everywhere: 2-3 meals a day, everyday are rice-based plus any space that is not occupied by a building has rice on it. Turns out, rice grows in fields just like wheat! I mean, it makes sense, it’s a grain too, right? I guess I just couldn’t picture how rice would come from a plant. The monsoons are officially over in the Kathamandu valley and that means its harvest time! Every time I go out and explore the valley, I get to see rice in vary stages of harvest and it is so unbelievably cool.

In the Terai, they have big rice paddies and use machines for the harvest. But in the Kathmandu valley, each family’s rice paddy is pretty small and they are planted in steps into the valley walls so everything has to be harvested by hand. 

Stairs of rice in various stages of harvest

From what I can tell, the process is this:

Tie rice plants into small chunks and cut off each chunk at the base

Carry the bundles across the field...

To the hand operated grain separator
(or in some cases, men would just hit the plants
against the ground to remove the grains)

Filter the rice

Package and transport!
(i.e., put on a guy's back for him to carry onto the public buses)

Dry the non-grain parts and make sleeping mats!

I love that this process takes over the town squares and roads. Walking through any town in the valley right now (these pictures are from Banepa), you have to dodge food production. It's such a big contrast to the US norm of gigantic farms and factories far from where anyone lives. I am told that the rice paddies next to my house should begin harvest soon (they are tied in chunks now) and I can't wait for the front row seat! I'm not sure I'll be able to leave the house that day!

Public Transportation, Part 2

October 12, 2011

To continue my earlier post about getting around Nepal, I have now had a chance to experience a couple different kinds of long distance buses. I took a “tourist” bus to Chitwan, public long distance buses from Chitwan to Lumbini to Bardia (and Kathmandu to Manakamana) and an express night bus back to Kathmandu from Bardia.

The “tourist” buses in Nepal I think are supposed to give tourists an easy way to get about the country. They are marginally nicer than the regular buses but leave from a more convenient location (near the tourist district, rather than on the Ring Road) and do not stop constantly along the roads to pack the bus full of people. But the tourist buses are pretty useless because they barely go anywhere. You can take a tourist bus on the Kathmandu-Chitwan-Pokhara tourist triangle and that’s it. So, since I could take a tourist bus to Chitwan I decided to go ahead and try it out. Some things about it were nice. I liked not having to worry about whether my bag was going to make it there; I liked finally meeting some other tourists and getting a little English fix; I liked not stopping for an hour is Kalanki to fill the bus to the brim; I liked that I could buy a candy bar at the bus station. Interestingly, the bus had more Nepalis than tourists. I’ve discovered that the caste system is still really influential here, which I did not expect. There is a big divide between the highly education upper class and the lower class, and a lot of discrimination and prejudice. The public buses are apparently only readily utilized by lower classes. My boss will never take a public bus, he flies anywhere he can or hires a private car, and the same is true of my host family (they will take a public bus as a last resort, though never a night bus and they won’t eat the provided food). I’m not sure whether tourist buses are worth the extra money ($20 compared to $8ish for public buses), but I’ll only have one other opportunity to take them anyways.

The first adventure in long distance public transportation is always buying a ticket. I’ve had to navigate both the Kathmandu and Butwal bus parks, both times successfully. It’s a lot like Ratna Park, where I basically just have to start telling everyone where I am going and eventually I will land on the right counter, with the added challenge of limited English in Butwal and everyone assuming I was going to Pokhara in Kathmandu. Initially, I was actually kind of impressed with long distance bus travel. When you buy a ticket, they assign you a seat number and then mark the seat off their chart. And there was a fixed departure time, how exciting! So I got on the bus and tried to find my seat, but it turns out the seats are not really labeled and the conductor put me in a random seat. Then, miraculousl,y the bus pulled out of the bus park half full of passengers at the stated departure time… and then it sat outside the bus park for 30 minutes until it was more full… and then an hour in Kalanki (just outside the Ring Road on the main highway out of the valley) until no more people could fit on. So although I think Nepal has some idea how a transportation system should work, complete with tickets and scheduling and fixed stops, in reality long distance transportation is just the same as transportation around the valley. And ten hours of completely packed buses that will drop off or pick up passengers anywhere is a bit rough.

Long Distance Bus Park

Bus ticket, hooray!

