A day of exploring

Today was a good do to explore our neighbourhood a bit more. The rain has let up, the clouds have parted and that means the sun was shining. It was really great to feel the warmth (heat) of the sun. The morning was given to a pre-bid site meeting with all bidders, and that went really quite well. The afternoon was set aside for some exploring of shops and coffee shops.


We spotted this young girl waiting with her dad for her sister to come home. She was quite patient, and finally her sister came around the corner and this little girl just lit up with joy.














As we turned the corner towards home we came across these men doing road repairs; all very manual labour but done with great care and precision. These two are doing the final stage of leveling, measuring and packing.









The guys further back are filling the pot holes with rock and brick, pouring liquid tar over them, and then filling the holes with hot asphalt.
All quite the process.









Further down the road, actually rite across the street from us they are constructing a new multilevel building. Today they poured the second floor. Now floors are counted differently here. Ground level is termed as ground level, the first floor above ground level is termed the First Floor, the second above is termed the Second Floor and so on. I had watched over the past days put all the forming and supporting timber in place, and yesterday they tied in the rebar. Today was the day to pour the concrete. Again, it is very intensive manual labour, and men and women work equally here as you will see in the pictures. They worked at this from about 8:00am and finished right about 4:00pm. Enjoy the pictures.

Left on our own

We had our last meal with Bruce, who provided us with a great orientation to life in Kathmandu. He has now gone home.

Last meal with Bruce before he left for home.

The meal was great and the fellowship even better. No earthquake during this meal though.

Linda and I have continued to explore our new neighbourhood and  feeling more comfortable and confident with each outing. I decided to take a walk to the building site from our home to see how far it was and how long it would take to get there, if I could even find it. Well, I did find the site, had to stop a few times just to orientate myself and insure I was heading in the right direction. I walk pretty fast and at my pace it took about half an hour. I made it home in about 25 minutes as I was now sure of the way. I will be able to reduce that time a bit as I stopped numerous times to take pictures.

Road to site 1

Road to site 2

Road to site 3

Road to site 4

As you can tell by the appearance of the road, it was quite wet everywhere. It had rained most of the morning and the sky was just beginning to break up. The site itself was quite wet as well. I did venture to walk through the site and am now so thankful I purchased some sandals that could withstand wet environments.

The boundaries of the property are not totally clear but the east side goes from about the pole in the foreground to just to the left of the gravel piles in the back.

Property from NE corner

The first days

The City

The People

The Faith

The Traffic

 

The Recycling Garbage

The weather has been wonderfully warm with bouts of refreshing rain. Four days in we experienced a 6.8 earthquake that had everyone running for safety. We are safe but there was some damage and loss of life in Kathmandu.  These pictures are just a sample of the things that we have been experiencing in the past six days.