London Calling

A side trip to Nepal...

...not literally. Friends Rob and Anne invited me to attend a Nepalese festival in Ealing. I was intrigued by the thought of wandering around a festival ground checking out the various booths set up offering food, drink and many other intersting aspects of Nepalese culture. Then we arrived at the "festival"...

It was actually an auditorium with a stage at one end where local acts from the Yeti Nepalese Association of the UK were performing various styles of music and dance. When we walked in, 2 Brits and 2 Americans, we were at the front of the hall and walked the entire length to reach seats in the very last row.

Despite the discrepancy between what we thought we were getting into and what we actually got into, it was quite a lot of fun.

While we couldn't understand the lyrics we could certainly feel the beats of the music, and the dance exhibition was very interesting indeed. We sat back and enjoyed the acts while wetting our whistles with Cobra, an Indian beer, not Gurhka (sp?) which is the Nepalese beer of choice. Beggars can't be choosers though.

After a beer or two hunger pangs set in, thankfully they were setting up a buffet style dinner behind us. There are 2 things to know about a Nepalese style buffet for the uninitiated:
--You have no idea what you're eating, you hold out your plate and they load it up with whatever is in that particular vat
--It is hot, not burn your lips and throat hot but induce profuse sweating from your neck up.
Unfortunately we had no beer at that particular point so you just had to tuck your head and continue to shovel food into your mouth, it would not have been appropriate to leave anything on the plate, except the bone of some type of meat.

A shortwhile after eating it appeared the festival was ending, since we couldn't understand what the announcers were saying we arrived at this conclusion by the fact 3/4 of the hall emptied out, and the other 1/4 seemed ready to go.

After an hour and a half tube ride back across London to home I finally hit the sack to dream of my first day of work, only a few short hours away.

posted by Brian and Kirsten Hennigan @ Monday, October 02, 2006