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Published: August 7th 2009
This will be my last entry from Pokhara! On Friday I am intending to have a last visit to Pokhara town centre and to do some shopping for stuff to take home. I have booked my bus ticket back to Kathmandu for 7:00am Saturday so that will (hopefully) give me 2 full days to have a better look around Kathmandu before flying home on Tuesday. I say hopefully because there has been so much rain recently that there have ben numerous landslides and some major roads have closed temporarily - though as far as I know the Pokhara-Kathmandu road is still open. Next blog entry from Kathmandu!
Tuesday 4th August
My last day in school was Tuesday - the last 3 days (Wednesday to Friday) this week were another holiday which no one at the school had thought to mention! It was marked on a calendar hanging in the staff room but as it was all in Nepali I hadn't really loked at it. I was beginning to think I was getting somewhere as well - I had started taking out groups of 4-6 weaker students into another room and going through the text book with them more slowly.
World Peace Pagoda
not the best photo but my camera battery died after this one!Anyway, schools here being what they are, the headmaster decided to send the kids home instead of having the last lesson so he could have a little leaving ceremony for me in the staff room. I got a flowery speech of thanks, requests to keep in touch etc, and a red tikka blob on my forehead!
Wednesday 5th August
As I had no teaching on Wednesday I asked the P.O.D. placement organiser if there was anything else I could usefully do and he suggested spending the day in a children's home which I did. It was not an orphanage as such but a refuge for street children who have nowehere else to go so I guess most of them would probably be orphans anyway. I spent about 7 hours there and took with me a lot of the teaching aids that I brought to Nepal but hadn't really ben appropriate in the school. We played lots of games and I introduced a few simple english spelling games as well as using up some of my bubble blowing pots and balloons. The home had been donated a computer for admin purposes and they were having some trouble with it
Lakeside, Pokhara
from the World Peace Pagoda so when they heard that I was a computing teacher they asked me to have a look at it. Basically there was nothing appearing on the screen so I unplugged everything, and opened up the base unit to see if there was anything obvious like a loose connection. As soon as I took the side panel off, two cockroaches scurried out! I checked all the motherboard connectors, blew a few cobwebs and a bit of dust out then re-connected everything and it worked! So, a literal bug-fix at last!
Thursday 6th August
This morning as usual I put my trainers outside my room at the hotel then went downstairs. I thought my right foot felt a little bit uncomfortable so thinking makybe the sock was folded up a bit, I took the trainer off to find a cockroach inside - still alive! I will certainly be checking everything carefully from now on. Today I had agreed to have another session of chatting to one of the raft company guys to give him more practice with English conversation. This time we went for a walk up to the World Peace Pagoda - another prominent view point on the south side of Lakeside. We took a taxi to village called Kalimati which the Lonely Planet guide book said was the shortest way to the top and we got to the pagoda in about half an hour. After a look at the view, it was actually quite cloudy and drizzly so not much to see in the distance but a good view of Lakeside, we set off down. Because the walk up had been so easy we decided to take a longer route down. This turned out to be much longer than intended as there were so many footpaths in the forest it was impossible to know which was the right one. Eventually we ended up at the dam where the water from Phewa Tal exits. This bit of forest is known for its leeches and the rafting guy, who was just wearing flip flops on bare foot had quite a few on his feet and was bleeding a bit. I was wearing sock and trainers and I didn't seem to have any, but when I rinsed out my socks back at the hotel, I found one - amazing to watch it moving around the sink.
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DozzeeInGhana
Dorothy Appleyard
creepy crawlies
That story about the cockroaches in the computer is funny lol, how did they even get in there?! Leeches are disgusting though, i think i'd rather have a cockroach in my shoe than a leech stuck to my foot!!! Well i'd rather have neither really lol. And i hope you've kept your tikka forehead blob so I can see it when i get home..or at least a photo haha. Enjoy your last few days dad, can't belive its gone so quick, see you soon! x x x x