Beecher in Nepal

out of asia, out of blogging

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 19:40:00 +0000

It's 12:40 in the PM from Hong Kong. I leave for the airport in 40 minutes. My flight leaves at 4:20PM. It arrives in San Francisco at 1:40PM... three hours earlier than it left. I've never traveled back in time before. I wonder how I'll spend my extra 3 hours. Probably in customs.

The avid beecherinnepal reader will note that I haven't actually been in Nepal for the last two weeks. Shame, shame for having kept talking after leaving Nepal. Maybe a more descriptive name would have been beecherinasia. But then, how would google pump up the traffic? It was mostly about Nepal.

Hong Kong. I love this city. The theme seems to be 'money money money money'. Not that this is also my theme. The money they have here is beautiful - the colors, the designs. Best looking money I've ever seen, except maybe Switzerland. Figures.

True to the guidebook and my Hong Kong friend's insight, Chung King Mansion has great Indian food, and Sunday in the park is Filipino-housekeeper day out. It's Tagalog at high volume right now.

The week with Jeff in Xi'an and Xining was great. From the terra cotta army to buying a bed to sleep in when it started hailing at Hua Shan - adventure. Real China was amazing, and Jeff's been there for ten months. Not surprisingly, he speaks Chinese now and can read. We were in a park looking at a statue and he says 'oh, the plaque says "The teacher says to his students that if you plan a flower, you get a flower; if you plant a bean you get a bean"' or something like that. Pretty impressive character-reading capability for ten months. Silvia coming from Beijing for the weekend was indeed a delicious twist.

And the food in China - wow. Not at all what you get in America at Chinese restaurants, but I was told that's how it is. Jeff said, "Eggrolls? No. Fortune cookies? Haven't seen'em." An Etheopian laser physicist once told me that if you're ever in doubt as to what to order in China or can't read the menu, say 'ma po dofu' and you get a good meal. He was right.

One thing I'm taking away from these eight months is that English really is the international language. We're lucky to speak it well. Star Trek's not in French for a reason.

And this is the end. I'm trying to go out on top, like James K. Polk and Ludacris - or was it Jay-Z? After all, who wants to read beecherathome?

This morning, I ate toast.
Going to work now.
Need more milk; maybe one or two days left on this carton.
Mood: somber
Listening to: If You Like Piňa Colada

Nobody.

Hong Konger!

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Tue, 24 May 2005 07:07:00 +0000

This morning at 5:30AM I left my landmark signature-series room at the Hotel Miami in Bangkok. It sure was budget - but not bad. It's close to a skytrain line and had air conditioning. The sheets may have had bugs though. Not the first time that's happened during beecherinnepal.

If I'd had another day in Bangkok, I'd have gone to the National Museum of Forensic Science.

I bought the electrical components Ecosystems needed. There's only a very limited selection available in Kathmandu. A lot of the Nepal expatriates fly through Thailand, ergo Bangkok is known as a place to get stuff on your way to or from Nepal, electronics included. I got the parts at the Ban Mo electronics market. I bought the polypropelene film capacitors from a man who only sells capacitors. He and his grand daughter sit behind a counter full of capacitors. You can buy a cap the size of a novelty Foster's beer can from him, if you want.

The rest of the Ban Mo market was just as awesome and odd as the idea of a family store only selling capacitors. There were huge rack-mount stereo systems thumping, guys soldering surface-mount chips onto boards, and cute girls behind the counters trying to get you to buy their MOSFETs - I can barely describe the joy. And the selection was off the wall. It was like five digikeys happening all at once, in person instead of by catalog, inside a music video's slow-motion walking-through-the-club scene.

I posted the electronic components from the Bangkok airport. It made me feel like an international businessman of mystery - dropping packages of highly specialized parts in the mail to Shangri-la as I catch a jet to Hong Kong.

Speaking of Hong Kong, I'm writing at a park bench there presently. The park is clean, thoughtfully landscaped, and free. The traffic is above orderly. The train from the airport was fast and service was excellent. The people are snappy dressers with the newest cell phones. Everyone seems to be going somewhere or doing something intently. This last bit is in sharp contrast to Nepal. Nepal loves a good sittin' around, doin' nuthin.

I'm staying at the Miradore Mansions - just up the street from Chung King Mansions. Miradore is supposed to be like Chung King, but with fewer mysterious deaths and less of a firetrap. It still took me four different flights of stairs to get from my guest house on the 12th floor down to the ground. Cosmic Guesthouse seems nice. It's behind a cage door and has a very Hello Kitty theme - all pastel blue, all walls tiled.

I'm going to get something to eat. In two days I fly to Xi'an to see the terra cotta statues with a friend from school, Jeff. A mutual friend of ours is also coming. She's coming from Beijing, Jeff's coming from Xining, and I'm coming from Hong Kong. Very exciting times.

message from above

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Sun, 22 May 2005 06:23:00 +0000

So the Grace Hotel has proven to be a curious place. There were no knocks on the door, but it turns out this area of town is Little Arabia. There are women with burqas here. Burqas in Thailand - I would've never guessed.

The lobby of this hotel is full of full-figured Thai ladies looking for, ah, dates. And the guys standing around down there are ready to arrange, ah, dates.

This morning I was woken up by lightning hitting the hotel at 8:00AM. Keep in mind I am on the top floor. It scared me the hell awake and set off all the fire alarms. I got dressed fast and ran out of my room, and the only other people in the hall were old confused-looking western guys slowly leaving their rooms with one or (surprisingly often) two Thai girls.

Maybe the lightning strike was a message. Regardless, I've had just about enough of the Grace Hotel scene. So I've checked out and found a place for half the price. You can now find me at Hotel Miami. The door of my room, 204, is pictured in the Lonely Planet's 'budget places to stay' section. It's like seeing a celebrity at a restaurant - an encounter with fame.

