Katmandu living

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.

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.

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.

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.