Wow, wow and wow!

Nepal is a different place.

It is rural Mexico, but without the hygiene standards.  This place longs for squalor – it would be an upgrade.

It is Jamaica, except without the intensity.  When Virginia was in the cab without a seatbelt – no problem.  When all of our luggage was atop a van without cords – no problem.

It is crowded and cramped.

Yet we are having a blast in Kathmandu.

Perhaps this is the best summary of how different Nepal is.  The country is two hours and fifiteen minutes behind Hong Kong.  What is the purpose of the extra 15 minutes other than to say “we just do not fit into the standard mold”.  Frankly, I kinda wish they had chosen to be off by 17 minutes and 23 seconds, but perhaps I am a rebel.

We arrived at the Katmandu International Airport yesterday night around 10:30 pm (that would be 12:45 Hong Kong time) and it was surreal.

Here is a picture of the largest airport in Nepal.

I have no words to describe how desolate this felt at 11 PM (1:15 AM Hong Kong time)

The boys said it looked like an ad for post-apocalyptic videos games – mist, unfinished structures, sketchy characters and low lighting.  By low lighting, I mean LOW lighting.  Katmandu has rolling blackouts for 6 hours everyday.  The blackouts are scheduled and vary by district.  Hotels post the schedule for the 6 hours each day they will be without electricity.

In the States, we do not like people telling us when we can water our lawns.  Here, you go dark 25% of every day.  The other 75% has very few lights.  I suspect that the typical Wal-Mart parking lot emits more lumens than 3 city blocks dohere.

In the airport, they decided it was too much effort to have us take off our backpacks, so they waived us through the customs security check unsearched.

Wiley turned to me and asked, “Did they just avoid procedures because it was too much effort?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“I can appreciate these people.”

Liam kept staring.  If you will recall, Liam blithely declared that China “did not feel foreign” to him.  He looked at me and said, “yep, this is feeling foreign.  Really, really foreign.”

As I alluded to above, the ride back involved stacking our 6 backpacks on top of a van, shoving the 3 big kids into the back of the van (no actual seats)  and putting Virginia in the front seat with the driver and porter (but no seatbelt).  Susie kept asking “is there a seatbelt?”  “No problem” came back.   They were perplexed as Susie held Virginia from behind for the 15 minute ride.

Loading the van. Safety? No problem!

When we got to the “luxury hotel”, we woke the front desk workers who were sleeping in the lobby (where would you have them sleep?

The lobby, AKA the employee dorm

The basement or a closet?  Sheesh – where is your compassion?)  They got up, checked us in and spent 10 minutes trying to spell the wifi password (would you have guessed that ‘management’ would sound like “manezent’ – they did).

We work up, ate a Nepalese breakfast just as the lights went out.  I looked up expecting to see the staff sprinting to find the breaker.  No one moved.  No one seemed surprised.  I eventually asked what was happening.

“Everyone gets 6 hours off.”

“From what?”

“Electricity.”

“You have rolling blackouts for 6 hours every day?”

“Yes.”

While the power was going off, we were meeting with Tsedo, a Tibetan refugee that has become a dear friend of a business school classmate of Susie’s named Susie Silver.  Susie Silver is an accomplished traveller, particularly in Asia.  Tsedo is smart, knowledgeable, and honest to a fault.  He has helped us with flights, hotels, home stays, permits and guides.

He also set us up with a driver who took us to the two great religious sites in Kathmandu – one Buddhist and one Hindu.

The Buddhist site (Boudhanath) was an intriguing visit.

The Stupa - I love the eyes

We saw pilgrims who have come long distances to circle the “stupa” (shrine) and perform the ritual of the Kora – circling the building in a clockwise fashion and turn the prayer wheels and recite mantras.  We visited the monastery and saw exotic icons.

This interesting image was hidden on the ceiling of the monastary

We then hopped into our van and drove to the most important Hindu site in Nepal (or so several people insisted to us), Pashupatinath.

This place was truly singular in my experience.  It was not particularly striking.  In fact, it was hard to tell where holy ground ended and random structures began.

