Yak yak yak

Random thoughts on Nepal

The first afternoon I was there, I wandered jetlagged and exhausted through the city, in that sort of semi-dreamlike way you do when you’ve had no sleep. It may have been good, in some ways, that I did, since the all out assault on your senses of downtown Kathmandu may have been easier to cope with what with those senses being so dulled. It’s something of a manic place, which seemingly gets increasingly frenzied the closer you get to the middle of it. By the time I reached Durbur Square, the heart of the city, I was being constantly assaulted by monks wishing to bless me (for money), small boys begging, men attempting to sell me hash, shopkeepers shouting out to come and look at their wares, blokes wishing to guide me, and still others just wanting to have a conversation. All while attempting to avoid the crazy motorbike /rickshaw /taxi /bicycle traffic weaving in and out of each other on the narrow and crowded streets, and beeping incessantly. Buddhist chanting humming in the background, pigeons ducking and diving, and the heavy smell of incense all add to the sensory overload. All this and when I got to the square there was a Maoist rally going on, with red-bandanna-ed cadres of people chanting and raising their fists in support of the angry invective of the speaker. Just off that square I stepped into a quiet courtyard, with a group of Chinese tourists (wonder what they made of the Maoists) looking up at a wooden window, at which emerged a young girl – the Kumari, Nepal’s very own living goddess.

The political situation is bizarre, and not what one would describe as stable – a government that includes Maoists, while the country is still a monarchy. Mind you I didn’t meet a single person who actually liked the king, and in a couple of cases the most mild-mannered, sweetest people opined quietly but vehemently that he was “a bastard”. This in a country where English is used in such a way as to be as roundabout as possible (see below).

At this propitious juncture, having mused to myself self-consciously and devotedly for some hefty and generous epoch, as the clock hand ticked its way unceasingly and perpetually around the dial, I have resolved, decisively, to humbly offer up to you, kind reader, this finely crafted sentence by way of a light hearted spoof and benign lampooning of “Nenglish” the locally enhanced rendering of my own dear mother tongue.

One of the other features of Nenglish, Nepali English, is the use of English words in odd ways. The front page of the Nepali Times for example, seemed to have a daily report on some deadly road crash, which was unfailingly referred to as a “mishap”. The day before I left, for example, a mishap had killed 15 people in the south of the country. The other interesting one while we were there was the daily practice of “load shedding”. The hotel was filled with warnings about “load shedding” and how various facilities would not always be available because of it. Load shedding, it turned out, was the phrase used for the daily scheduled power outages that rolled throughout the capital. Never have I heard such an excellent euphemism – the power is not being cut because the economy is fucked, you understand, but because we are somehow unburdening the system of its unnecessary charge, or something like that. Inspired.

We were working with members of the Nepali English Teacher’s Association, who were a fantastic bunch of blokes (in nearly 20 years of working the English teaching “industry”, I have never before met a group of practitioners who were all male). On the first day, I asked some of them how far from Kathmandu they lived. One responded “Not far. It’s just a three hour bus ride and then a 5 hour walk” (at which point one of his fellow participants snorted and said “5 hours for him. It would take me about 18”). Another said “Oh very close. About 100km by road and then a 24 hour walk”. What I’m getting at here is that much of the country is pretty remote. It’s also fairly traditional in many ways (In the context of Nepal, Maoism actually seems a pretty futuristic political ideology). You may remember 6 years ago when the entire royal family were massacred in their home, ostensibly by the drunken crown prince who then turned the gun on himself. I’ve been reading a little about that incident and the whole background to it hangs on various family feuds stretching back about 300 years. It’s like the play Shakespeare wrote but shelved because he thought it would be a bit far-fetched. [I use the word ostensibly above, because it’s really not that clear that the official story is that accurate, and any number of more-or-less believable conspiracy theories abound – a number of which point the finger at the new king – the brother of the murdered one].

The last, and only free, day of my trip was on Wednesday. Obviously I was looking forward to doing all the touristy things I had been unable to do on other days. However, I learned on Monday evening that this would not be as easy as I had hoped as a bandh had been organised. A bandh is a kind of general strike with added features – everything shuts down, traffic is stopped, demonstrations happen, and there is often accompanying violence directed at anyone seen not obeying the bandh. This obviously meant that the chance of doing things like shopping for presents would be somewhat curtailed, for example. Even getting to the airport might present a tricky problem. As it happened, it turned out to not be half as bad as it had been painted, and for a few hours in the afternoon it was actually quite nice to be able to wander around the streets without being mown down by weaving honking vehicles.

