Orla's travels in Nepal

We’re now back into the swing of village life and getting use to being back at school again. I think when we first came back from the holidays I was actually feeling the most homesick that I’d been and I was missing Frank a lot and it was suddenly quite intense being back at school again, but we’re now back into the swing of life here and our one day weekend. We have a really nice new routine of cooking and sharing food with our host mother, or the person we share a house with (she’s only twenty-three) who is called Anita. She has a five year old son who we’re always playing games with in the mornings and afternoons. We also had a timetable change, which means that we’re now teaching more English classes (I’m teaching all 7 classes) every day and there hasn’t been any computer classes, which tend to be a lot more relaxed. Instead, now, we have all the younger classes in the afternoon which can end up quite chaotic - I’m lucky if class 1 (full of 5 and 6 year olds) does anything other ...

The holiday is almost over now and this morning and last night I spent some time looking at some of the photos from this month taken in the Annapurna Conservation Area as well as Pokhara. So much has happened in the last few weeks and the bus we took from Harpe to Pokhara already feels like a long time ago. My Nepali has definitely improved in the last month, thanks to our wonderful teacher in Pokhara called Indra and the help of Eli whose spoken Nepali is really good (he says his method of learning is just talking to lots of Nepali people and learning from them). I’ve learnt the script now and I enjoy just driving past shops and walking past places and being able to read the words out phonetically. We’re now in Kathmandu, and we’re spending the last few days of the holiday just relaxing and enjoying the rest of the break. We’re off to Jazzmandu this afternoon, which is a jazz festival that takes place in Nepal every year - there’s also a jazz workshop on Monday and I’m quite excited b...