Bangkok

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Sat, 21 May 2005 05:37:00 +0000

Last night was the bosses' going-away party - not for my going away, but for theirs. They're going back to America after 13 years. Big move. The party was proportionally large. We demo'ed the product we created at the party. We got it done in time - not having achieved in our constant pursuit of the platonic ideal exactly, but it was something that demo'ed well. It was a proof of concept, if you will. The cleanness and professional look of the demo is as much to the credit of our best mechanic, Prem, as it is to the big shot foreign engineers and architect. Prem - what a guy. He always has a smile and is always ready to make anything mechanical better.

But this morning, I woke up in Nepal for the last time of beecherinnepal. Got up with the sun at about 7:00, heated up the daal bhat, and went to work. At 11:00 I said goodbye to everyone I've known for the last eight months. I got two silk kata scarves and 3 necklaces of flowers - as travelers do.

It felt like the end of undergrad.

Neither now, nor at the end of undergrad, did it feel very real that it was all ending. With that kind of feeling, there's really no answer to 'hey, how does it feel to be leaving?' or 'thought, reflections?' or 'did you write a poem about this?'. What is there to say? It was, and now it's done. It was good. I think we did good work. I think it's been good for me. Check that - I think it's been great for me. And it hasn't been all about me.

I had a professor once last year, Bernie Roth, who suggested replacing 'but' with 'and' in all manners of speech. It changes excuses into statements. I think that's a simple idea that changes everything, like using short sentences. It's for the better.

I flew into Bangkok this afternoon. This country has parking spaces and the taxis' meters are actually metered. I haven't spent enough time to observe much else yet. I read in my guidebook that in some Bangkok hotels, girls knock on your door all night asking if you want special massage. The guidebook named the Grace Hotel, in Sukkumvit, as a particular instance of this Bangkok-sleezy-hotel phenomenon. So I told the airport cabby where to go, and here I am at the Grace. I think they've cleaned up their act since the guidebook was published. Maybe these two things are related. Regardless, it's midnight, there've been no knocks, and I'm going out. I have to buy some fruit juice or sorbitol gum - I won't elaborate.

There's writing your blog, and then there's a whole modern city out there with a night life, after eight months in Nepal. You understand I hope.

times will change

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Sun, 15 May 2005 03:28:00 +0000

Last night as I lay motionless with the light on, watching for mosquitos to kill before going to sleep, I got to thinking about the timeline I'm on.

It's May 15.

In one week, I'll be in Bangkok.

In two weeks, I'll be in Xi'an checking out the terracotta army with Jeffers - a friend who teaches English in Xining.

In three weeks, I'll be on a plane somewhere over the Pacific headed for SFO.

In four weeks, I'll be starting a summer job in Washington DC as a shop-floor technician and occasional engineer.

Oddly, the fact I'm a high-strung guy gives me some solace in the face of these timelines. I was handling this after-Nepal stuff three weeks ago. That should make this last week low-stress and fun. Should.

Rato Machendranath

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Sat, 14 May 2005 16:38:00 +0000

Rato Machendranath is a 15-meter-tall chariot with six-foot high wheels, made entirely of wood and vines - no nails, no pegs. It's pulled by a team of men. It holds a god that gets toured around the Kathmandu Valley once a year. Its stability can best be described as 'tippy'. They've been building it for a few weeks down the street, and it got rolling on Thursday.

Every twelve years, the chariot starts a couple miles from Kathmandu and comes the extra distance. The last time that happened was three years ago. It fell over three times that year.

If you're wondering "what happens when it gets rolling down hill?", don't worry. There are guys running backwards in front of the wheels throwing sticks under them to slow it down. When they want to stop outright, the guys wedge logs under the wheels. That causes an abrupt stop where the entire thing lunges forward. I saw it get up on three wheels when they did that. I have some video of that, but at 18 megs it's a little big to put online from 56k.

Friday morning, I got up at 5:00AM on account of the mosquitos in my bedroom. I went for a walk down to where they parked Rato Machendranath for the night. When I got there, it may as well have been noon - there were hundreds of Newaris circling around the chariot. Lighting butter lamps, throwing offerings, buying vegetables - it was busy.

Yesterday my boss approached me to ask what I'm planning for my last week in Nepal, and in the course of doing so told me those plans will include going to their choir concert. So we went to their choir concert tonight. It was at the British school. I haven't seen so many white people in a room since the US embassy's town meeting after the coup. Most of the music was in Latin. It was like being in Church, in Italy, at the long service. As I was listening, I thought briefly about how secular performances of this kind of music is a specialized interest - like spoken word readings of Tender Buttons. Intricate and technical, but not a general crowd pleaser. Later they rubbed some funk on it and did a few numbers from the 1994 film Sister Act. Tremendous.

newspaper clipping

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Mon, 09 May 2005 15:19:00 +0000

I'm at the office. It's pretty late. I'm trying to send a fax to Hong Kong from Nepal. You can probably understand what a circus that is.

Right now there's a wedding party outside the window. The office/bosses'-home is next to an open area that's popular for this sort of thing. It's a three-goater, which is big. The guys were butchering the goats yesterday outside our window. They butchered the first goat in front of the other two tied-up goats - cut its head off and everything. I was a little surprised they didn't take it behind a wall or something.

Here's a news clipping from the Himalayan Times yesterday about how FM radio will now be used for the promotion of art and culture rather than political news. The Minister for Education and Sports is paraphrased:

They're cutting down all the trees that line the major street in Patan: Pulchowk. They're big trees. I'm no ecological activist playing pirate-taking-over-oil-tankers, but this doesn't seem right. It takes so long to make big trees like that, and they don't hurt anyone. Then someone younger than the trees gets an idea. And who knows what motivates that idea.