All in all, I had a good time. A lot of work, but Kathmandu was fascinating, and very different from anywhere I'd been before. I even managed to have the traditional tourist experience of getting a severe case of the runs. I bet you're glad you know that aren't you? One of the things I mused upon while spending more time than usual in the bathroom was whether there was a blog somewhere out there on which someone just documented his bowel movements. Please don't take that as a prompt to link to one.

Top of the World, Ma

Yesterday morning I flew (or, more accurately, was flown) in a small plane along the Himalayan range from Kathmandu to Everest, a truly spectacular trip.

Unfortunately, the top of Everest was shrouded in clouds, but just as I was having my turn in the cockpit being shown the view by the pilot, the clouds gently parted, revealing the world's highest point. Right there in front of my eyes. It was, well, momentous. I'm not sure I can put it into words quite how exhilarating it was. Actually, I am sure that I can't.

However, for what it's worth, here is a picture that I managed to get just in that 15 second window that I had before the clouds rolled back in again. The summit is that peak you can see just to the left of centre (click on the pic to expand it a bit).



(And yes, I am aware that the way the clouds lie makes it look like there might be a higher peak just to the right, but they are deceptive. That slightly hidden bit is the peak of Lhotse. You can see what it looks like without the clouds here.)

Anyway, back in Europe now (albeit only just - am currently in Istanbul airport) and will possibly be able to relate stories of Nepal very shortly)

Blog of a Death Foretold

So, yesterday we went to Gyergyószárhegy, which is a village about an hour north of here to witness the funeral of the Farsang. [Szárhegy, as it is known, is one of those villages that really need you to be careful with your accents - write it as Szarhegy and it becomes "Shit Mountain"]. As you will be aware if you have been reading for a while, Farsang is the Jan 6th - Lent period in which much merriment is to be had (normally because it is too cold to do much but get drunk and have lots of sex as far as I can surmise). While some countries celebrate carnaval by having a four day bacchanalia, others have a single day of general mayhem, and still others (the UK) celebrate in a typically reserved way by making pancakes, here in the villages of Transylvania the period goes on for 6 weeks or more (depending on when Easter is).

But all good things must come to an end, and so it is that farsang (or actually some kind of athropomorphised farsang dummy) is laid to rest in a funeral ceremony on the weekend before Lent kicks off (ie this one). Villagers from all over the county convene on one spot - which changes annually- to perform their mock funeral ceremony, drink palinka (I assume - it certainly seemed like a well lubricated event) and consume large quantities of töltött káposzta (stuffed cabbage). It was all very enjoyable and I thought I would share with you some pictures (all of which can be blown up to a more viewable size by simply clicking on them).
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Dancing round the funeral pyre - in the background you can see the castle for which Szárhegy is famous.


The Szentdomokos funeral procession



On-stage funeral. The big bale of straw you can see is actually a bloke dressed as a bale of straw. It was dancing and stuff.


The body of the Farsang is brought to face it's final rites. Sadly you can't see from this picture the fact that it had a carrot and two onions attached to it in a particularly suggestive place.


This is a bull apparently. To me it looked more like a beehive with a pot on its head, but I was assured that it was a bull.


A man is beaten to death for wearing a sheep's skull on top of his head. And rightly so.


The farsang is dead. Until next year, when he will rise, phoenix-like from the ashes.

Doing the Business

Over the course of the last 20 years I have done a lot of flying - so much in fact that if I were to retire to a hut in the forest and eat fallen leaves for the rest of my life, I'm sure my lifetime carbon footprint would still be a massive yeti-sized one. I mean obviously in comparison to people who work for multinational companies, I haven't done that much flying, but I do seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time on aeroplanes.

Twice in that period, I have found myself in business class - once when a mate was giving me and my then-partner a lift to Porto airport for our flight to the UK, and he was so late picking us up and getting us to the airport that we were forcibly bumped up as they were the only seats left. Which left my irritation at his somewhat irresponsible approach to timekeeping thrown back in my face in the best way; and the second time when I flew to a conference with my then boss and he bumped me up with his frequent flyer points for the Hartford to Chicago leg. Neither of these flights were particularly long, so I didn't get much benefit from the excitement of being in the front seats (and when flying domestically on a US airline, the business class experience is more or less the same as economy class anywhere else).

