Arrived safely yesterday and managed a decent night's sleep but woke this morning to calls and texts from the UK checking I was ok - I turned on the news to find an early morning plane crash had killed 7 Brits and 12 others! So sad and certainly put me in a sombre mood. I began the day with a cup of tea in a shady cafe with Kancha Gurung, one of my best friends here and president of Tri Netra foundation which is a small home offering support and education for blind children in Nepal. We discussed progress since last year and I was happy to learn a local guy and his Finnish friend have been putting on regular documentary film nights with 70% of the profits going to the foundation.
Next stop for me was the Pooja Paper shop. The owner, Sushil Thapa, I met six years ago and as is the custom in Nepal we sat down to talk business over a nice cup of masala chiya (tea with spices). I have a custom order for our popular mini notebooks and we are working on several new product designs in handmade lokta paper. After a flying visit to a silver shop where I picked out stones for some silver commission pieces, it was over to a busy courtyard to visit my friend Tashi Ghale in his tourist information office to catch up on local news and upcoming events. I was happy to find the Kathmandu Art Gallery Shop open as I wandered past - the shopkeeper Pradip Balami is a talented artist and I had a nice hour checking out his latest work and giving suggestions on developing the sales space over (you guessed it) another cup of tea!
The evening saw Thamel, the tourist area of Kathmandu, come alive as Saturday is the day off for most nepalese and they all like to go out and have fun on "Good Friday". I met friends and went on an interesting tour which included chats in an Irish Pub, dancing at an out door psy-trance party and chilling with a cocktail at a lovely bar. Plenty of time to practise my nepali and share stories and jokes. It's a hard life, but someone's got to do it!
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| Pradip Balami holding one of his pictures |
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