Pokhara, Nepal, Day 2 of 3. Mister Shakya was right: 3 days is TOTALLY not long enough to stay here. But 3 days is a heck of a lot better than none, let me tell you. I'm so glad we came. I am, as noted above, enchanted. Enamored. Blown away. Today we took a taxi halfway up a hill, which to some people probably would be a mountain except standing next to the Himalayas, and gazed at them. Some lucky ducks got to go paragliding. Next time we totally will. Even if I didn't buy anything else here I still couldn't afford it, 75USD/hour. Dang. Someday I WILL go paragliding. Just you wait. But even just sitting and drinking our ginger tea and laughing at Uncle Arjun charming posters off the lady for Rs.100 apiece, those mountains... Whoo baby. Our taxi took us down to the school Grampa planned and built. I'm pretty amazed. There was one lady who'd just retired who was still hanging around teaching pre-K who remembered mis abuelos and she was pretty excited to see us... She told me I look like mi mami, who was very small last time she saw her, and that was nice because usually people say I look like mi papi. I look like my mom to everyone here. And I feel like a celebrity just for being related to my grandparents. Grampa built the first hostel and suggested the huge water tank under the first bank of classrooms; Gramma started the first library in a thatch hut with a tiny wooden shelf. All the stories I've heard about my mom growing up, hanging out in Gramma's office at the library, and all that jazz, Grampa's lukewarm rope-and-bucket showers and the tiny attic room where they all slept, Mami and Mama crawling in Mahendra Cave on their stomachs, Grampa "hanging out" in the engineers' building yet never slowing down or stopping his work (he can't, ever - he'll work 'til he dies, you can bet on that)... Grampa being the strongest man around: once there was a fire and the schoolkids (among them Mama and his best friend, whose house we ate at tonight) got let out to help put it out, a whole row of thatch houses blazing away... They were just filling this 200L tub with water and then using small buckets to carry it to the fire. Grampa finally got angry with the slow pace and the burning strip, so he hoisted the whole 200L tub onto his back and carried it over. Crazy guy. Seventy something now and not even close to finished. I'm blown away. Haha. Mama also took us to the cave and to the gorge. Snap son, let me tell you... That gorge is death. He said that in Pokhara it's easy to make people disappear... In Pokhara it's best to be friends with everybody. The old bridge all covered in vines and leaves, with the gorge and the raging river far below, looks like something out of an Indiana Jones film. Takes my imaginative breath away. Avinash and Nicole and I are climbing the mountain tomorrow, I forget which one. Hah. In theory only. And the three of us plus Ashwin are starting a band called the Vultures (as opposed to the Eagles)/Buffy and the Vampire Slayers. Nicole is Buffy and Avinash is the vampire. Don't ask how that works out. Avinash on guitar, Ashwin on bass, Nicole on tabla, and me on vocals/bass clarinet/keyboard. We've also determined that Nicole will wake up bald (thaloo, in Nepali) tomorrow - OK, we're all waking up thaloo tomorrow :x After lunch Nicole, Ashwin, Avinash, and I went out alone. I love how Mama doesn't care - he said we'd get ripped off if we went without him, but I think we did reasonably well, between the boys' Nepali and all of our collective bargaining skills. We are no ordinary tourists, let me tell you. "In Kathmandu we get this for [insert unattainable price here]." Haha. Worked almost every time. But Nicole and I got sweet wool slippers with fleece lining, and skirts for 200 (not bad, even in IC) and I got a sweet tunic-thang... And a book called "Teach Yourself Korean." That makes 4 languages I'm trying to learn right now. I'll probably learn some sick mixture, like Nephingerean. Or something. Mwahaha. I WILL become supermultilingual if it's the last thing I do!!!!!!!!!!!! We went to Mama's old friend's house for dinner - actually, it's a chicken farm. Classy though. Nice. With good Nepali food. Good is an understatement. Nothing beats sitting in a marvy living room eating with your hands!! And then we had Nepali chia. Weird how it's chia instead of chai, ya? And Ashwin and Avinash and Shrishti, the daughter, taught us some Nepali. Like "Mero baloo thaloo cha." Which means, "My beer is bald." Nicole meant to say "My dad is bald" but it kinda came out wrong. Hahaha. And we played a bunch of hand games and whistled and clicked with our mouths... "Kids will be kids," is Mama's motto for today. We've been kinda off the wall. Like in the restaurant at lunch, we were eating sugar out of the dish and flicking it at each other while waiting for our food to get cooked... And at breakfast Avinash was teaching us to catch flies in our hands. On the mountain we were swordfighting with our posters, and at the cave we were having waterfights. Haha. Fun day. We're pretty mature. Mwahahahahaha. Yeah so anyways, tomorrow we're going boating sans rower-man, and then I guess probably more shopping. You can never get enough here, everything's so bright and beautiful and tempting... And there are rad styles and juice stands and even gelato!! Which I haven't seen in MONTHS... Love overload, man. Snap. I'm too excited. Someday everybody should get to come to Nepal. Hopefully it doesn't become one of the Utterly Unsafe Regions of the World. There are FAR too many of those. But Connor has pirate stories from Afghanistan, so... ;-)