hi everyone,
i went to nepal, here's pix: http://scoopsnoodle.com/nepal
mostly i was in magic dirty kathmandu - a taxi costs usually 2 dollars, 50 cent and avril lavigne share the charts with hindi pop stars and sometimes there are monkeys. mostly i was traveling with rinpoche - we took a helicopter to a place with no roads electricity or much else called maritika where there are famous meditation caves and cute children who maybe over-estimated my enthusiasm for buying them pepsi.
i saw some friends, i helped them with a movie they're making asking buddhist teachers like: so... what about white people then? i ate so many buffalo momos. i drank some tunkpa - you get a nice heavy wooden mug of fermented barley, it has a metal straw (pinched to a too narrow for barley opening at the base) sticking out, then you poor hot water in there and drink it, repeat. i ate lots of chocolate, we all of us kinda went on a choco-binge, it got a little gross. i saw some maoist rebels, i saw lots of posters for maoist rebels. mostly people i spoke with seemed kinda apathetic when it came to the whole situation - no wonder considering how endlessly fucked up it is. one preternaturally cheerful cab driver told me: only 2 things wrong w/kathmandu, pollution and politicians - then he pointed at the side of a mountain smiled and said my village lol.
one day me and rinpoche and glen and a local monk and a porter and a village kid in a michael jackson t-shirt took a hike to a mediation cave made famous by a woman named mandarava a thousand years ago. rinpoche (who likes to run marathons wtf) kinda pushed the pace. it was nice, we hiked up, we hiked down, there were stunning views, there were rhododendrons. then we hiked down down down, very steep little switchbacks with an occasional stone wedged in there for a step. the cave was right at the narrow cusp of two mountains. the opening was small and slick. we took off our shirts and squeezed in there. there was a bat inside. rinpoche was overjoyed, being all ok now picture with me and glen, ok now one with me in milarepa posture, hey look a trident. labor was easy, it was a good birth, triplets. on the hike back up i died. rinpoche took my pulse and he and glen laughed at me. it was really sunny and hot.
corey almost got beat up by a monkey, it was funny, it was my fault. if you take a picture of village children and then you show it to them on the back of your digital camera they giggle. the entirety of nepal is covered in terraced gardens, an unfathomable amount of rigor over thousands of years, don't even try to fathom it - not possible, maybe tomorrow. driving in kathmandu is basically a serial game of chicken - sometimes rinpoche doesn't wear his seatbelt, this is bad. one day there were all these weird hindus with huge snakes wrapped around them being all touch the snake give me money, ewww no dudes stop being like that. there was a sweet, competent, lovely lady running the internet cafe we frequented, once she was watching a travel dvd about vermont and i was all hey i used to live there and she went oh it's really nice (then slightly confused) you really have to walk like that? there were cross-country skiers on the screen. i met some sherpas - it's true they really are some of the best people in the world. there is a living goddess in kathmandu, she's like 10, when she starts puberty they get a new one. you really get the sense that decorum is important while you're there, which is interesting - then you start to get somewhat embarrassed to be associated with some of the other western tourists. the tourist part of town is called tamel, really kind of gross to see crackers inadvertently create their own little degraded neighborhood - you can buy dreadlocks there if you want. nepali's appreciate hanging out on roofs, in this regard i feel a great affinity for them. little kid monks are the best. the royal palace is pink.
love,
j
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