I miss Nepal. All the time I am dreaming about how to get back to that place. I want to trek, and see those mountains up close. When we got to Sandipur we were at about 12,000 looking up over 16,000 ft to the summit of Kanchenjunga. It’s impossible to really accept that you are looking at something that massive, and easy to imagine how Buddhist tradition says that the himals are the homes of gods and goddesses. SO MUCH TO LEARN! I want to know the language better, I want to learn more about Buddhism and just that way of looking at the world.
But most of all I miss Ilam, the NCDC family and especially my host mom, Indira. Sometimes when we were hanging out, and I wasn’t pestering her on teaching me Nepali with stupid sentences like “is a banana sour? No! It’s sweet.” and what not…. she would ask “you… what thinking?” And between languages I would try to tell her something about how beautiful I thought Ilam was, or how I grew a lot of the same things in my garden in Boulder as she does at her house (which she thought was endlessly entertaining by the way… Indira can laugh about something as simple as rhyming an English and Nepali word for about two hours).
I will never forget how once we finally got to Ilam, after all the flights and time shut down in Kathmandu for the strike and jeep ride…. getting out of the jeep and seeing Indira, walking back to our house and having that first cup of tea with her. That place really feels like home to me. Man, I can’t wait to go back. It’s hard not to know when that will be… but I know it will be sometime. I really want Matt to experience all of it… and especially Indira’s cooking which is going to make him lose his mind. She specifically asked me to bring him back, and invited him to her house for saag when I told her that was his favorite. SO CUTE, I LOVE HER!
It is cool, though… to get to a place almost exactly on the other side of the world and have the same overwhelming feeling of home that I get when Matt and I are driving in the mountains and finally get in view of the range where his family’s place is (where we have hiked all over for the past three years and still have endless trails to hit up).
