Characters > Katherine

I have been feeling creatively pathetic recently, and I haven't had a clue what to write about for months.  Then I remembered this old little thing.  The characters that I have met in Nepal.  This post is about one of my favourites.  Katherine.

[joint birthday party hilarity]

She's an American who arrived here just two weeks before I did on a program called Princeton in Asia.  She's working somewhere between Child Protection and Education at the US branch of Save the Children [SAVE THEM!  SAVE THEM!].  She's the only one amongst my close friend circle living in Lazimpat and it means we get to do a lot of amazing stuff together.  She could fall asleep inside a lion's mouth, or on the tracks of an oncoming steam train at the drop of a hat which makes her a rather bad movie-watching buddy but is an amazingly good-hearted and optimistic person.

Our first encounter pretty much was an epic 30km uphill bike ride (man, those ARE beautiful photos, and I wish I was writing stuff like that now) through mud and rain in the middle of the monsoon, where we got lost and had images of appearing in the newspapers back home as "two stupid Western tourists lost in the forest"*.  

This even was closely followed by an adventure through the Nagarjun Forest - an area in which the former king lives.  It was organised in the heat of the moment on a Friday night over drinks.  "Its the weekend tomorrow and we don't even know what we are going to do?!?!!" Luckily, Gemma's friend Jaya (you should remember him from such adventures as Mero Charpi Explode Chha) came to the rescue and recommended the walk.  Amindst talk of "making the most of our time in Nepal" and doing something every weekend and totally embracing the outdoorsiness we climbed up another hill and I can't seem to find any post that has shared those photos with you [gasp].

Of course, the frequency of these adventuires deteriorated, once we established ourselves with routines and discovered that we might actually need to do work while we are here.  So, while we still try to organise the occaisional adventure, or get ourselves out the Hash, we usually content ourselves with hanging out between my place and hers and our favourite locales in Lazimpat.  

And we still have 4 months of adventures to enjoy!

*Incidentally I have heard rumours that there are mass graves in that particular national park from the insurgency (just in case this post left you with too good of a "happy feeling")