Katmandu living

the van de Wiel/Schou Hansen family blog


Liva and Joop were creative today - If anyone are in doubt what this is, Liva told me to tell you that it was a "native American" and turkey - An Indian was simply not a good enough explanation.








I am back from my mission to Yemen and next weekend we will celebrate Sinterklaas. So this weekend we have been to the Dutch school to do the typical sinterklaas preparations, like baking cookies and making a ship for Sinterklaas to "sail" on in this landlocked country. Liva and Joop has been trying out their sinterklaas and swate Piet costumes, so all in all we should be ready for next week




We are getting close to the changing of guards here in Kathmandu - Lieke is coming home in tomorrow afternoon and I will be leaving 12 hours later on Monday morning - it is a bit tough but that is of course the price we have to pay.

Today the kids and I have been to supermarket to buy Loerdagsslik (Saturdays candy) and also went and looked at a car that we might buy - However, after looking at the used car market in Nepal I think that it is better to import a car instead. As the car we looked at today was a 5 year old RAV4 it was now old enough for Nepalies to buy it at a lower duty rate - So when we looked at the car the best offer was from a Nepali that had offered 19000 dollars for it - On the top of this the Nepali then have to pay 14000 dollar duty so the car comes to 33000 dollars - As it would cost us around 23000 dollars to import a new RAV4 directly from Japan I think we are going for this option - the only problem is that we will have to wait 3 months for the car.

As promissed you will find a couple of pictures of the kids from today - The first one is fromt he garden of Summit Hotel that we passes through every day. The other is in the Taxi on the way to the Supermarket. Most taxis in Kathmandu are old Maruti 800 (Suzuki 800) and they are rather small so I will normally have to roll down the window to have room enough for my arms.

Things have been pretty quite here in our blog the last week or so - With preparation for my mission to Yemen I have been busy trying to get ready (I have ticket and the hotel is booked) and have therefore not focused much on reporting news from here.

It is of course also because nothing much is happening here in Nepal. Lieke has been away for the last two weeks and me and the kids have not done much. Anyway I will try to take some pictures of the kids tomorrow and mayby Lieke and the kids after she returns on Sunday, as I am pretty sure that nothing will be updated the two weeks while I am in Yemen. It will be strange to get back to Yemen without a house to sleep in - the good thing is then that I will be staying at the Movenpick so I will have my own tennis court and my own in-door and out-door pool.


It is very nice that the kids are having more contact with Danish kids but it also comes at a price. After talking to her Danish class mates Liva came home and asked why we were not having Friday candy as the other Danes were. I told her that it was because we in Schou Hansen family always have had Saturday candy. So tonight we have started a new tradition - we are having candy on Saturdays and nothing the rest of the week. We are right now in front of the television watching Mama Mia and eating candy and the kids are loving it - Liva know most of the text to Mama Mia.


Lily, Joop and Rama making momos in our kitchen in our small apartment 


With nothing much to do while the kids are in school, our two didis (nannies) are busy trying to find out what to do with themselves. While we are still at the hotel (or rather apartment hotel) there is a maid service every day that comes in and clean up the place – they even do the dishes so we have nothing much else to do. So the last two days Rama and Lily has been cooking for us. Yesterday they made a Nepalese meal with chicken veggies and Dhal, and today Lily suggested making Momos. Momo is a dumpling that is eaten on both sides of the Himalayas, though I think it originates from Tibet. So Lily has been off to the supermarket and bought us our first real Nepali kitchen appliance – a steamer pot. I am pretty sure we will also have to get a rice cooker as it seem difficult to live without here in Nepal.

Liva is having her after-school activity for the first time today so she is coming home late. She is off at 7.30 in the mornings and only home at 15.35 today so she is having some long days. With Dutch school and after-school activities she now only have one day where she is home direct from school. She has chosen “fun with Spanish” and “handicrafts” as her two after school activities (I guess she want’s to brush up on her Spanish that is getting a bit rusty by now). Joop can still not take after school activities so she is only out late on two days.   


After quite an impressive start after we arrived to Nepal I have slowed a bit down with the publishing of news. By any measure today was a historic day with Obama winning the presidential election in the US. It was also a very typical day here in Nepal – to watch the election. I got up at 5.30 only to find out that we had a power-cut. The demand for electricity in Kathmandu is 700 GW but only 500 is produced every day – so to alleviate this, scheduled brown-outs have been introduced. So on average we have 2-3 hours without electricity a day. To avoid this most people have installed generators or inverters (a kind of massive battery that store electricity for the power-cuts). Anyway, I had to go back into bed as there was nothing much to do without electricity. The electricity returned half an hour after we got up, and I just managed to see that Obama had won Pennsylvania before the electricity went at the cable provider – So now we had electricity in our apartment but no cable television. So I logged on the internet and tried to follow the election on the New York Times website, but it didn’t quite have the same excitement as watching it on television. After being without cable for 2.5 hour it finally returned in time for the second wave of results coming in, and I could enjoy the rest of the morning of election, knowing that both we and our cable provider had had our scheduled brown-out ……. Needless to say that the first thing we need to invest in is an inverter. Liva came home at 15.00 and the rest of the day she was singing BRAK OBAMA – It turned out that they had interrupted the lessons to tell the kids that the US had elected the first African American as president – So she is already getting brainwashed by going to an American school…

After being a bit lazy with our Flickr account for the last half year, I have just uploaded some of the photos we have taken our first days in Nepal. To see the new photo album please click here.

Liva and Joop with Lilly, one of our two nannies

Lieke has taken off to Washington where she will be for the next two weeks, so the kids and I are home alone. It is Sunday today and Lilly, one of our two nannies, has taken the kids to the Zoo for the afternoon. Nothing much has happened this weekend besides Lieke leaving. Smutti brought a mouse (a big one so maybe it was a baby rat) into our bedroom yesterday night so I am a bit more conscious about closing the door to the outside.

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