An expatriate woman who's been here for thirty years and I were talking about the trees the other night at a dinner event our manager had. She told me I should read the story about the last tree in Brooklyn. I think I will when I get home.

books

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Sat, 07 May 2005 11:09:00 +0000

It's Saturday. Fin de semana. Nini and her family are still stuck in Lukla. The flights flew today, but the available seats couldn't clear the backlog of travellers. Maybe tomorrow. The options out of Lukla aside from airlines are (1) a five-day walk to Jiri and then a day-long bus ride to Kathmandu or (2) a chartered plane or helicopter. Option number one would make her family miss their flights back to England on Wednesday, so that's out. Option number two is more than expensive, so it's out also.

I've been tying a few things up, as we're at fewer than two weeks remaining in Nepal.

I've read a lot more here than I used to. There's more time to think here. But all that accumulated reading was around fifteen pounds - not including the borrowed books. This kind of already-read weight is not going to make the trip home.

Most of the books were used - left at our flat by traveling friends who came through. I packed up about twelve pounds of these used books in a kitchen towel and plastic bag and headed into Thamel, the tourist part of town, to hock them. There are a lot of used book stores there. I think used book stores are one of the highest manifestations of human society. All those texts passed from person to person at such a reasonable price.

So the Dalai Lama's autobiography, Peter Matheison's The Snow Leopard, some lonely planet books for countries I've never been to, some fiction about India, Papillon, and more have been put back into the cycle. And what did I get in return? Postcards!

Well... postcards and 800 rupees (~USD11.50). I was in the mindset of Nepali financial scales and not tourist financial scales when I was at the first bookstore. When the guy said he'd give me 800 for five of the books, I shouted "deal!". I didn't even counter-offer. I probably could have gotten 1200, without even resorting to hysterionics. Way to go beecher.

Did you ever read the post on how to leave a comment anonymously?

monkey on a bus

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Fri, 06 May 2005 18:01:00 +0000

Ewan and I are back from Lukla. We have been since Tuesday. Nini is stuck in Lukla due to cloudy weather, along with her aunt and father. We've taken to telling people they're her parents - it's a lot easier than explaining the relationship. As an aside, we're told 'Nini' means aunt in Newari - the language of a Nepali ethnic group by the same name. But it's not just 'aunt', it's specifically for aunt-by-marriage. So your father's brother's wife is your nini, but your father's sister isn't. Our cook is Newari.

If you're an avid beecherinnepal reader, you'll notice that I will have commited Revisionism in a few days. I wrote a few entries while we were in the Everest area on paper. I know - paper! I'll transcribe those later and pre-date them to when they were originally written. I'm holding-off on posting them because with Nini and her family still in Lukla, our collective of digital photos is not yet complete. The posts need accompanying photos to fulfill my artistic vision. When will the posts be up? That's the same question as 'when will Nini and her family be back?'. No one knows - if it's cloudy in Lukla tomorrow, the flights will be cancelled again. Even if it's clear and the planes fly tomorrow, everyone who didn't get a flight out today will be throwing elbows trying to get back to Kathmandu. A single day can mean hundreds of dollars and meticulous planning to some tourists. I hear the higher monetary value of the synthetic clothes the trekker is wearing, the more violent and unpredictable they get. That, or being French. So the Lukla airport can get real ugly, according to the Lonely Planet. They wrote an entire half-page on delays, fear, and malice at the Lukla airport in their purple Nepali-trekking book.

Being back in Kathmandu is good - the flat feels like a home to come home to. They say it's an early monsoon this year, as it's been raining about every day. The rain puts the dust down and cuts the fragrant bouquet of the Bagmati river.

On Wednesday morning, Ewan and I went into town for electronics parts. Stuck in traffic, I saw a bus going the other way with a baby monkey sitting on the driver's side window, chewing on a plastic tube. Ewan and I commented that this kind of thing is normal here, but being out of the Kathmandu Valley, even for only four days, makes you appreciate this kind of stuff. I wish I'd had the camera that I carried everywhere on the trek. Because there was no camera, I can only provide this artist's rendition of the monkey on the bus:

picture on queue - will be revisionist-ed

We had more business in town after the monkey incident. The second notable incident happened once the rain cleared up. We were walking past a busy minibus/tempo-stop. These stops become impromptu markets, and a member of the new-wave hippie genre I've written about prior was doing his thing. This particular specimen had clearly been in India before visiting Nepal. He was wearing one of the sarongs that I'm told men were in southern parts of India. Guy smilie probably thought the sarong, and the accompanying tie-shut-collar poncho-shirt, made him look totally with it. In fact, in my experience, the Nepalis I know look down on the sarong-wearing guys as laborers. I think it's a caste thing. So guy smilie with the hip outfit was holding up his minibus. And why was he holding up a minibus of Nepalis, most probably wondering why a rich western male would be wearing a sarong? He was pointing across a few lanes of pedestrians at some strawberries and saying the word for 'quickly' (which sounds just like 'cheeto', like the cheese puffs) over and over to a woman selling seasonal fruit. As we walked past, I noted to Ewan that that hippie's gonna get something he wasn't bargaining for with those strawberries - something messy and painful and free with any street produce introduced to a foreigner's digestive system. Ewan kind of laughed and agreed. "Want to do anything about that?" "Nah, he'll get what he has coming".

Yesterday I mailed the postcards that I wrote in the Everest area. A Patan postmark is less exotic than a Namche Bazar one - granted. But I think the postmarks are written in Devanagri, so the recipeints won't know either way. When I watched the man slam the postmark on to cancel the stamps, all the guys in the post office started to gather around and read the postcards. There was some debate as to whether the slightly overlapping stamps were acceptable on the eight postcards. It's a good thing there were four employees standing around doing nothing at the post office, or the chore of reading such a high volume of people's mail would have fallen on a single Nepali government employee.

Speaking of, want a postcard from Nepal? Try leaving a comment with an address, and wait four weeks. You could not even include a name if you don't want to - just an address. See what happens.

