Birthdays and Weddings

I started my day off with breakfast outside on the roof. Two slices of peanut butter toast and a small cup of milk tea. Soon after I headed out to a birthday celebration. Who's you ask? Why the Dalai Lama of course! It was held at a Tibetan Refugee Camp, (which is not what the Nepali governments calls it might I add), with hundreds maybe thousands of Tibetans in attendance. There was traditional clothing and children running around everywhere with small toys. It was absolutely fascinating to see that many Tibetans all in one place like that. They dress differently than Nepalis and most women do not have their noses pierced which is shocking to see in Nepal (almost every woman in Nepal of all ages has her nose pierced in atleast one way). It was really really fun to see and just be around that many Tibetans all at once.

From there I went to a friends family's wedding. I got to take a ton of pictures and eat lunch there and it was beyond fascinating. You hear so much about Nepali weddings but really it was as beautiful as you imagine it.

I sat down for a while during the lunch break for the bride and groom, (weddings are all day events so lunch breaks are needed,) and a group of kids sat down next to me. Children who are in school in this generation in Nepal have pretty good English, at least the wealthy ones, and they love to practice it, so lets just say I saw it coming. "Hello, excuse me" followed shortly after two younger girls dressed in beyond fancy dresses with silly high heels and small purses sat down. I was soon questioned how I was, where I was from, what my name was, where I live (in Kathmandu), if I went to school, what I want to do when I grow up (no joke it was phrased that way too), if I had siblings, how old was my sister, what was her name, where is my sister, what does she do there, what is my last name (which really threw them), if I could pronounce their names, if I knew Nepali, if I could understand Nepali, if I knew how to say certain phrases in Nepali (which is really awkward when your Nepali language teacher is literally sitting right next to you), what was in my bag, was the stuff in my bag from America, if I had American chocolate in my bag, if i would go down stairs with them to see the birds (which they kept calling seagulls but were pigeons), if I would go get ice cream with them (they even offered to pay for mine if I didn't have money and tried to persuade me with how little time it would take or how refreshing it would be in the heat), I'm not kidding it wouldn't stop. My favorite questions of all though we're most definitely if I was married, they were quite dissappointed when I said no. They followed that up with how old I was- I'm twenty. This response illicted exactly the response I expected: shock. To which even though in my culture it's perfectly normal, I still felt pretty poorly about myself to be twenty and not married and to have let these girls down. Haha. They then told me quite happily that the bride was twenty. Which illicted in me a touch of sadness. She's only twenty. Yikes. Better than fourteen I suppose.

However through this quite hysterical conversation with these two eleven-year-old girls, the best part was yet to come. "What caste do you belong to?" I'm not kidding. I just smiled and was so taken a back that this, in 2014, was still considered a publicly appropriate question. Never having had expected to ever be asked this question in my entire life, I hesitated, uhmmm how do you answer that, I settled for "we don't have that in America, it isn't like that." Which looking back probably wasn't the best answer possible but I tried my best.

And in the time that it took to type all of that my laundry sitting outside in a bucket in the dark should be done soaking and it is time I rinse it and hang it up to dry! Namaste