Lieke and I are off today so we are trying to catch up on all the stuff we do not get around to do on a normal week. This morning we first went to the American Club Commissary to pick-up some stuff for the birthday party of Joop and after that we went to "Barbar Mahal Revisited", one of the fanciest shopping areas in Kathmandu to look at timber samples for the dinning table we want to have made.
Barbar Mahal is the stables of one of the old Rama Palaces (the palace itself was destroyed earlier) and is really cute.
When we came home we had a lamp installed that we have bought at Barbar Mahal earlier. It was not that simple as we could not find a ladder that could reach all the way to our celling in the living room so Santa, our gardner, had made a typical Asian scaffolding in the middle of our living room that the electrician could climb up on. After a few trails and errors we finally got the light to work.
It took all the people working for us to hold the scaffolding, including Santa and the guard. Bicky our driver was driving Lieke around town so he could not participate in our team building exercise.
While all the others were busy putting up the lamp, Liva, Joop and I took advantage of the empty kitchen and started this year Christmas season on making some Marzipan candy. Herman's bakery, our local baker, can deliver most that you need for these kind of thing and they have produced some marzipan. So we take some of it and rolled in some nuts and dipped it in chocolate....
With Thanksgiving here and the school having teacher development day, the kids have had a couple of days off. Wednesday we went to the school for parent-teacher conference and heard that both Liva and Joop were doing very fine. And today (friday) Lieke and I are having the day off as well as it is Eid which is an offical UN holiday. So today will be used to prepare for Joop's birtday part which we will hold on next friday. The kids are now finally back to full health again after being suffering from the flu for quite some time.
I have finally bought my iMac and the kids and I have been playing around with it the last few days.
Lieke is in Manila for one and half week and seem to be doing fine (we just called her and she had been out shopping). Kathmandu continues to be beautiful these days - the view is so clear that it at times seem like the mountains have moved closer. Today we went shopping at the shop in the American club for the first time. There is not that much to buy and things cost the same as in the shops eventhough everything is supposted to be tax-free. It is nice though to be able to pick up Samual Adams Boston Ale and zip-lock bags (yes, they even import zip-log bags) and also nice to have access to wine, not to talk about flour for our breads. The kids are now laying infront of the television enjoying their Sondags-slik (Sunday candy) as we forgot to get candy yestereday.