Since we've been back in Kathmandu, things have been coming together on the project at work. We have PCB's now. What I've been struggling with for a while has finally reached a clearly stateable one-and-a-half sentences:

The key to detecting an absolute battery terminal voltage in a system with no absolute reference available is by making a differential measurement. This is common-mode rejection.

pink chiffon war

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 13:05:00 +0000

Why haven't I posted anything for a while? I've been busy. Not busy experiencing the niceties of Nepali life, but busy with work. It's about charging batteries with interrupted power supplies. You wouldn't be interested.

On Wednesday, Nini's father and aunt are coming for a visit. He's been in the British army for 42 years. On Friday we're all flying to go see the Everest area - or, as tourists who read their Lonely Planet extra attentively like to call it - the Solo Kumbu. Ewan and I will be there just until Tuesday on account of work. Monday is his birthday and also the day we have to break from the group and get back to the airstrip, so it'll be just the two of us celebrating his 27th birthday on Monday night - at high altitude, where we can really think clearly. I'm going to get messed up on homemade sherpa beer. Nini and her family will stay up there for another week.

But this post isn't about the future, it's about the recent past. Walking home from work today, I dropped by the place we rent DVDs. It wasn't to rent a DVD, it was to pick up my deposit from the last time I rented a movie. I returned that movie this morning, but the guy said to come back later - no change now. That's a little odd, I thought.

If you step back and look at the DVD place, it's kind of odd in and of itself. They sell two things: pirated movies and office chairs. They don't sell office furniture at large - just the chairs. The DVDs border the walls. They don't like it if you sit in the chairs if you're there to get a DVD. They must think it's not likely that the movie-renting customers are also office-chair-buying customers. They're probably right - completely different clientele. I've never seen anyone buy an office chair there.

So there I am, 6:00 on a busy street, walking into the DVD/office-chair place to get the change from my deposit. But when I get inside, there's no one there. The door's unlocked and the lights are on, but no proprietor. There is no back room in which he could be doing something. He's just not in his store. I walked slowly up to the counter and looked over to see if anyone was on the floor back there. Nope. So I go outside and decide I'll wait for a couple minutes - maybe the guy is on an errand... with his store wide open. The idea of grabbing all the DVDs I can hold and running briefly passes through my transom. But then, why would I want to do that? Just because I could - I guess. The idea passes.

As I sit on the step waiting, an Indian street vender walks by selling chiffon. Not dresses - just loose yards of chiffon. They're on his shoulder. He looks at me as he walks by and makes a face that asks, "you want to buy some chiffon?". I make the corresponding face for, "why would I possibly want to do that?".

Pink or white available - good quality chiffon.

The new idea that sprang to mind was that I'll have to write a post about this. I realize my laptop's in my backpack - I could write as I experience. Modern. I think people call blogging where ever 'war blogging'. I don't know if you need an internet connection to 'war blog' or if writing offline counts. This idea passes even faster than the smash-and-grab-DVD idea - mostly because I can barely handle the word 'blog' itself, let alone the phrase 'war blogging'. I think the phrase is really new - many a year or two old. I believe the name follows from 'war driving' which is a few years older still. War driving is when you tool around town in your car trying to pick up 802.11 wireless networks either without encryption or crappy WEP encryption that you hit with airsnort, and then use the networks. Not exactly 31337 ski1z. What do you do when you find and access a network? I don't know - I guess most people who war drive check the email. Sex offenders war drive for lurid internet business because it's almost untraceable. Both of these names stem from 'war dialing' I think, which was when back in the day people phreaked the phone system from pay phones so they couldn't be traced. What's phreaking? It's bypassing the phone company's archaic systems to make calls for free. It used to be easy, I've read. As the phone companies got wise to phreaking, they got better at tracing offenders - so the offenders went mobile. You could call a friend in Singapore for free from a pay phone by war dialing - if you had any friends in Singapore. And where did the name 'war dialing' come from? I don't know. It was probably made up by people who were never in a war who thought it sounded cool.

live band before 8:00AM

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 02:07:00 +0000

It's 7:43AM and there's a South-Asian marching band hitting it pretty hard right outside our flat. I guess it's a wedding. It started at 7:25AM, right after I'd gotten up to put on the water heater for a shower. Just as I was sitting back down on the bed to waste 20 minutes or so staring at the ceiling while the water warms up, the band started. It'll scare the hell out of you - at 7:25AM - to hear a sleep-eyed marching band start "When the Saints Go Marching In" with no warning. It's disorienting. The band has that South-Asian sound - lots of complicated and loud clarinet. Even when they play Western songs, they're arranged in a South-Asian way. Kind of awesome.

If I ever propose to a girl in the US, I'm going to do it by hiring an Indian marching band to wake her entire neighborhood up at 7:25AM.

I don't think I ever posted it before, but engineers seem to replace lawyers here in the rank of which jobs get the most respect. In the US, it's a big deal if you're a doctor or a lawyer, but here it's doctor/engineer. Awesome for me.

A Nepali living in Minnesota posted a comment to my last entry. Funny, as I am a Minnesotan living in Nepal. He noted most Nepalis are far from "pretty much vegan". Dairy's huge. So there you go - my last post was full of factual errors! Not surprising, really. I've only been here seven months and spend most of my time in an English-speaking office in the country's largest city. How much do I really know about how Nepalis do anything? Not much.

best new year's yet

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 03:32:00 +0000

Yesterday was Nepali New Year. We celebrated the arrival of 2062 at a bar with Nepalis and expatriates.

This was the best New Year's yet. It's the fourth since I've been here, and I've only been here seven months. There was Newari New Year first, then Western, then Tibetan, and now Nepali. I still haven't found a Nepali who knows what happened 2062 years ago.

We were made privy to the bar we spent New Year's at by the architect who's volunteering some with us. He asked me at one point, well into the evening, what my marital status is. Sweet Enola Gay. This is the first time I've ever been asked that.

