About a week ago I discovered a new food, momo. Momo is a steam/fried dumpling with spiced veggies inside. It is amazing. If you buy the steamed variety you get to binge on well spiced food until you are stuffed with minimal guilt because it's just veggies and some dough. A typical day looked like this:
Wake up at 10am. Buy croissants and apple crumble for breakfast and take them to local restaurant to eat with some chai. Buy a few things from the shops. Take a walk. Nap. Eat a snack. Walk. Surf Internet. Eat momo. Read. (ok, perhaps a little more internet than that).
I looked up how to make momo and discovered it's not very difficult. My +1 recommended I open a food cart in DC and name is Mama's Momo. I thought this was a fabulous idea....
Until I vomited 2 kilos of momo a few nights ago. Now neither of us can stand to eat it (he held my hair and helped me clean up), so mama's momo is no more. On the bright side, I can see my hip bones. Illness is sexy, sort of.
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Kasol is a popular destination for backpackers seeking to trek through the Himalayas and Israelis on vacation. The town survives on tourist revenue, apples, and marijuana. The only school here goes to the 7th grade. You hear that and it's sad, but distant, until you realize the person working 14 hours a day/7 days a week in the coffee shop serving espresso, the waiter serving dinner, the hotel staff scrubbing your bathroom and changing your sheets are younger than Matthew. I think about him a lot here because I see so many kids younger than him who are done with school and are settling into daily habits that may last the rest of their lives.
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Someone thinks I have a nice reading voice so I've recently spent an inordinate amount of time reading Terry Pratchett novels aloud, in between kicking his butt in shithead (a 2 person card game). There's also been quite a bit of haggling, thankfully +1 loves to haggle. I do not. I hate conflict and I'm usually willing to pay to avoid it. During my last trip, Ben and Tim did the haggling for me, so I avoided it then as well. It's an important skill though as there are few fixed prices - many things are up for negotiation (hotel rooms, jewelry clothing, etc.). He haggles and I scrub the bathrooms in the hotel rooms. It works out well. (Bathroom cleaning techniques here leave much to be desired, but at $6 a night, who can complain?).
Overall, it's been lovely. I miss you all though and feel a bit homesick and have started to think about all of the things I need to do when I get home. I'm hoping to spend some time with Amelia and in SC when I return as I think there will be an onboarding delay with work because they won't start the background check until I return and provide fingerprints. Also, it looks like we'll be visiting Melanie for weekend in October as +1 will be speaking at U of M - (assuming my drilling schedule is clear - I'm being reassigned in September but don't know where to..).
That's all for now. Love ya'll!
Erin
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