The other side of the Nepalese postcard

It can be difficult to adjust. It just about breaks my heart when a Nepali friend or employee steals from me or sabotages the relationship with disrespect in other ways. That's the other side of the postcard for me. I love living in Nepal. I think it's just taken a while to get a good circle of influence.

Nepal is a place where you can feel like you can make a difference, but things work quite a bit differently here, so it's has been quite a learning curve for me. That's why I write my blog posts and why I wrote the book Nepal: A Tourist's Manual. I finally got over the cultural hump and actually think the way things work here is pretty normal now.

Nepal has a lot of advantages for people from the West. I love to encourage people to come here for an extended stay. Now I'm hoping to find older women on small pensions from the West to come here. I can even house them and take care of there needs to provide a wonderful time for only $500 a month. It would be an adventure of a lifetime for women who have never been able to travel before. My blog is at http://FrugalTravelsNepal.blogspot.com

While Nepal is a beautiful country to be in, it certainly very difficult to live here and adjust here. The hardest thing I find here is trusting Nepali people. Many feel the need to steal from you and rip you off just because you are a foreigner. Even my landlord has stolen from me. The Nepalese people have an attitude that a foreigner has an endless supply of money and therefore it is okay to steal from them. My recommendation to people coming to Nepal is to keep all valuables and cash in a safe place when you invite Nepalese people into your home and to only allow them in common areas like your lounge room, kitchen or bathroom.
Finding quality labour can also be difficult. It is inevitable that you will need to have some work done on where you live. Relying on recommendations from Nepalese friends can be problematic as they will just recommended their brother or uncle or some unqualified relative. A lot of the time the problem will be fixed or only half-fixed. Even if you do find someone who does the job well, they will leave you to clean up the mess that they leave or they will cause another problem with your house/apartment. For example, a painter you hire will get paint on your carpet so you have to get new carpet.
Noise is obviously something that you don't see on a postcard. Kathmandu, where I live, is a very noisy city. As you've probably read online, car horns pollute the air constantly. Even as you walk through the airport there is a sign saying, "Blowing your car horn is a great way to express your creativity in Nepal." If I was prime minister for a day, I would remove every single horn from every single vehicle in Nepal. Street dogs are also very noisy. You will often hear them during the night barking at each other. Nepali people are very noisy as well. It is common for them to yell at each other even though they are sitting next to each other. I don't think I've ever heard a Nepali person speak at a normal level when talking on the phone. They also have this selfish habit of playing music on their phone for everyone to hear as well.
Rubbish is everywhere here. It is on comparison with India. This obviously stinks and causes a great deal of pollution in the air and water. The sad thing is that everyone does it. Even the people in houses that get garbage service. Children litter right in front of their parents and don't get scolded for it. Unfortunately, the Nepalese have just accepted the rubbish problem and don't want to do anything about it.
Malnutrition is a major problem here. I've been told that 70% of the people here suffer from it. Unfortunately, this comes back to their basic diet. Most people eat dal baht (rice with lentil soup and vegetables) for all their meals, which has barely any nutritional value especially with the poor farming techniques. The average Nepali family will only eat meat once a week, even less if they are poor. A lot of food is fried here, which also kills many of the nutrients in the food. Salt is often overloaded into meals, which is bad for your heart. I lived with a Nepali family when I first came to Nepal and suffered from malnutrition myself because of the diet they eat here. It took around 4 months for me to feel the effects of it.
While Nepal has a lot of positives for expats, it is also important to observe the annoyances that you will have here. I have met many people who planned to move here for an extended period of time, but instead left Nepal after a couple of months because they could not deal with the negatives of living here. Not everybody can live in Nepal permanently and I believe it takes a very patient, relaxed and easy-going person to move here and stay.

Neapl and its people is very famous for its hospitality then i don't know what she thinks about Nepali. I am Nepali.

E_Moodie is quite accurate on one level. It's important to put it in context. When people move to the US, Canada or a country in Europe immigrants are always getting taken advantage of. Airports, bus stations and major cities are all horrible places to randomly make friends. But when we come to Nepal we find the people seem so warm and friendly we are somehow caught off guard.

Thamel is not where you are likely to find good, dependable people to make friends with. I call them Tamali instead of Nepali. I can assure you that there are lovely people who are trustworthy but everything E_Moodie says is absolutely true and you have to accept it. They don't have the same borders as we do. Just look at how close they stand to each other and even hold hands. They call each other brother or uncle and are tightly knitted into their own castes/groups. If you've ever studied psychology about In-groups/Out-groups you will be amazed that they have time for us at all. But they are lovely, gracious people-and yes, sometimes things are missing and I have to confront my dear friends.

At first I would just cut them off. But then I decided my friends are worth more to me than a few rupee. Here is a story to illustrate the point: I am an old lady, but have many young friends, mostly young men. One such friend was about 16 when I met him three years ago. He would come over and cook for me and stay over in my guest bedroom. I buy my coffee at a particular place in Kathmandu and buy 4-5 bags at a time. One day he saw all the coffee and asked if he could have some. I said yes, and told him I'd get him some, which I did. But after he left I noticed that I only had two bags left. Ordinarily I would have cast him out of my little circle, but I decided to have a talk with him instead. He just figured one old lady didn't need that much coffee and wouldn't miss it. I explained that I save money buying it in bulk and don't need to go all the way to Kathmandu so often for coffee. I also mentioned that I deserve it and consider it disrespectful when someone takes anything from me without asking. That was a year ago and I haven't had a problem with him since. I can even give him money and he brings me the change.

So, don't write these people off too soon. If you just want to hang with Westerners you can stay in Thamel or Patan and just avoid Nepali for friendship, but then you are missing out on knowing some amazing, generous people just like the reputation they have had for millennia.

There are some amazing people in Nepal. However, it takes some time to find out who they are as they are few and far between. For example, our landlord is a great guy. He owns a successful resort here, sponsors many children from his village and is a joy to be around. His wife, however, regularly uses our pump to fill her water tank (their house is next door to ours) which doubles our electricity bill. She has even entered our courtyard and stolen pot plants from us. When our lease expires, we will move houses because of this lovely man's kleptomaniac wife.
My roommate and I have learnt over time not to trust the average Nepali person. We have learnt keep all guests in common areas and to lock our bedroom doors when they come over as Nepalese people have such sticky fingers. This is the best way to have a social life with Nepalese people without having to worry about them stealing from you.

Its very enlightening to hear this side of the story as a Nepalese. Sadly most of these things are true.

You really need to keep things in prospective. When I was in France I'd get woken up each morning with shouting and throwing vegetables at 5-6 am. When I was in Sicily I saw so much garbage along the road I even saw rats crawl out!

People in the Kathmandu Valley are not starving and the food is better than that GMO crap they feed Americans. When I first left the US I tasted a carrot for the first time in my life! It was delicious, not like that orange, pointy thing that looks like a carrot in the US.

It is the West that has brought a lot of the destruction of the environment here more than anything else. They didn't need sanitary landfills until plastic bags and such. They just don't know what to do with all of it. I live here and I don't know what to do with all my plastic, either.