Tuesday 9 March 2010

classic new country experience

Or unaccustomed to being so wholly unaccustomed
...

Where we’re walking hungry round clean fresh Saturday morning Tansen... the empty updown cobbly streets of this quiet hilltown ... two hours into the hills from where the lowland plains ends and the very beginning of what will become the himalayas rise up
after the morning sun has cleared the cloud from the valley below
the misty wisps in the smaller valleys like gossamer on the edge of a wood

So we're unable to find anywhere that looks like a nice place to eat
And everywhere with bowls of snacks looks brownly dingy
And as complete first-day foreigner outsiders we don’t know what’s what
Except we see another dingy looking place... but this time with a sign outside where a cheesy Euro couple are eating and drinking cocktails, with Momos and Chowmein written beneath it
And only that persuades us its a place to eat and so we approach and, three seconds later we not only know that its a nice small hovelish restaurant but realise that it, and all the other places we saw that looked crummy from the outside, are probably great on the unseeable inside... cos this is totally what we were after... so we tuck in to momos and chowmein and Nepalese onion bhajis [?] and samosas and bready dumplings and drink tea and think, we’re unused to being wholly unused to the new
And that only the cheesy sign stopped us from another half hour walking hungrily around this lovely hill town
...

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