Public transportation seems to be a great way to get a feel for the different areas in Nepal, though this feeling is not always a positive one. The bus to Manakamana was no problem, basically just like the regular in the valley buses. Chitwan to Lubmini was fine too (and there was actually a group of three Polish girls on that leg with me). But Lubmini to Bardia was unpleasant. It took three buses and 10 hours and was definitely the sketchiest experience I’ve had here. I was never in danger, exactly, it was mostly just incredibly uncomfortable. The Western Terai was pretty wrecked by the Maoist insurgency, so there are no tourists in this region and a lot of police checkpoints. I thought I was used to being stared at after a month in Kathmandu but it’s not even comparable to the Western Terai. And there, folks did not stop at starting. Teenage boys are the worst. I had a number of boys get on the bus and sit next to me and then grab my hair or take a picture with me with their cell phones. I think the fact that they were trying to be sneaky (holding the phone at arms length as if to find a signal for a call, then flipping it around and quickly snapping a picture) made it even more uncomfortable. And then of course they would switch seats with their buddies so that everyone could get a picture. I had very little idea where I was headed (my travel agent just gave me the name of the bridge where the hotel would meet me, though he turned out to be incorrect) and English was sparse. The Butwal to Bardia bus was the first time my bus conductor did not speak any English at all. And around Kathamandu or the road to Pokhara I can kind of get some sense of where I am, because in towns the Coca-Cola shop signs will have the English name of the place on them, but in the Western Terai, all English writing disappeared. I made it safely to Bardia eventually, but I think the experience shook me up more than I initially gave it credit for. After talking with some folks here, it seems that the experience was pretty typical of what happens to women traveling alone in India. I talked to a girl in Kathmandu who says it was easier to travel around India if you wear a Kurti. I may try this approach, but she has dark hair and dark skin and she agreed that I am never going to be able to blend in. The blond hair/blue eyes thing is killer.

I thought I was going to have round two of Lubmini to Bardia on the way home from Bardia, but I was pleasantly surprised. My hotel in Bardia got me on an express night bus back to Kathmandu and it was such an easy trip. The seats were actually assigned! There was no one sitting on the floor! And the seats were comfortable enough I was actually able to sleep a bit! The bus made about four stops in the Bardia region, then other than dinner and bathroom breaks, did not stop again until we got to Kathmandu! Amazing. The night bus was less scary than I thought it would be, largely because although the speeds are still crazy, there were a lot fewer people on the road, and the sun came up before we got to the really twisty scary roads.

Dashimi

October 10, 2011

Tomorrow is the last day of the biggest Hindu festival in Nepal, Dasain. It’s a 15-day festival celebrating the victory of the goodess Durga over evil demons. In addition to some key activities on specific days, the Dasain period is when everyone goes home to their families and nothing in Kathmandu functions. It is this holiday that gave me the week off for my Chitwan/Lumbini/Bardia adventure and I knew one of the days I would be in Bardia (October 6) I would be stuck at the hotel with the other guests because the 10^th day is the main day when really nothing functions. A part of me still thought I’d be able to at least get food at the hotel, I mean come on, ski instructors work Christmas right? Aren’t there some nice Buddhists that could come feed me? But nope, everything was shut down. Luckily, my jungle safari guide from the previous day, Bardeep, took a liking to me and invited me to come home with him for the day’s festivities.

First, bit about the family: Bardeep’s mother lives about 16 km from Bardia in a traditional Tharu village made up of rice paddies and mud huts. When I first read about the mud huts in my Lonely Planet, I pictured the huts you see in photos of Africa, like maybe a one room small building with a grass roof. But in reality, saying that something is a mud hut is akin to saying the neighborhood has a lot of brick houses. Really all you know is the building material, but the actual structure can vary a lot. There were a lot of one-room tiny mud huts with straw roofs, but there were also some gigantic and really sophisticated multilevel structures. In some places I though the houses looked nicer than some Denver neighborhoods. Bardeep's family has a two-story mud hut housing 7 people (the mother, her older son, his wife, their 2-year old, plus Bardeep's sister and her 5 year-old son (her husband is working in India) and the family’s father (though I did not meet him because he was out in the paddies all day)). Bardeep left home at age 7 to start working at the resorts and he’s lived in resorts since then. He feels very lucky because when he was 17, he was able to learn how to be a guide and has been doing that for the last six years while also trying to finish school. Bardeep tried to explain to me that his mother’s house was not so nice, that it was very old (his father built it a long time ago, apparently) and he wanted to earn enough money and build her a new one before he got married. Bardeep’s older brother does not work at all; he was a professional futbol player until last year when he broke his leg. So the only income coming into the whole nine person family is Bardeep’s income, the sister’s husband’s remittances from India and a very small profit margin from the rice paddys, though they mostly just feed the family.