In fact, it is hard to describe our experience as we arrived at Pashupatinath.

We arrive along a path that took us past vendors and then to a river.  The river is shallow, dirty and heavily polluted.  In this polluted river, we saw people washing clothes, rinsing their hands and even (please tell me this is not true) drawing water.

Smoke wafted downstream, making the detritus even more unappealing.

It was then that I heard the wails.

Soul-crushing wails.  Tears.  Mourning.

My eye turned up to see the pyres.

Funeral pyres.

Five were burning at different stages.  One was practically ashes.   Others were still in full flame.

We watched as a man pushed some burnt material into the river.  I would like to think it was wood, but I do not think so.  I do not know how much heat is necessary to completely incinerate a human form, but I doubt these pyres were sufficient.

As the ashes/embers/material fell into the river, I watched a child fetch a soccer ball from the water as his mom washed laundry that must surely contain some of the cremation.

Laundry time

We then became fascinated by the ceremony across from us.  It was the source of the wails.

Here is what we saw.  A body wrapped in red silk with gold trim was being lifted onto a bed of wood.  Mourners circled the body, placing flowers and dyed powder on it.

They participants put water and (I think) milk into the corpse’s mouth.  They put jewelry and money on the body.

[Note – at one point, the jewelry and money were cast into the river.  Moments later, a young boy strolled across the river and retrieved most of it form the water.]

I cannot tell you how sad this is to me

Near the end of the ceremony a woman and a man circle the body three times.  They also put water in the mouth.  They then took a lit bundle of straw and circled it another three times.  She then placed the flame against the face, wept massively and sat down.

I have nothing to add here

A body being prepared for cremation

I think we watched this for 20-25 minutes, but I cannot be sure.  It seemed endless, yet instantaneous.  The emotion was raw and the ceremony well-rehearsed, though deeply foreign.  We would later learn more about the meaning and preparation of the ceremony from a friendly guide, but nothing will erase the purity of the experience.

Part of the purpose of funerals is to provide a familiarity that helps us deal with grief.  They help us become more comfortable – they give us a context to understand loss.

Sitting on a squalid riverbank hearing sadness and watching bodies burn shoved the humanity of death in my face.  It was solemn and powerful, despite the soccer game and the roaming onlookers.

We then toured the rest of the temple complex.  We soon saw what makes this place particularly famous.

Monkeys.  Lots and lots of monkeys.  We saw momma monkeys and baby monkeys and alpha male monkeys and swarms of monkeys.  Apparently, the inhabitants of the temple feed them daily.  Clearly, they are not going anywhere.

This guy seems sufficiently excited to see us!

They move rather rapidly

We also met some “holy men”.  They were extremely odd, but surprisingly friendly.  They invited us to join them for a photo (OK, we gave them a few dollars, but they were WAY more excited than $4 justified).

Baskin clan rollin' with our homies!

The last time all four of our kiddos were openly impressed was the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.  Usually, at least one feigns indifference to look sophisticated or cool.  Not then.  Not now.  Pashupatinath left an impression.

Steve Sir

We have loved being in London.  After 7 weeks of living in apartments and rented rooms, we are staying with dear friends.  I was shocked to learn that we have not seen these friends in person since 1996, yet we picked up as if we had not missed more than a year or two.

Some friendships simply transcend time and place.  I am not sure what creates fundamental compatibility, but we have it with this couple of Londoners.

I hear you ask, “How did you meet them?”

I am glad you asked.

In September 1994, Susie and I married and went on a honeymoon in Turkey and Greece.  We started in Istanbul, but soon moved out of the city to more remote locations.  We flew to Selchuk (near the spectacular ruins in Ephesus) and spent the morning walking around. By the mod-afternoon, Susie was feeling ill.  By the afternoon, she had “flu-like symptoms” in a big way.

There is some speculation of the source of her illness with both a simple and an exotic explanation.  The simple explanation involves her eating a salad that had been washed with Turkish water.  This water brought with it a little Motezuma’s Revenge (or perhaps Suyleman’s Revenge) and it made Susie sick.  We, however, also proffer a more exciting possibility.

