OK, I can appreciate Nepal in all respects but the FUCKING INTERNET! This will be the THIRD time I'm writing this email, the first time being lost in a brief power outtage and the second being stranded on the computer I was writing it on when the connection to the internet failed. The browser was even too old to have the autosave function on it. AARGH. Let me at least mention how beautifully written, elegantly composed, and marvelously executed the past two blogs were. When was the last time a blog made you stand up and cheer, then cry? Well that was what you missed. Thanks, Nepal. Now you just get this shit:

Ugh, I've started this thing twice already so you'd think I should remember how it goes. Oh yeah, in one version I continued the analogy I had of coming back to Thailand in order to switch gears between my two main trips, Southeast and South Asia. And, because I'm new at driving a stickshift, I rode the clutch for about three weeks and then popped it out about two days ago fast enough to give me whiplash. It happened when I woke up on the floor of this girl's place I had seen the day before, but had no recollection of where I was or how I got there. Looking back on the day before, my birthday, I realized it had been an absolutely great, drunk, crazy, fun time. Fit to be the last. For a while anyway.

That was 3 days ago. Since then I've shaved my head, enrolled in a monastery, and am getting ready for a 3-week trek through the himallayan wilderness. Well, maybe it's more like a buzzcut, a 10-day vipassana course, and a long walk along a path, but it sounds cool anyway. The buzzcut's awesome, I look rediculous! If I can find somebody to take a picture and email me, I'll post it up. I look just like one of those Goombahs from Mario Brothers. But it will really make the meditating and trekking a whole lot easier.

Anyway, Nepal: as it tends to happen, I came here at exactly the right time to witness the Holi festival, a day when the entire country of nepal celebrates the coming of springtime by hurling bags of colored water at each other. This really happy looking nepali guy who owned the bakery I had my breakfast at invited me to come back at 11 and celebrate Holi with him. So I went back, thinking we were going to throw water around, but instead we headed to this really tiny, totally local restaurant (about 10 by 15 feet long, including kitchen) and ordered food and beer. The beer, however, came in the form of a bucket filled with fermented millet. It looked like wet, rotten birdseed and smelled like sake. Apparently they wet it, add yeast, and let it sit in the corner of the room for a month, then scoop it into a bucket and serve it. The waitress then added hot water to it until it was full and gave us a metal filter straw to sip out of. Tasted like sake, too. When we're finished, she adds more hot water. Basically, you keep adding hot water about 5 to 7 times until you've washed the seeds of all their alcohol, and by then you're really drunk.

So then it was time to head outside for the festivities. I got painted up to look like Braveheart, because if I didn't someone else would do it for me. I had a much better description of this in the other posts that were lost, and I don't really have the time to go into it right now. Just imagine zig-zagging down the 10foot wide streets, trying to dodge the bags filled with parasite river water being thrown at you by kids on the roofs of 4 story buildings lining the street, and simultanously trying to dodge the motorcycists and rickshaw drivers who are doing the same while doing their best to miss the massive potholes that litter the road. Tourists make great targets. I developed several strategies of not getting hit, but most tourists, particularly the girls, were absolutely covered head to tow in color and water. I remember this one part of the street where the concrete was completely obscured by green, yellow, and red color. Women were hard to find on the street, because apparently Nepali men have no idea how to flirt so instead of actually approaching a girl they wait until this festival to pelt them with bags of water. Instead, the girls are high up on the roofs throwing their own bags down at the lonely boys.

Anyway, I gotta run. This meditation course starts soon and I gotta register. It's a 10-day Vipassana course, you can learn all about it from www.dhamma.org or ask any hippie. Alex made it 8 hours, so my immediate goal is to make twice that. I'll do my best to stay the whole 10 days, but I get the feeling that those first few days of sitting still, without talking, without eating after noon, without reading or writing, and waking up at 4 will be the most difficult thing I'll ever do out here. Wish me luck.

I'll be out of any kind of contact for the next 10 days, but between this post and the last one it should be enough to fill my quota.