Celebration basics: The 10^th day of Dasain is Dashimi, a day when the elders bestow blessings on the younger members of the family for the year. Each family in Nepal sacrifices a goat a couple days earlier. Then, each older person blesses the younger people with three things: a tika, jamara (yellow grass), and a small amount of money. The tika is a mixture of rice, yogurt and red coloring supposed to represent the blood of the family as well as the sacrificed goat and it gets put on your forehead. The jamara is a symbol of the godessess’ conquest and is put behind your ear (or in a girl’s pony tail). I have no idea what the money is for. I kept trying to ask Bardeep about the significance of things happening that day, but he just kept telling me that Dasain was the time of the year when Nepalis waste all their money cooking extravagant meals. He also said that because so many people do not work here, they need festivals to keep themselves busy. In addition, younger members of the family receive a new set of clothes on Dashimi. For some poor families, this is the only time of year they receive new clothes. For richer families (like my host family in Kathmandu), Dasain is the time to buy all new things for the year. This year, Bardeep’s mom gave him his wedding suit as his clothing, though he has no immediate plans to get married. Ha, talk about a not at all subtle hint! After we had all received our tikas, we ate a big lunch then headed off to “relatives house.”

Tika from Bardeep's Mom

The Celebration Continues: When Bardeep said we were walking 30 minutes to his relatives house, I thought he meant like one relative. Instead, we spend the entire rest of the day going to every single one of his relatives’ houses. The younger members of the family have to receive blessings from every elder. Luckily, Bardeep’s family has a monopoly on a particular corner of the village. So we would walk though some paddies, then boom we’d be at another family member’s house. I have absolutely no idea how everyone was related but there was a lot of tika and a lot of food. By the end of the day I had red rice falling into my eyes and could not eat another bite. I think I had seven lunches. English was less common in the village than Kathmandu (understandably) so most of the day I had no idea what was going on, but it was a really cool experience. Everyone was so welcoming and did not seem at all surprised by the presence of this random American girl. Lots of people wanted to take a picture with me (one woman joked that it would be a “black and white picture”). His little cousins also gained a special place in my heart, because instead of the usual chorus of “Hello, how are you?” or “Hello, what is you name?” I hear yelled over and over again at me throughout most of Nepal, his cousins picked “You are very beautiful.” Luckily, I know how to say “And you also” in Nepali. J

Tika from an uncle

And Continues: Since families are now more dispersed across Nepal, it has evolved that you get the last five days of Dasain to receive a tika from every elder in your family instead of having to make it everywhere on Dashimi. A smart move I think, because families here are gigantic. When I returned back to Kathmandu on the 8^th, it was time for tikas from my host family, and every night since then extended family members have been here for dinner and tikas. Radhakrisna said that there are more than 100 members in his family. Geez. Dasain is almost now over now, tomorrow’s big highlight is that kids gamble with the money they got on Dashimi, but have no fear, the next festival (Diwali, but it’s called Tihar here) is just 15 days away…

Public Transportation, Part One

September 26, 2011

Before my trip, I thought I might just be taking cabs everywhere. After all, they are so cheap—for less than the cost of the T in Boston I can take a cab pretty much anywhere in the city. But by Nepal standards, cabs are outrageously expensive and about 10 times more expensive than public transportation, so I quickly decided that I should probably figure out the buses. The last time I tried to ride public transportation in a city with a different alphabet was the subway in Russia with my dad in high school and it was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. I think initially I was still a little intimidated from that.

There are three varieties of public transportation in my Nepalese life: just around the city, around the valley but outside the city and long distance travel. First, just getting around the city: For this, your options are bus, microbus or tempo. Buses and microbuses in Nepal are fun to watch but terrifying to try to ride. There aren’t exactly bus stops; you just get on and off wherever you want. To facilitate this, each bus has a “bus conductor” (I don’t know if they actually have a name) that hangs out of the door of the bus yelling the buses destination and collecting money when people get off. If someone wants on or off, he just bangs on the side and the driver stops. Because I cannot understand a word they are saying, nor can I read the language on the front of the bus, my approach to buses is to stand on the side of the road yelling my destination until a bus conductor waves me on.