Looking around me, I realized though that I was probably among the youngest people there - some of the tourists in ponchos were probably about my age, but the people we knew there and were talking with were all married couples. His question kind of shocked me at first, but taking in the situation at hand, I guess it was a reasonable question. Nevertheless, while we have many talking points in common, marital status is not one of them.

vegan food

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 17:19:00 +0000

With Ewan and Nini still in Bangkok, it was dinner-for-one tonight. Our dede made dal baat with spinach. She leaves the food in three tupperwares next to the stove. Since there's no special lady around, I fried up some garlic, onions, and chilis, and put it all together in our one, sacred, non-stick pan.

Once I finished, I realized that the meal was vegan. For those who don't know, vegan food doesn't contain any animal products. It's like vegetarian food, but with the added caveats of no dairy, honey, gelatin, or elmer's glue. I knew a lot more vegans at school in California than was statistically likely in a given national pool. That's Northern California.

Back in California, I even know of a kid who was fruitarian. Frutarians take it further by only eating food that does not cause the death of the plant. Fruitarians can, for instance, eat peas but not potatoes. They can eat nuts that grow on trees, but not peanuts. I heard the kid was pretty sickly.

Mulling over the chilis after dinner, I realized that a lot of the food I eat here is vegan. A lot of Nepalis eat mostly vegan. A Brahman family I know observe it strictly - and no leather on account of Laxmi. And the thing is, the food is good. When I was at Stanford, I lived for a year in a house that served vegan food at every dinner. That food was usually ass. Good salads though. At the time, one more serving of poorly marinated and baked tofu seemed humanly less doable than retaking that multivariable integration class I got a C+ in. It's not anyone in particular's fault. The house policy was that cooks couldn't order particular food for the meal they were scheduled to prepare. 'This is the way this house has always done things' was the defense for that. Cooking for fifty makes sauteing a two-hour affair of batches - so that's pretty much out. Vegan food doesn't really lend itselt to baking either. So it pretty much ended up being a big wok full of... something.

The point is, some people can't cook toast. And most California budding yuppie doofuses can't cook vegan food. But vegan food can be good - so good, you don't think of it as anything other than 'good food'.

more sickness, more food

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Sat, 09 Apr 2005 13:32:00 +0000

Sick again. No, not blue-green this time - at least I don't think so. It's just a cold. Just in time for the weekend.

So, I look inward (to my apartment) for the weekend. This kind of forced seclusion has me thinking, in ten years will I regret all the time I spent in my apartment instead of out and about in Nepal? I could be be taking in Boddhanath for the weekend, or climbing a hill or mountain. Nepal has these things. Many days, I go to work and come home around six. Maybe I have a curry at the local place, or something like that. Maybe we rent a VCD. Maybe I write one of these posts or, via personal correspondence, contribute to the future W. Vucich Beecher Memorial Letters Collection at an leading American university.

When I'm working and living here on a daily basis, it's not a constant adventure of sights and photo opportunities. It could be. But right now my focus is certainly on my work, as there is so little time remaining. I have a tentative appointment to see a local injection-molding operation this week. Then there's a new 6V two-stage battery charger in the works - constant-voltage with a current-changeover. And we're meeting with potential sub-contractors. As you can see, my mind is not principally on the banyon trees of Lumbini. We're also in the middle of a 11-day Maoist-called strike. All the roads outside the Kathmandu Valley are closed.

Many people have emailed me that for the last six months I've been writing expatriot instead of expatriate. How embarrasing.

Like last time I was sick, my mind's on food. Again, like last time, it's not immediately very appetizing so the thoughts are observational. I don't know if I ever said that most Nepalis eat the same meal every day, twice a day - and they only eat two meals per day. That meal is dahl baat tarkari - rice, lentils, and a vegetable curry. Our dede eats it before she comes over at around 8AM and then again around 8PM. We have dahl baat three times a week when she makes it.

More about food. A friend sent me a link to a ripped version of a new American commercial from Burger King for an enormous burger with a five-word name. Hootie's in it. I'm sure my bosses would call that burger a crime against humanity. Why? Because two days ago they called a steady diet of white rice 'bad for you', as it is just simple carbohydrates. 'Brown rice is so much more nutritious.' Only people from Northern California could possibly look down upon the diets of Japan, India, and most places in between. What's the incidence of heart explosions in those countries? What's the incidence of obesity? Without delving into the erudite, I'm going to venture saying 'low'. Maybe they were speaking more about vitamins and minerals than heart explosions, with the brown-rice thing. People are relatively short in those countries.

Now I tell you what's 'bad for you', and that's the Burger King thing that Hootie and Brooke Burke are selling. That commercial got me thinking back to nights I went for a 'midnight snack' at Jack in the Box during college, I started to wonder how many calories are in my once-staple Jack in the Box midnight run: one ultimate cheeseburger and two tacos. I tried out jackinthebox.com and that indeed is the restaurant's web site, complete with nutritional information. The answer is around 1200 calories. No wonder I got carb-faced in college.

Since I've had so much time to think in the last 36 hours, I've also thought about how, in the future, I can parle having lived in Nepal into being able to do whatever the hell I want. I don't plan to stop the ultimate-cheeseburger thing at Jack in the Box once I'm back at home. In fact, I think if any northern-Californian gives me strife over eating something like that, I'm going to reply that "I've eaten boiled meat from my dead horse in the Gobi dessert when there was nothing else and our teeth were loose form scurvy, so this is really good right now". I don't think the average American will know their geography well enough to call me out on not possibly having done that by way of having "lived in Nepal for a while".

one metric ton of steel

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Tue, 05 Apr 2005 17:58:00 +0000

Yesterday I went up to see our machinist, KC, at the Jai Bagalamuki Engineering Workshop. I was checking out the progress on the v4 model of the pedal generator. It also happened that there were twelve tension rods for the Tar Pul bridge on the workshop floor. They were rushing the tension rods because our galvanizer's place is shutting down soon. They're going to have one last big run of heating up the zinc pool.

I bring up the tension rod thing only because never before has my work created so much steel. It was about two weeks ago that I pointed out to my boss that our current tension rod is too small, if we want the concrete anchors pulling-out to be the failure mode of the Tar Pul. He put in an order for new tension rods with KC post haste.

