Off To Pokhara

Namaste!
Tomorrow morning we are off to Pokhara, me for the second time, everyone else for the first time. I am looking forward to showing my fellow volunteers around and maybe hiking into the hills for a day and having them meet the family that I stayed with. We will leave tomorrow (Thursday) morning and take a bus, which takes about 6 hours give or take. After a few straight weeks in the city we are in need or some cleansing, figuratively and literally. My feet are constantly caked with mud, I swear, no matter how hard I scrub them, especially now that the monsoon rains are coming down more often leading the streets to become rivers or mud. Anyway, we are planning to do some hiking, rent a paddle boat on Phewa lake, rent bikes for a day and bike into the beautiful countryside with a picnic lunch, relax, read, and have fun! We are actually going with quite the entourage: me, Christine, Amie, Matt, Rajendra, Hassia, Apar, BJ, and Ashton. Four of those are our Nepali friends who we invited along. It is always fun to have them come, also they are our shield against rip offs. It should be a nice relaxing weekend, and I will report about the happenings when I am back in Kathmandu on either Sunday or Monday.

Speaking of my fellow volunteers, here is a short rundown on who I have been living with:
Christine: one of my room mates. She is 20 years old, from Chicago and goes to Vasser College in New York. She is studying biology and music and wants to be a surgeon. Her dad owns a homeopathic store, and she has tons of cool homeopathic stuff here.

Amie: my other room mate. She got here about a week or a week and a half ago and is the newest addition to the gang. She is 23 years old, and graduated last year from Oberlin College with a degree in biochemistry. Right now she is about to embark on her second year of Teach For America. This program I had never heard of but sounds like an amazing, frustrating, and incredibly challenging experience. It is a program that employs recent college graduates to teach in inner city schools. So all last year she has been teaching chemistry and earth science at an inner city high school in Chicago. Wow, her stories are amazing. A very noble thing to do, and she seems to have learned a TON. She is originally from Ithaca, New York.

Matt: he lives in the "office" with us, but in his own room. He is going to be a senior at the College of Charleston and studying biology and wants to be a surgeon. He is from South Carolina and is full of southern pride. He is alot of fun, and very funny.

Melissa: she is 23 years old and room mates with Caroline who also lives in the office with us. She went to Grove City College, then got a masters degree at University of Tennessee in public health and epidemiology. She is originally from Colorado. She will be entering medical/PhD school in the fall either in San Diego or Seattle. She has worked alot with Third World medicine, focusing in Central and South America, especially Guatemala. She is very outdoorsy and fun to hang out with.

Caroline: Melissa's room mate. She is 20 years old and half way done with her undergrad at William and Mary in Williamsburg (which I am very jealous of) where she is an English major. She is teaching English here at a elementary school. She is originally from Maryland.

Kuber: (pronounced Ku-bear) he is between the ages of 15 and 18, none of us can figure it out. He is our cook, cleaner, server. I am not really sure what to call it. He lives at the office and has a small fold out bed and sleeps in the kitchen. He was hired by the family from a poor village some where outside of Kathmandu. He is very entertaining, and things we are all very funny. We kid him and pronounce words wrong, like saying Namaste which is pronounced na-ma-stay, we say "naa-mastee!" He teaches us alot of Nepali words, and we help him with his English homework. He just failed his English test, so we are making him study.