After walking through the touristy part of Selchik, we decided to walk around the back streets to see the real communities.  Istanbul was already a modern, secular city, but Selchek was a conservative Islamic community with a few touristy streets to cater to the Ephesus crowd.  As you know, the conservative Islamic community finds female skin offensive.  Since it was hot in September, Susie was wearing a skirts and a light blouse with exposed shoulders.  She looked beautiful and somewhat European (we had people guess French and Italian), but to the natives, she must have looked like a serious Western sinner.

We did not think about the effect our stroll might have on the local population.  Heck, we saw much more revealing outfits in the tourist areas.  The tourists, however, were smart enough to stick with on the beaten path.  Not us.  We went through the streets freely.  As we strolled, we came upon a family in the street featuring a cute 5 year old and her grandmother sitting outside a home.  As we walked by, the grandmother hid her child’s eyes and gave Susie a raspberry.

Some locals explained that this was the “Evil Eye”.

This is the alternative explanation of Susie’s ailment.  Perhaps she dressed spicy and her body got dicey.

In any event, I went to grab some food for us and brought it to the room.  To put it mildly, my lovely bride was taken aback at the smell.  She banished me from the room.  I was to leave, eat, make sure I was clean-smelling when I get back.

While outside of our hotel, I was eating and having a drink.  Sitting alone, I suddenly heard a lovely English accent.

“I met with them after I returned from Davidson College.”

I am not the type of guy that accosts strangers on vacation, but this was too much to ignore.  I am a confirmed Anglophile and this was a great BBC accent.  More importantly, Davidson is my beloved alma mater.  Finally, Davidson is notably tiny with roughly 1800 people at the school.  To hear that accent talk about Davidson necessitated a conversation.

That is how I met Lucy Congrev and Colin Evans.

We quickly became mutual smitten and talked for over an hour.  I did not concern myself with my bride.  She wanted me gone and I was gone.  She wanted to sleep and I was out of the way.  In the meantime, I was enjoying rich and lovely conversation.  In fact, I think I was describing my wonderful new wife to my new friends.

Susie, however, was starting to have mild delusions.  In her sick state, she had a nightmare in which I had been taken by someone (Turks? Travel Agents?) and needed help.  Being a committed spouse committed to my rescue, she rose from her bed and staggered out of the room and out of the hotel.  I looked up to see her weaving her way from the hotel like a wraith.  I rushed to her to see what had engendered this emergence.

She looked at me and said, “I am here.”

“Yes, but you look terrible.  How are you.”

“Not well.  I feel faint.”

“Do I need to call a doctor?”

“Maybe, but I have something that you must share with the doctor.”

“An allergy?  A previous health history?”

“Make sure they use clean needles!”

Susie is intrigued with medicine.  I am convinced that she is better diagnostician than most of the doctors I know.  In fact, I am sure she would have been a doctor had they a more sane training regimen.  Susie understands the importance and joy of sleep and a medical rotation sounded like torture on earth.  She trained at Kellogg Business School to manage a major hospital.  We are lucky at camp to have her skills running our Health Center.

But as is often true of medical experts, she knows stories of every conceivable medical malady.  Activities that would never strike me as even mildly dangerous create risks that must be mitigated.  Apparently, unclean needles in Turkey were such a risk – so much so that the idea of ‘clean needles’ managed to pierce her consciousness in a away that ‘stay in bed, you are sick’ or ‘he had only been gone an hour and probably has not been kidnapped’ could not.

After having a nice doctor give her a once-over, we knew she was OK and was 100% 2 days later.  In the meantime, we decided to travel with Colin and Lucy.  We had a car and no one had hard reservations, so we chose locations and explored.  While our time together was short (10 days in Turkey and a week in Texas 2 years later), we have kept in touch.

Our reunion has been a true delight.  They have 2 darling children, James 8 and Olivia 7.  Frankly, there are few things more cute than a young child speaking with an English accent.

Today was a light day.  We watched England lose in the Rugby World Cup (Colin took it with a stiff upper lip) and Texas get pummeled by OU (I was less circumspect, but better than normal).  We also walked around the city and visited one awesome museum – the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Room.

