Katmandu living

While we were still in Yemen I published a photo of our house as it looked like in Google Earth. This time I will just publish a link where you will be able to see our house and the neighborhood around us. If you click on the link below you will get to a satelite picture where our house is under the small cross in the absolute middle of the page. From there you can surfe around the city

http://wikimapia.org/#lat=27.6868295&lon=85.3106993&z=18&l=0&m=a&v=2

It seems like we are getting a new schedule every second day these days with new timings for load shedding - Friday we got a new schedule with 16 hours of planned power-cuts so if the cutbacks continue with the current rate we should have no electricity at all in a month or two. With the lack of electricity we are also getting all kind of other problems - without electricity water can't be pumped up, so now there is only 110 million liters a day to fulfill the demand of 230 million liters that are used in the Kathmandu vally.

It is of course nice when Lieke can combine one of our trips out of town with a bit of work. So when we went down to chitwan to see the National park, Lieke used the opportunity to visit some schools. So what follows here is my series of typical Unicef school photos.

We have now lived outside Europe for the last 12 years and have been used to the problems of living in the third world. However arriving in Kathmandu has still been a bit of a shock. We are now on a schedule with 14 hours of planned power-cuts a day. So our newly installed inverter is working overtime and I think that this is as much power-outage it can take. Should the power-cuts become longer, the inverter will simply not have time enough to recharge the batteries between power-cuts. Anyway, with the lack of a efficient electricity grid our lifestyle have become rather green. To make the inverter last longer we have changed all light bulbs to Energy saving bulbs (9W on average) and all our hot water is coming from our solar system on the roof. As the hours of sun in the winter is less and the days are colder, Lilly and Rama went up to clean the solar system the other day to ensure what we are getting full value – still the water is only luke-warm on some days which is rather hard as it is really cold in the mornings and evenings.

We have now finally moved to our house. In what seemed like a real Christmas story the container arrived on the 24^th of December. As we are living on a rather big hill and traffic with bigger trucks are not allowed during daytime in Kathmandu, the moving company felt that it would be best to repack the container to smaller trucks. I therefore went down to the river where the container had been parked since it arrived late the evening before and followed them repack in the morning mist.

The moving people were really efficient and by lunch time all 230 boxes and pieces of furniture had been moved to the house and the majority of the moving people went home leaving us and the two remaining people with the unpacking. However, we still managed to make the living room ready for the Christmas celebration at night through the food was not quite up to standard with Fried Rice instead of the usual elaborate dinner. Below is a picture as the living room looked on Christmas eve.

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.