There on the floor were twelve tension rods, each probably 100 kilos and ten feet long. They will be portered to bridge locations by a team of eight men, who will take shifts of four to carry the rod. And I am the reason those guys will have a heavier load than before. I am the reason there's a ton of steel on KC's floor. Pretty wild.

After the visit to KC's, Simon (the British architect) and I were walking down the street and everything ground to a halt. The street went quiet, except for police yelling at people to get onto the sidewalks. About five minutes later, the king blew by doing about 50 MPH in an E Class benzo. He was driving, albiet with trucks full of soldiers ahead and behind. Back in the day, they say you had to stand with your back to the road so that you did not see the king. Now though, you get to watch.

Tonight we had some drinks with four Dutch people. They dropped by our place in January before they went off to build a school, and now they're done. One of the guys is over two meters tall. The photos of him with the Nepali kids are pretty funny - he's twice as tall as a lot of them. This left me wondering about myself - I mean, 6'4" is tall in Nepal. It's really tall. But it's not quite tall enough to be a point of interest. It's tall enough to make tuk-tuk rides uncomfortable, and tall enough that I can't buy any clothes. Our bosses' cook is about 4'11", and he's the head of his household of 12 people.

I read some American news today. It's going to be a little odd in nine weeks going back to a place where people do stuff like believe George Bush Jr. is competent to run a country, recreationally get even fatter watching to make sure Mexicans don't get a taste of our sweet sweet freedom, and buy crap like this.

more film criticism

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 17:09:00 +0000

If I told you that someone paid tens of millions of dollars to make a movie where Denise Richards was allowed to say the line "the world's greatest terrorist with six kilos of weapons-grade plutonium can't be good" - in a James Bond movie nonetheless - you probably wouldn't believe me.

Oh, believe it. It's called The World Is Not Enough and it's the worst Bond film I've ever seen. Oh, even worse than that one with that guy who's not Sean Connery or Roger Moore, but before Pierce Brosnon. This film gets the same rating as Catwoman.

As a point of reference, like Catwoman before it, I luckily rented this DVD for 25 Nepali rupees, and none of that went to pay royalties to anyone involved with making the film. The DVD also has two other Bond movies on it, the good first one that Pierce Brosnon was in, and the one with Hallie Barry. Considering Hallie Barry was Catwoman - however you spell her name - I'm not expecting much of that movie.

Man, work is stressing me out. So much to do, with only six weeks left. So much expected of me.

I still don't think my bosses know I have this web site. I checked out stats.williambeecher.com and an average of 60+ people are reading this site every day. Who are these people? I don't know, but on this last post, I got a response from an Nepali guy living in the US. Wow. Oh, I've mentioned this website casually in conversation with my bosses a number of times. It's not very hard to remember - williambeecher.com. It's my name, and then '.com'. I don't think they use the internet except to download email.

Unrelated, but surprisingly pertinent to the ethos of this post, the affordable local gin in Nepal is great - Blue Riband.

Oh, and there are no flights from Kathmandu to Varinasi. More to come on that idea...

where the people who know go

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Sat, 26 Mar 2005 18:43:00 +0000

Where do the twenty-something expatriots go in Kathmandu when they want to have a gin fizz? Well we found out tonight. In the early evening, we went to the eightieth birthday party for one of Haydi and David's friends, Olga. For the last twenty years, she's been running a scholarship program for bright, but underpriveledged, Nepali kids. In addition to a lot of expatriots she knows, there were about 200 of the kids there. They call her 'Olga Mommy'. She's a huge part of these kids' lives. The ex-Prime Minister was there, the one who was ousted and put under house arrest on February 1st. It was a big, big party. Very nice. Olga's speech was brief and really on the ball. She's 80, and incredibly with it.

Later, we went into the tourist part of town to hit the bars. We saw four of the expatriots from Olga's party at the bar we went to. We thought it was kind of 'our place', but apparently it's an expatriot hang-out. Don't worry though, there were also plenty of tourists with dirty long hair, formless bags, and baggy pants.

It occured to me last night, staring at the ceiling right before falling asleep, that I'll be leaving Nepal in less than two months. Two months from now, I'll be in Hong Kong. In two months and five days, I'll be back in California with nowhere to live, with a lot of things I've put aside for the last six months staring me in the face. Pretty scary, really. Everything I consider home will be gone. There'll be no Doggy, no flat in Jhomsikel, no Ewan & Nini, no Haydi & David, no Tapa, no Mylee, no Nandu, no KC, no twenty people in a microbus - it'll all be gone. Instead, the money will be green, things will be expensive, people will speak my language, I'll know what the holidays are, OSHA will be standing in the way of fun/fast/cheap things, and George Bush Jr. will rule the country of residence. And here at EcoSystems, we've still so many things to do before we go. It got me cracking on work when I woke up, even though it's Saturday.

And I'd still like to take a long weekend to Varanasi before I go. So much to do.

Holi was as colorful and drenched as one would expect. Photos of that will follow shortly. They, like the photos of the nine-course meal at Dwarika's, are on Ewan's computer and the network connection isn't accessible when his computer is asleep.

Holi

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 07:52:00 +0000

Tomorrow is Holi, so I've designated some second-tier clothes to wear. If a little kid throws a water balloon, full of red dye, at you on Holi, then that's okay. The little fella is celebrating a Hindu festival. They especially like to hit white people, I'm told.

The kids have been getting excited about this for about a week. There's a narrow dirt path between our flat and the main street, and the neighborhood kids like to take advantage of that urban canyon scenario. People move slow there because the ground's really uneven. If I was ten (or twenty), I would throw water balloons at foreigners there too. I got hit by a non-dyed balloon last Thursday and shouted at the surrounding buildings that Holi's not for another week.

