My week in review... feces, farmhouses and elephant butts.

So I spent all last week travelling around Nepal... the most memorable part, I must say would be the various hotels we stayed in. I remember laying in bed at one guest house after the toilet had decided to spit up on me and someone else's feces were decorating my right foot, and I was laying there thinking, "wow. Never again will I have a complete stranger's feces on my foot. I hope. Aaah, memories." Luckily, I had just finished watching a movie on Star World (India's premier english movie channel!) where Queen Latifah finds out she has 3 weeks to live and decides to just live it up and go crazy. Naturally, it turns out that she was misdiagnosed, but she learned a damn good lesson in the mean time. So as I was saying, luckily I had just finished watching this movie so I really wasn't too freaked out about the whole hotel situation. I was just amused. I mean, you are only young, alone and in Nepal once. I cherish all the awful awful dirty beds I slept in last week (and the one very decent one at a farmhouse belonging to Min's colleauge). I also think that when I leave here I will miss the food very very very much. I am really sick of rice, but I drink about 6 cups of milk tea (chai) a day and I freaking love all the different breads and curries. The one thing that I really have to get used to is the idea that you literally have to lick your plate clean. If you don't lick your plate clean people think something is seriously wrong with you. And they give you A LOT of food. And the meat is very bony and fatty and while I am getting used to eating the fat, the idea that the bone is "soft bone" so you can chew it and swallow it still scares me. I dreamed the other night that I chocked on a mutton bone and I really think my digestive system is paying dearly along with my conscience for my bone ingesting. For being such a poor country, the population as a whole is not very skinny. These people eat a lot. I mean, I can eat and these people out eat me every single meal. Last night I was almost in tears my stomach was so full. But the naan I was eating really was fantastic and I didn't want the cook to think I didn't like it. So I ate. And ate. And ate. And Katie thought I was going to starve here, ha!

But anyway, we went to Chitwan National park and it was AMAZING. We saw rhinos and monkeys and crocodiles and I saw twin baby elephants that were born THE DAY BEFORE. And I rode an elephant. And I actually have a rather large bruise from a baby elephant that was angry at a man trying to force feed it a banana so it went AWOL and head butted me. Elephants are not soft or cuddly. They are rather wiry and rough. And their heads are very very hard. It was not pleasant.

The night before we went to the park we stayed at Min's collegue's house that was about half an hour from Chitwan. It was a farm house with no power or indoor plumbing but it was pretty cool. I got the best night's sleep I've had since getting here that night. Hira's (collegue) mother in law was this little old lady who spoke no English but she just adored me. She kept grabbing me and hugging me and pinching me. And saying things to me which I couldn't understand but seemed very endearing. Her grandfather in law slept on a bed on the porch. It was very Charlie and the Cholocate Factory. I have so many pictures I'll post a couple in a little bit... oh man, what a week!