As the war broke out in 1941, the English created a secret shelter that was the nerve center of the British war effort.  It was bomb-proof-ish.  Apparently, it would not have survived a direct hit even after they covered it with a 6-foot barrier of steel and concrete.  Luckily, the direct hit never came and the efforts to fight the Fascists continued from this bunker.

Here is a picture of the main communication room.

A Replica of one of the Key Bunker Rooms.

Here is the tiny closet that housed the first “hot line” to the US, where Churchill would talk directly and secretly with FRD or Truman.  This room was such a secret that even the folks in the bunker did not know about it.  It was inside a broom-closet sized room that required a key. To assuage suspicion, the head leaders created a story that the room was the private bathroom of Churchill and that it had the only flushing bathroom.  That story reduced curiosity and maintained the secret.

"Hey Franklin! Have You Heard the Glenn Miller Album?!?"

Churchill is one of the most fascinating figures I have ever studied.  He started his political career as a mild conservative, quickly switched to a borderline Socialist and hen became the voice of anti-Hitlerism.  He was an orator of the first order and a water-colorist of the second order.  He predicted the manipulations of Hitler and was swept into power when the predictions proved true.  He led as well as any statesman in the 20^th Century

I also want to share a picture that I love from today.  I wish we had more sun, but the contrast between the Memorial, the building and the vines is quite pleasing to me.

We Loved the Bold Contrasting Colors

Tomorrow, we tackle the Tower of London and the National Gallery.  Colin and Lucy  are horrified at our pace, but our kids are holding up very well.  I look forward to sharing our many discoveries tomorrow.

Steve Sir

I started to become aware of international politics in the 1980s.  In addition to being the decade that gave us marginal musical acts, it was also the decade that the Soviet Union cratered and the Iron Curtain was lifted.

I share this because when I was first starting to understand the world, the Soviet Union was in obvious decline.  They failure in Afghanistan had signaled the end of their military aggressiveness and dominance.  I could see all that and I believed that they truly wanted to modernize and become less belicose.

Meanwhile, my father would shake his head in a resolved and frustrated way and say that the Soviets cannot be trusted and that they are intent on world domination.  I thought that this seemed thick-headed and reactionary.  Of course, I had that rare wisdom that comes from little to no experience, so I was quick to point out the weakness in his thinking.

After going to the Museum of Terror today, I understand my father so much better.

Outside of the Museum of Terror

The Entry Hall With Symbols of the Nazis and Soviets

The Museum of Terror sits in a building that was used by the Nazis in WWII and by the Soviets after 1945 as the central interrogation and police headquarters.  I am amazed that both organizations used the exact same address, but they did come with basements that have nasty and ruthless jails, so I guess it makes sense.

The museum is very impressive.  It uses video, sound, slow elevators, great design and superior story-telling to convey the suffering resulting from the occupation of these two hideous regimes.

Yesterday, I suggested that it is not fun to be the small land-locked pawn in European politics.  I now see that I was more right than I had thought.  We learned about elements of the Holocaust, relocation of wealthy businessmen and farmers, torture for politic incorrectness and the destruction of a vibrant economy.

In particular, I came to understand the human element and the historic element.  And I came to understand my father better.  While I grew up with Gorbachev and Perestoika, he saw Stalin overtake Eastern Europe and slaughter millions. He saw a country intent on growing across the entire world that was also overtaking us technologically – using information acquired from us using spies.  Where I saw weakness and hope for reconciliation, he saw manipulation and a complete commitment to domination.

I had not seen the swallowing of Eastern Europe.  I did not watch great countries lose control of their nations.  I was not there when no country aided the Hungarians in 1957 or when Sputnick proved that that Soviets could do more than lust steal technology.  I know understand his point of view so much better.

It makes me wonder which of my world views will come in conflict with those of my children.  Will we resolve them well?  I hope we do not have to wait 3 decades for clarity like I did.

Tomorrow will be less political and more fun.  I just wanted to share this epiphany,

Steve Sir