In other news, I got the full run-down at the western-grade clinic this morning, after still feeling a little fatigued eight days after getting sick. I don't have mono or the blue-green or a parasite, as far as the tests show. As conciliation, the doctor told me he's been similarly fatigued for the last three weeks and can't find anything wrong with himself either. Maybe the two of us have an undiscovered disease and are on the verge of medical history. As I mentioned in the last post, this clinic has discovered digestive-system diseases before.

On Sunday, Ewan's parents took us all to a fancy Nepali dinner. The tourist guide books say this is something you must do in Kathmandu, and it was as good as it was billed. We chose the 9-course set meal. Ewan's mom took pictures of all nine courses. I'll put those up when she downloads them to Ewan's computer.

At this restaurant, you can have anywhere between 6 and 22 courses. Prince Charles ate the 12 course when he was there - so the picture on the wall says. The affair took 3 hours seated on the ground. Awesome. If you're ever in Kathmandu, you gotta do it: Dwarika's Hotel, book the dinner at least three hours ahead.

blue-green food

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 16:51:00 +0000

Still a little sick, food is not really foremost on my mind.

The prevailing theory is that I may have cyclospora, the blue-green algae disease. It makes you fatigued and achy, without the lung/stomach situation of a cold. It was discovered in Kathmandu. We're really on the forefront of fecal-ingestion diseases here in Nepal. Geez.

Don't worry, cyclospora is curable with three days of over-the-counter stuff here. Come to think of it, everything's over-the-counter here: valium, whatever. You can buy a little packet of rabies vaccine, a syringe, and directions of how to shoot it - brought to you by France.

My pants have been on a slow road to looking like a Subway-Select-Menu ad on me. Blue-green's kept that going. Best shape of my life, incidently.

Food is on my mind observationally though. You know, like when you make plans for the future. I'm considering photographing all my meals like this guy. Just considering.

sick and raining

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Sat, 12 Mar 2005 16:14:00 +0000

No sooner do I write about feeling great and the sun shining for springtime, then I get sick and it starts raining.

I must have touched my face.

It was odd getting sick. For the first time since I got to Nepal, I had a cold. Oh, I've been sick plenty of times, but it's always been food poisoning. After five or six good stiff food poisonings, you forget about a plain old cold. For a little while, I was wondering whether I had something truly awful, like rabies. Not that I'd been bitten by an animal, but I could tell it wasn't food poisoning, but I was nevertheless sick. I calmed down about that pretty quick. Some advil and orange juice don't make you feel better if you have rabies.

Ewan's parents are visiting. They went for a walk up one of the Kathmandu Valley's hills yesterday. To further spite the idea that a beautiful springtime is upon us, it started to rain, and then hail, and then a lightning bolt hit the ground 20 feet from them and they saw the ground steaming afterwards. They told me it was pretty scary.

Tomorrow, the Hobbses and Nini are off to Pokhara. They planted a flower bed outside our flat this afternoon. Our landlord has alotted us a bit of a garden, but we've been typical engineers about the thing, and just left it, up until now.

springtime

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 13:07:00 +0000

It's springtime. It happened in the last two weeks. No more jackets to go out, just a nice shirt and a sunny day. This kind of weather means a lot more to me after going through winter than it otherwise would. Take southern California, where it's always sunny and warm - there's no contrast there to make springtime. Taken to the other extreme, like in Fargo, springtime isn't nearly so sweet either. The piles of black melting snow and slush in the roads take too much away - once those are gone, the wanderlust of it being warm and sunny is gone. But here, it's just right - like in northern California. Since there's no snow on the ground, all of a sudden when it's sunny and warm, everything's beautiful. The contrast from just a few days prior is what does it. All the girls suddenly are a great deal more attractive too. I attribute that to everyone switching to fewer layers.

And springtime has me thinking, this place is good for me. I'm feeling good. I've been taking care of myself.

Springtime also means there are a lot of white people walking around the streets of Kathmandu who look like they're 'finding themselves in Nepal'. This often includes looking like a homeless person in San Francisco, but with the addition of the dirty clothes being expensive, synthetic, quick-drying materials. There may be a poncho. There may be a book about Buddhism or ayervedic medicine under the arm, and a whiff of incense may be detected when you walk past. It almost certainly includes a necklace made of rope, and possibly includes a man purse. If no man purse, then a huge, formless bag. No fanny packs, no SLR cameras - that's a different genre. I don't bring up the 'finding themselves' genre to beleaguer their deal (much). I bring it up to draw the comparison that this kind of thing is not what has gotten me happy in Nepal. It's something else.

It's not been big things that have led to feeling good. It's not resolutions. It's small stuff, in the presence of a lot of life's issues being an average of 12 and 1/4 time zones away. I've been sitting up straight. I've been sitting cross-legged more. I've been shaving every other day. I've been wearing presentable clothes, for once. I've been getting up at around 8:30 without an alarm clock. I've been washing my face. I've stopped wearing white socks. If you spend a little more on socks than you would if you buy clear plastic bags of white socks, you can get some nice stuff - not fancy, just not white. For starters, steal your dad's socks like I did. I've stopped touching my face.

That last one is the weirdest - I know. A guy I know once recounted to me, while going down the 405 one night in LA, that a doctor told him that the way to get sick less and have better skin is to stop touching your face. The story went that the doctor relayed it as 'off the record' - the kind of thing that makes you lean in and speak quietly. It seems to be working.

Swopener

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 18:24:00 +0000

This afternoon I got a package from the shop TA's at the PRL. Awesome care package, signed by everyone except Nicole, who was supposed to bring lunch to the weekly meeting, but was in Reno. The package included my very own Swopener:

304 Stainless, electroplated, rounded edges where your hand touches, chamfered edges on the business parts, great surface finish, great registration on the fixturing flip. Oh man, I'm still geeking out over speculations on the tooling.

dude

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 18:10:00 +0000

Dude means 'milk' in Nepali, pronounced just like Americans say it. This must contribute to how hilarious 20-somethings 'finding themselves in Nepal' are to Nepalis. This situation has me saying 'dude' a lot less than I used to, so that's good.

