"Auntie....rice...now....eat!"

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It's now our second and a half week at Happy Home....blog entries are a little bit all over the place because of the extremely temperamental power supply. Anyway, we will try and do our best to keep them coming.

We started our second week with a pretty standard day and the early morning chorus of "Good morning auntie", to which we have to reply, "Good morning, how are you?". So they then sing, "I'm fine thank you and you?", followed by "I'm fine thank you" and finally..."Thank you auntie". All sung. It's very sweet, if a little monotonous!

Kop khuns were being very uncooporative.

After walking all the kids to school (Bishant, the little 3/4 year old, had a backpack which was literally the same size as him and covered his entire body and legs.. It was HILARIOUS!), passed the jaw-dropping view of Kathmandu, we went to the Principle's office to get our days teaching schedule. Clare started with what looked like a semi-relaxed day of only 3 periods of teaching. But it soon turned into 6 lessons as the other teachers completely exploided our presence. Rosie was taken to teach class 5 health, which turned out to be quite an easy, productive lesson focusing on the four main food groups. However the next 2 classes, on computers, were completely the opposite due to a lack of technical knowledge from skiving every ICT lesson in 6th form. Sorry Mrs Weir!

The kids distraction techniques are definitely improving- they drop pens on the floor to make you bend over and pick them up, sing outragiously horrendous pop songs (like "I like the way you move", and "you are so beautiful to me"), whilst many of the older boys are trying to perfect their swagger, which reduces us to giggles every single time.

We get home to the dreaded words of "Auntie.....rice....now.....eating!" and are force fed yet another 2 GIANT meals. You may not think this is something to complain about, considering the food here is incredible, but when you have to have 5 large meals a day (daal bhat for breakfast as well) it can become a bit of a chore!

We woke up slowly to the children singing and found there was still no water - we hadn't had any for 2 days and hadn't showered in 4! This day meant our first trip to Thamel - Backpacker land of Kathmandu. It's crazy busy, loud and full on, but we instantly fell in love with it. We managed to haggle for trousers, drank incredible tea in a tiny, dingy, dark cafe with one nepali lady cooking traditional food and spent the rest of the day trying to ward off young men who wanted to "improve their english".

We have a MASSIVE mouse which lives in our room and it keeps waking Rosie up, who then wakes Clare up. One night we followed it across the room with our touch.

At the moment, we are quite literally being forced to illustrate the kids school books with thousands of pictures of every disney character under the sun - Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are particular favourites.

School has been, to say the least, crazy as hell and utterly bizar!! The principle took full advantage of Rosie's camera and essentially employed her as photographer for the school prospectus for 2 days. One of the shots had to be taken from the top of a 3 story house in construction which had no rail or barrier, so was a terrifying experience. 10 pictures were of the Principle himself in different hats and positions.

The insane principle took us with a few students to the national TV production studio where for some reason unknown to us we had to go back home. However, the principle had other ideas and took us on an impromtu field trip to Patan Durbar Square - amazing with the most intricate sculptures and temples.

The next fun school adventure involved riding on the back of motorbikes at break neck speed yet again. Rosie drove with "the fat one" whilst Clare had the principles accountant who just shouted "Clare, Clare" at the top of his voice for the majority of the journey.

We ended up in a really lovely school in Bhaktapur. However, we were later informed that we had to make our own way back to Patan. We were dumped in the backend of nowhere with a couple of rupee - took 1 motorbike, 2 tuk tuk's and 40 long minutes of Clare being unsubtley felt up by an elderly nepali man under the pretence of "folding his arms" in a bus to get back home. When Rosie was told about the man, she peed herself laughing.

To escape these school adventures, we took a day and night stay in Thamel. We stayed in Pokhara Peace Hotel, with our friend Courtney who volunteers part time with the children, and 3 of her hippy Nepali friends who openly smoked pot as we all chatted in a candle lit circle on the floor.

We ate pizza and drank beer - a totally bliss time out from Nepali food, visited Kathmandu Durbar square on a festival day with lots of singing, paint and people dressed up and ate mo-mos with lassis on reclining cusions for about 50p. Kathmandu is AWESOME!!!

We went with a couple of other travellers from Germany to what we thought was The Monkey Temple overlooking Kathmandu. However, our bus skills weren't quite as good as we thought and we ended up on the opposite side of the city an hour away from where we intended. The place was a beautiful small town with colourful bunting, paint powder for Holi, temples, vicious monkeys and cows..only problem was we had no idea where we were, although being lost is becoming a standard part of life here now. We walked through the city trying to avoid paying entrance fees but it resulted in us wandering in to what we aptly named "The Earth's Anus" - basically a massive sewage pipe emptying into a river. You can imagine the smell.

This week at Happy Home has also been physically and emotionally draining as at one point 12 out of the 18 children had terrible fevers with crazy high temperatures of up to 104 degrees. It was so horrible for all of them, especially the littlest ones who got it the worst. Rosie at one point was vomitted on by little Pasang, 5 years old, who was wimpering with fever for nearly 3 days and Clare sat with David the oldest boy who is so strong but he kept crying as the fever was so awful. We have been looking after them pretty much constantly but we reckon we are out the other side now.

Yesterday, we had a girls trip to Patan Zoo for a picnic. They have an impressive range of animals and the girl's all really enjoyed themselves. Today, we took the boys to a school playground where we ate lots of food and played football, frisbee and catch for a couple of hours.

This whole experience is very tiring, but this is everything we wanted from our time here. The children feel like our own and we can't believe we are already halfway through our time with them. The kids have made this our home and we couldn't get more out of it if we tried. It's intense but brilliant!

The kids have just left prayer as we write this so it's time for more drawing and revision - exams start tomorrow!

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