Katmandu living

the van de Wiel/Schou Hansen family blog









With Christmas approaching there are a number of activities here in Kathmandu – Last week there was the yearly Christmas market at his weekend we went to one of the hotels for a one day “fun park”. There were a number of rides and the kids tried out most things. Joop and Liva is off from school for the next three weeks so we have to be creative to entertain them. We are planning to go down to one of the National Parks over New Years.

The renovation of the house is now finished and they only need to do the paint job. Today our two nannies have been using the whole day cleaning up the place, and we hope that our shipment will arrive Tuesday or Wednesday so we can move in in time for Christmas. Before we move in however, we will need to install a battery inverter as the power cuts become worse and worse here in Nepal. The have just put out a new schedule and we will now have 70 hours of planned power-cuts a week. The reason should be that there are less water in the winter to produce energy from the hydropower plants. At the moment the energy production is only covering approximately 60% of the demand.



We are getting ready to move into our new house - The renovation should be finished on Sunday and our shipement might come early next week - We still need to buy all the stuff we need, like refrigiator and stove, but things are looking up.


When we moved to Nepal the kids got a Nintendo DS and they have just gotten some new games from Sinterklaas - So what seem to been their father's dream and their mother's nightmare has happened. They are now next to impossible to get away from the "gameboy"


As can be seen from the picture above the reinforcements have now been put in place in the living room and they are busy doing the same in the rest of the house. All there needs to be done is then the touch up and we are ready to move in - Today it was two months since we left Yemen and we have been living in hotels for all this time so I think that the whole family is ready to start our lives for real here in Nepal.






Joop is turning 5 today and we have had her whole class over this morning. As our tradition dictates we had made a pinata (Joop had asked for a mermaid so that was what she got) and the kids got cake and sodas, played some games. This morning Joop was celebrated as well and she got the dolls house that she has been asking for for some time now. She also got a new dress that Lieke brought home from the US so she looked very well dressed the whole day.

To see more photos from joopies birthday party please check out Flickr page by clicking on the flickr section of the sidebar.

As we already published one of Joopie's photos, Liva also wanted me to publish one that she had taken. So here is a photo of Smutti our cat taken by Liva the other day.


One of the things that Liva and Joop got from Sinterklaas was a camera and this morning they have been busy taking pictures. The picture at the top was taken by Joop - Besides taking pictures of each other they took quite a few at the supermarket this morning.


"At home" with all the presents that was left by Swarte Piet (or Sinterklaas)
The Dutch kids of Kathmandu together with Sinterklaas and "de stoomboot"

Joop at the party
Sinterklaas sailing through the streets of Patan

Today was Sinterklaas and following the same tradition as in Yemen and before that in Mexico, we went to the party of the Dutch consulate. As you could see in one of the earlier posts we used last weekend to build a boat for Sinterklaas and today it was used so he could “sail” through the streets of Kathmandu. After the celebration together with the other Dutch, we went to Summit hotel and had dinner and when we came home Swarte Piet had been here and left presents in front of our door. So the rest of the night was used with unwrapping presents from Sinterklaas.

This is a picture of the place we live right now - it is a bit "out of wack" because I have taken the picture with my new 10-20 mm lens for my camera and wanted to fit the whole building in the shot.

Our house seen from the front gate

The view from the bed room

The Kitchen



The house seen from the hill
Today I went to our future house. Together with the landlord and an engineer we tried to find out how much time it would take to make the improvements necessary to make the new house more earth quake resistant. The work will now start tomorrow and we will hopefully be able to move into the house on the 20th of December at the latest. So we have another 2 weeks here in the hotel before we are able to move to the house. In the meantime I can now start to buy all the stuff we need, like a refrigerator, a stove and an inverter.




Though we are still living in a hotel we have started to prepare for the birthday party of Joop on the 9 December - as a part of our yearly tradition we have started the production of the pinata.

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