Microbus Conductor

It’s been very successful so far, except that I cannot for the life of me pronounce where I live (Marharajganj) so I cannot take microbuses/buses home. Instead, I take the tempos, which have the route labeled on them (not in Roman numbers, but I know the numbers in Nepali now). If I get on the number 5 tempo it will take me to my turnoff and then I get to bang on the ceiling when I want to get off. I love that part. Unfortunately I nearly always hit my head on the way out (I’m tall here!), to the great amusement of the children passengers. To pay for my transportation, I just take all the small bills out of purse and hold them out and the bus conductor (or tempo driver) takes the right ones. Buses so far have never been more than Rs 15, about 21 cents.

Tempo

My favorite part of public transportation within the city is the game, how many people can we fit in this tiny vehicle. My sample size is just vehicles I have been on, which is poor methodology because I do not get on overly crowded buses, limiting the contenders to vehicles that get packed after I get on. But even with that limitation, the current leaders are: 27 people in a microbus (a American 14-passenger van) and 17 people in a tempo (about the size of an old school F-150 truck bed)!

The second variety of public transportation is traveling around the Kathmandu Valley. For this, I get on a microbus near my house and go to the city bus park at Ratna Park. From there, you can get on a bus to anywhere in the valley. The first time I went to Ratna Park, I got excited because it bore some resemblance to a US bus stop, with signs indicating the route number and destination (though not in English, still a promising sign). Well, after 20 minutes of no one in that area having any idea which bus went where I wanted to go, it turns out I wasn’t even in the bus park—all those nicely labeled stops were for buses to drop people off in an orderly manner. The bus park itself is like this gigantic mud pit with no signs whatsoever. After you get over the initial shock and accept the fact that you are not going to find the bus on your own, it’s very easy! You just start telling every single person you see the name of the place you are going, everyone will point you in a direction and you walk in the direction with the most “votes.” It reminds me a bit of using an avalanche beacon, head in the direction with the loudest beeping. And as soon as you get in the general vicinity of the right bus, the bus conductor will make sure you get on his bus, because after all, there are no bus schedules, and the bus wants to fill up before it gets bumped by the next bus arriving. I haven’t yet gotten on the wrong bus. I don’t actually think that has a high chance of happening if I pronounce my destination correctly. Although not overly friendly, everyone here has this attitude of wanting to make Nepal a good place for tourism. The phrase I have heard the most (sometimes from random people who help me onto buses) is “you are a guest of Nepal” and everyone kind of keeps an eye on me. It’s nice.

Ratna Bus Park

The third kind of public transportation is long distance buses which leave from another bus park. I am going to save my bus ticket purchase adventure for another day when I can also write about the long distance bus ride adventure.

Public transportation is fun! If Nepal weren’t so awesome, I would think just riding the buses would be entertainment enough. I love watching the city and the crazy stuff that happens on the bus. I’ve been on buses with goats, ducks, bags and bags of rice, and loads of bricks. It’s also a fun game to see how fast I can find the bus I’m looking for and the satisfaction I get from successfully getting anywhere is great. I have an MIT degree under my belt, but my greatest life accomplishment to date might be successfully buying a bus ticket to Janakpur in less than thirty minutes, heeheehee.

That said, I constantly think about how impossible this trip would have been for me 2 years ago. It’s definitely required a certain level of inner calm, willingness to have no clue what I’m doing and a faith that it will work out just fine. The transportation system exemplifies this requirement well. If I had stumbled upon Ratna Park during the fall of 2009, I probably would have immediately concluded it was impossible to find my bus, assumed that if I tried, I would get on the wrong bus, end up in a random town, get mugged, get stuck in rural Nepal and fail at life. Then I probably would have turned around and gone home. Circumstances like these make me so grateful for all the “A-FOGs” (Another F***ing Opportunity for Growth), as my mom calls them, I’ve had recently. I’ve changed so much and it’s really exciting how this trip is affirming and strengthening characteristics I've worked hard to acquire. I’m so happy life has opened up these adventures for me and can't wait to see what the next few months bring.