But now, thanks to getting a gig working on a contract with a seemingly unlimited budget for travel, I am going to outstrip those experiences very rapidly. In fact all of my upcoming flights will (I think) be on business class, so I will soon be able to go as far as to make comparisons with each airlines posh services. My trip to Nepal on Monday (and subsequent return), for example, will see me fly on 5 entirely different airlines - and so I will, among other things, be in a position to rank the Tarom business class experience to that of Singapore airlines (not a comparison that I expect will be especially kind to Tarom, but I remain open to the possibility of a surprise). Who knows - I may be able to blog directly from my seat, such are the hidden and untold riches of such travel.

Apologies for Absence

Been somewhat swamped of late since this week I have not one but TWO book deadlines. (Meaning I'm writing them, not reading them).

Lest you start to wonder whether I am in fact some widely published author, aside from one manual I wrote for a training company some years ago, these are actually my first and my second book. So, you won't find my name on Amazon. Yet, anyway.

So, I'll go back to my bunker mentality for now and attempt to find the time later to asnwer the tag I got regarding 5 dishes and my random thoughts on my short Bucharest trip.

Blasted Health

Sometimes I wonder whether Romania is really the best place to bring up my children. Hot on the heels of news of some respiratory infection that may or may not be flu or pneumonia, which is sweeping the nation, and the revelation of a European survey (mentioned here) which says that Romania is basically the unhealthiest country in Europe, comes news that one of Bogi's classmates has been quarantined at the hospital with scarlet fever. Scarlet fever? I thought that had gone the way of smallpox and was now something you only read about in Victorian novels. Not so in Romania, it seems, where scarlet fever is apparently alive and well. I suppose it fits in with the horsecarts and the villagers heading off to the fields armed with scythes, but blimey.

(You'll be happy to know that it is cured quite easily with penicillin, just in case)

Tripping

There was a time when jetting round the globe was my idea of heaven. And for a while I had a job that allowed me to do just that - and in one year (I think it was 2002) I calculated that I took over 50 flights, which is going some, especially since I did all my flying in economy class. Now I was living in the US then, and at times there it seems you have to get a plane to go down the shops to get a pint of milk, but a significant portion (more then half) of those trips were international. But now, what with the rapidly developing Paula to enjoy (every day walking less and less like a piss-artist), along with the rest of the family, it feels like a chore.

However, there's only so much one can do in Csikszereda, and hence this year, as alluded to a couple of days ago, I have to do some work (or rather I have to earn some money, and working is the only really legal way I can think of of doing that, save from investing non-existent capital) - work which will initially take me on a whistlestop tour of South and Central Asia.

My first excursion is this coming weekend to the foreign country that is Bucharest, where I will be working for a few days next week. OK, I know Bucharest is not technically foreign, but the difference between the capital and rural Romania is so great as to be more or less a completely dfferent country. (Plus I have to crack open my extremely weak Romanian and remember to not answer everything with an "igen" or a "köszönöm").

Then in mid-Feb I really do start having to leave the country - firstly to Nepal for a week (and having spent some time working out flights, I can tell you that travelling to Nepal is not that simple - at least from Romania. Looks like I will have to change planes in Istanbul and Qatar - or Munich and Delhi). I get back here for a few days, just in time to celebrate my birthday, before heading off again - firstly to Uzbekistan, for a week or two, and thence on to Pakistan and subsequently Bangladesh. I'll get back to Csik for a few more days of catching up with the family , before heading to the UK - both England and Scotland, and finally returning to the hearth of my bosom (or whatever) in late April, when the spring should have kicked in.

So, anyway, this blog will probably take a short break starting very soon, and then afterwards might suddenly be filled with anecdotes of exotic locales. Or not.

Speak, the (unspeakable) Hungarian Rapper

The worst song ever written? You decide.

"Sometimes people start a war, don't know what it's for"

Fillet of Crap

I recently discovered this video, which purports to show "A World Without Romania"

I learned one or two interesting things from it - like about Nicolae Paulescu, who invented insulin, and learned what it was that Henri Coanda (who up till that point had been nothing but the name of an airport*) was famous for.

However, I started to disbelieve what I had been told by the video when it reached the bit which mentions that Romania has created the "most mouthwatering dishes in the world". Now, I have no wish to offend anyone, but come on. Coming from a nation which has a global reputation for producing some of the world's worst food, I am not about to start comparing Romanian cuisine to English here, but really without trying I could think of at least 50 countries which have better food than Romania. And that's before starting to subdivide countries like India and China into different regional cuisines. Of the three commonly-quoted traditional "national" Romanian dishes, two of them (sarmale and ciorba de burta) are almost certainly Turkish anyway, and the third (mamaliga) gets translated as "corn mush" on menus. This is not, of course, to say that Romanian food is bad, but it's not up there among the world's great cuisines. How many Romanian restaurants are there in a place like London, for example?

