Bits and pieces from Kathmandu 1 October 2009 It's 7am and I'm sitting in bed working off line to write some thoughts. As I write there are two young ladies sitting in the field below our bedroom window watching me as they look after two cows! One has just finished brushing the others long hair both are still wearing their glittery finery, possibly their only outfits and new for Dasai which is the festival that is nearly finished, it lasts for 9 days. It does ma...

Shiva's home Before we left for this trip to Kathmandu after 30 years I said to Ken that I wanted to find Shiva our gardener, Purna, our aiyha and Hira our tailor. Well so far we've met Shiva, spoken to Hira and arranged to meet and found that Purna, although still young has in fact died. When we spoke to Shiva on the phone he arrived to see us within 15 minutes! He was so thrilled as we were and yes I got very emotional! He invited us to his home for a meal an...

The wedding Well this is was brought us back to Kathamndu! The first day was a lunch at Shyam Badan's home [bride's mother] followed by a cricket match between the two families! We were part of the Shrestha family and we won!!! It was so serious!! But the spectators had a good laugh. For me the best part was meeting Shyam Badan's mother who has lived with her for possibly 40+ years and had been poorly when we'd been at Shyam Badan's home on our arrival. She was...

Kathmandu After the initial shock of how built up everywhere is and how busy the traffic is we began to enjoy it. After breakfast we went with Bal Krishna's wife, he had been a bachelor when we left, on the bus to go down to the centre. We then ended up getting her office bus [works for the Govt] and then being dropped on the ring road to get a taxi to my old school. Now when I drove to Lincoln School it took me 15 minutes from home and I was the only car on the...

Singapore to Kathmandu We arrived in Singapore at about 8pm and took a taxi straight to the Marriott where we had booked in for our two night stopover. As the hotel was very full because of the Grand Prix we were upgraded to a suite on the 26th floor! From a small town by the sea with buildings no higher than a couple of storeys this was somewhat DIFFERENT but RATHER NICE! The first thing I did was run a deep bath and empty the entire bath gel in. Well one can p...