Yep, this place is back to normal. It's really, really wierd how fast everything sprang back to normal, but the city came alive OUT OF NOWHERE at some point this morning. The King made the announcement last night at 11:30, and apparently the people had been so accustomed to getting outside and protesting that everybody ran out in their underwear and PJs shouting and parading in jubilant victory in the same kind of numbers that, the day before, sent 500 people to the hospital.

9 hours later, when I got outside for breakfast this morning, the whole town's out and about. All the shops were open, full, and buzzing. I biked around exactly the same streets that were dead barren and desperately silent the day before to find myself dodging pedestrians, motorcycles, taxis, rickshaws, tiger balm sellers, drug dealers, and potholes in a fury of Chinatown nostalgia. It was a totally polar shift, all of a sudden. I remembered how long it took for New York to resume its usual pace of business after September 11th (several weeks), and then realized that these strikes and revolutions are a semi-common thing out here. They have strikes out here so often that everybody has a backup strike plan, in case one hits. Sure, they're usually not this long or important, but they're well used to starting and stopping businesses as news hits. That, and I guess everybody needed to suddenly do 3 weeks worth of shopping and selling.

It was weird, though, how yesterday the afternoon was cloudy, full of glum faces of bored, temporarily unemployed, broke and starving Nepali traders in front of closed-door businesses. And today was sunny, with every shop wide open with merchandise spilling out onto tables on the street and smiling, happy business owners happily bargaining with naiive westerners once again. It was a glorious day for shopping. I left the tourist part of town and found all the people selling nicknacks along the street had been starving for attention this whole time since their turf was under lockdown, and they were running after me and Simon to buy their stuff at well below "Nepali price" (which means only a little above what I should be paying, but less than half of what I'd be otherwise paying). So I stocked up on shit, am heading to the post office tomorrow, and am ready to finally get out of here! Go figure, of course, now that the town's back to normal I'm getting the hang of it all and want to stay, but my feet have gone itchy for India and the wind is blowing that direction. Varanasi this weekend!