It's a shame, because until that point, I had been enjoying the video, although the fact that they had chosen someone to narrate it who couldn't pronounce Romanian words to save his life was a bit of a let-down. I think the pronunciation of "multumesc" (sic) is the lowest point. The Romanian pre-cursor to baseball, therefore, following on from the ludicrous food statement, was significantly less interesting than it would otherwise have been. Of course when it gets to the end you realise it's an ad for Ursus beer, which also lowers the tone somewhat, and possibly explains the bland "trailer for a poor quality Hollywood action movie" aesthetic (Ursus being a beer brewed by that bastion of blandicity, Miller).

Anyway, watch it (it's about 5 minutes long) if you have the time.

[*Spotters badge for anyone who can spot the pop culture reference here without resorting to google]

Farsangi bál

So, how was the party, is the question I'm sure you're all asking.

It was good, but like no party I'd been to before. Or rather, it had elements of many other different parties but in a combination previously unknown.

Firstly we had to bring along our own food and drink - it was actually possible to order a fixed menu prior to the event, but since the fixed menu was cold meats and cheese as a starter, with a main course of töltött káposzta (stuffed cabbage - stuffed with pork), we didn't bother going down that route. Most people it seems brought their own food - and plates, glasses, knives, forks, corkscrews, etc. Having dropped off our baskets of food and utensils we all trooped down to the lecture theatre (the party took place in the canteen of the Sapientia University) to watch a play performed by the teachers at the school, which was on a traditional farsang theme, that of marriage. This extended pre-lenten period appears to have been traditionally the time when people from villages were married off - possibly lent was a time in which it wasn't wise to get married as you couldn't have much of a party, or maybe (who knows) some serious catholic villages even swore off sex during the 40 days. That would, of course, be inconvenient because lent aways falls in Spring, when people in those far off days before widespread pre-marital rumpy-pumpy were desperate to, ahem, "get married". So anyway, farsang was a period in which one partied, dressed in costume (no idea why, but this seems somewhat universal) and got hitched.

The play was performed with gusto and (I suspect) a touch of inebriation. I didn't know what the words were, but could get the gist It wasn't Beckett, is what I'm saying here. At the conclusion we all trooped back upstairs to the canteen and joined our tables. Each table was devoted to a different class at the school, so you were sitting with the parents of your child's classmates. In many ways the whole affair from that point onwards was like a very peculiar wedding reception. There was the usual wedding-type band, playing cover versions of classics from the 60s 70s and 80s. (At least I'm assured they were classics, being as how they were all Hungarian, I'll have to take people's word for that). There was the universal wedding behaviour of sitting round the tables, talking, eating, getting plastered, and occasionally getting up and dancing. What set it apart from the average wedding was two things - firstly the fact that all the guests were between 30 and 45; and secondly the fact that the people that you had in common, who had brought you and your tablemates together (the role filled by the bride and groom at a wedding) were not actually present and were all at home tucked up in bed being taken care of by babysitters. Then, rather than the best man's speech, we had an interminable raffle - parents had been asked to wrap things they didn't want and submit them as raffle prizes, and the table was very full of such gifts. The process of repeatedly drawing out a winning ticket, announcing the number, waiting for the winner to show up and choose their present, accompanied by boozy cheering from their table, took ages. At one point I was concerned that they'd actually have more prizes than tickets sold and would have to put all the winners back in the same hat and start drawing them again.

Our table, being a table of parents of kids in the first grade, was a little bit subdued, as it was our first opportunity to get rat-arsed together and we had to size everyone up. As you looked around the room, you could see the higher up the school was the class, the rowdier was the table. Some people, of course, had to flit to more than one table having more than one child in the school. In such cases they tended towards their oldest child's group, and left us newbies to fend for ourselves. Just as we were leaving, I came across a couple who had suddenly appeared at our table from some third grade table somewhere. They seemed quite put out that we were going so early (it was 2.30), and the husband insisted that I have a glass of wine with him - quite possibly because he was Romanian and wanted to chat to someone else at the party who'd no idea of what this bloody music was.

I have no idea what time it finished, but we certainly seemed to be the first ones to go. People do like to party until dawn here. The very concept that we were going before 5am seemed to be quite offensive, but having had the Szilveszter experience of having the 8am alarm-clock baby on a couple of minutes sleep, we weren't about to do it again. We've probably been marked down as party-poopers though, and will be treated with appropriate disdainfulness at the school gates on Monday.