The trekkers are starting to come back. Yesterday Ewan and I were on one of the major streets downtown, and we saw quite a few. What seems like 'quite a few' to us is relative to very few being around during the winter. But to Nepalis in the tourism business, the number of trekkers is extremely low - business is not good. May have something to do with the political situation.

ICIMOD

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 16:53:00 +0000

A few months ago, Ewan, Nini, and I went to see the Royal Botanical Gardens at Godavri. It was a nice day out. It had been quite a while since we'd left Kathmandu, and the air and calm up there was nice. The ride home wasn't so hot. It was in a minivan with twenty people in it, mostly loud teenage girls. The hell van was driven by a 15 year old, completely out of control. Sometimes he veered off the asphalt onto the dirt shoulder. But all in all, it was a good time, and I think the driver succeeded in impressing the girls. Some memorable pictures really captured the extent of beauty available at the gardens.

This Tuesday, we headed back to Godavri. But this time, we didn't visit the government-run botanical gardens, we went to ICIMOD - the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development. It's an INGO, with the stated goal of developing technology for the rural poor in mountainous terrain. We're told the money comes from the Germans, so that's probably why things are done right. The place was beautiful. It blew the government botanical gardens out of the water.

There were plots of nitrogen-fixing plantings, breeds of enormous goats that make 3 liters of milk per day, bunnies whose angora fur (the shaving kind, not the killing kind) can support a family, slope-farming techniques, and much more. They had plots of fruits they're breeding for Nepali village economies - like citrus, kiwi, and passion fruit. The citrus stuff is only applicable for below 2000 meters, we were told. They had demonstrations of water pumping concepts, and efficient charcoal briquetting. All in all, a wild place. The office is in the middle of a forest in the hills, so between that and its stated goals, it made me think of the Rocky Mountain Institute for the developing world.

EcoSystem's human-powered generator is coming along. We went up to KC's today with the Chinese-made gearhead motor that we had delivered to our bosses' hotel in Bangkok. It's a complete circus getting stuff shipped to Kathmandu. Shipping DHL from Quingdao to Bangkok, then hand-couriering to Kathmandu ended up saving everyone a lot of hassle and money. The motor has the name 'Linix' die-cast into it. Incidently, there are cough drops named Unix in Nepal - it's as if people name things after cool English words. Maybe Linix and Unix mean something in Mandarin and Nepali, respectively, and I'm just projecting. Probably not.

That funny naming thing reminds me of when a friend of mine worked in Russia, and his company wanted to rename themselves to sound less Russian and more international. Their current name was perfectly descriptive of their line of work, but it was just too Russian. The buddy of mine was the only native-English-speaker at the company, and they wanted to know what he thought about the name they'd arrived at: Flextera. He recounted this story to me that evening. I was sitting there, kind of leaning over the table listening. He paused and looked at me after he said the name they'd worked so hard to arrive at, Flextera. I said, 'sounds like a company that makes cheap modems'. He said, 'exactly'. The point is, these English-ish names foreign companies come up with - more often than not - make no sense.

KC really liked the DC motor and the way it was supposed to fit in with the human-powered generator. He also really liked the bike chain ring and western-standard chainring bolts we'd brought to put on the motor. He got a little concerned about the pitch on the bolts though - they were those hex-wrench kind of bolts that go with a sleeve to make up a sex bolt on nice bikes' chain sets. He said he couldn't get a tap for it in Nepal - so he'll make one. They machine carbon steel all the time at his place, and they make enough gears on their horizontal mill to know how to make a helical groove. Making taps - you gotta love that kind of initiative.

not about Nepal, but also not about welding

noreply@blogger.com (williambeecher) — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 09:17:00 +0000

This copy was originally the second-haf of the previous post, aluminum welding in the developing world. It was brought to my attention today by a friend that most people don't want to read about welding though, so I've moved this text into its own post.

I've been reading a lot of fiction here in Nepal. For some, that's normal - for me, that means I have a lot more free time here than I did at school. I wonder if that's entirely healthy. It feels healthy, but I'm weary that spending a lot of time 'on myself' is warping. Regardless, I've been going through my bosses' shelves of books, and have been on a science-fiction kick for the last two months. I'm reading the third book of the Dune series. Man, is that some heavy plot-driven science fiction. Before that, I picked 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea off their shelf. Once I started reading it in Bhaktapur, I saw it was the abridged edition. I don't think anyone over 12 should be reading abridged books.

A while ago, I got a compilation of short science-fiction stories off the bosses' shelf. The book was pitched as being 'presented by Isaac Asimov'. The back cover said the book, and Asimov's magazine in the 1980's, present 'hard core science fiction, the way it used to be written'. I thought that was pretty funny.

Ewan and Nini are off at dinner. Ewan told me about an hour ago they were going out for a romantic dinner. I think that's great. I haven't done that kind of thing with a special lady enough, historically. It shows a good consciousness of the present. Nepal is a great place to do something like that. They went to the Summit Hotel down the road - seriously swanky at about USD7 per person. Big spender! For USD34, you can get the best meal in town: a 22 course Nepali dinner a hotel named Dwarika's. For this 22-courser, you have to notify them of your plan to attend two hours ahead of time. The meal comes with a retinue of ladies serving, and a really beautiful traditional Nepali room. There's a picture on their wall attesting that Prince Charles ate it.

Speaking of the British monarchy, Ewan's been telling me about Prince Philip - Queen Elizabeth's husband. This came up after the recent news that Prince Charles is going to marry his special lady, but she won't be titled 'Queen' - she'll be 'Her Royal Majesty Princess Consort, Dutchess of Cornwall'. I didn't even know Prince Charles is the Duke of Cornwall.

The story is that Prince Philip is known for saying some pretty funny stuff, like when he was being toured through an Indian school and commented on the plumbing with "by jove, this looks like it was put together by a bunch of Indians'. Way to go, really connected to the people.