Ke Bhayo?

This little Nepali phrase means “What happened?” And I heard it A LOT as I hobbled around the city. I’ve decided that, when Nepalis are injured, they just stay home. This would explain why the eyes of everyone I passed followed my foot as I went. C’mon, people! Haven’t you ever seen purple toes before?

My favorite reaction, though, had to be the cute (cute like a smurf, not cute like Ben Affleck) waiter at the Red Dingo. He stared as I limped to the table and said “Teekchaeena!” Which basically means, “You are not ok!” I tried to explain what had happened and he was very sympathetic. “Oh, yes, the roads are very bad in Kathmandu. It happens to all of us. It is something we all must face.” He was so serious and so sympathetic that I felt like he thought my grandmother had just died! It was just so cute, though, that Jenn and I died laughing and he just grinned.

There were definitely other moments when Jenn and I just couldn’t hold it together. One was when we got to spend an evening in Nagarkot. A travel agent that Jenn knows found us a great deal on a hotel and a driver to take us there. As we’re driving up the mountain to our hotel, the driver suddenly pulls over. He gets out of the car and raises the hood. “Ke Bhayo?” The driver tells us that the engine is hot. I was relieved to see him pull out a big bottle of water because I had no idea how we would get up the mountain, much less down, if the car wasn’t up for it. I notice him pouring the water and I’m really surprised that he was able to take the radiator cap off so soon after shutting the car off. There are all sorts of warnings about that and how the car can basically blow up in your face, then implode upon itself. Then I realized that he wasn’t so much pouring the water in the engine as he was pouring it on the engine. Just a note to all of you newbie drivers out there: THIS IS NOT OK TO DO! First of all, it’s not at all effective and secondly, you run the risk of cracking the engine! But, ke garne? (What to do?) He stopped one more time to do the same thing and we managed to make it to our hotel, so I guess it was ok.

The night we spent in Nagarkot was completely worth the perilous drive up there. We had asked people to pray for a clear view because there was so much smog that I hadn’t really seen the Himalayas yet. This is ridiculous because we were so close to them! So, we get to our hotel and there are all these great balconies overlooking the valley (which we can’t really see into because of the smog) and with breathtaking views of the mountains (also hidden behind smog) and we decide to sit outside and spend some time with the Lord. We were only about 15 minutes into this when the first few drops of rain began to fall. Not to worry! There was a level above ours with a balcony so we just moved our table underneath the balcony above us. We didn’t worry too much about the thunder when it first started to rumble. It was just so far away. And besides, it was barely raining. We got distracted and didn’t even notice the storm until it was right on us. Crazy lightning and loud thunder in the Himalayas! It was incredible! It was probably unwise for us to sit out in it. We didn’t have much of a choice, though. I wasn’t in the business of moving very fast because it was really my first day of walking on my ankle. It was raining so hard, that it would have been ridiculous to try to move. So we just sat and enjoyed it. It turns out that the storm was God faithfully answering our prayers.

The waiter told us that night that the storm would clear the smog. He said that, if it was clear, he would come knock on our door to see the sunrise. We tried not to be completely creeped out by his offer, but to graciously accept. Turns out that they knock on everyone’s door on a clear morning. It’s just not every morning that you can actually see the sunrise over the Himalayas. When there’s a view, they want to make sure you don’t miss it. It was the most glorious sunrise! We started at the level of the hotel just above ours. Then the owner of the mountain view knocked on his window to let us know we were blocking his view. So, we kept going up and ended at the very top level. The clouds were below us and looked like a sea. The “foothills” were islands rising out. There just aren’t words, so here:

I don’t think that my photographs can even capture it. It was incredible.

It was so great to just get time away with Jenn and enjoy one another. I forget how much we laugh when we’re together. I was freezing that night when we went to bed so I pulled the extra blanket over me. The extra blanket weighed approximately 386 pounds. I was completely trapped under the weight of it once I laid down. The sad thing is that, when I slid my legs under the blanket, my pant leg was pushed up to my neck. As I was trying to fix that, my shirt was twisted 438° around my torso. As I fixed that, my sleeve was forced all the way up to my ear. It was so much work to fix all of this and, every time I got one thing situated, something else had gone awry. I finally couldn’t fix anything because I was laughing so hard. Even laughing was a lot of work under that blanket, which just made me laugh harder. It’s just really nice to have those moments when you’re laughing so uncontrollably that you completely forget why you started laughing in the first place so there’s no hope of ever stopping.

I miss Jenn.

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