Water, Elevators, Opening Night, & Finally Some Photos

So we're kind of up and running! We don't have a full menu yet, but after a very long week of really pushing to get things operational we are mostly there. Our biggest stumbling blocks had been the lack of water and no working elevator (a problem when you are on the 9th floor and the lower floors are still under construction). We were promised both by Tuesday ( we were also promised both by January...so I wasn't holding my breath), but Tuesday came and went with no water or working elevator. On Wednesday we were assured that things would work on Thursday, and despite our skepticism we were told not t worry it was a sure thing. Then there was a problem with the pump, and no water was had on Thursday, but we were told that when the power came on at midnight (load shedding still affects our work greatly) they would be able to pump water. 

Standing by reception looking toward the kitchen

Crossing the Finish Line

The title might be a bit off, as in many ways it's more akin to just getting out of the starting blocks, but the long marathon to open a restaurant in Nepal seems to be nearing completion. Yes it took far longer than I expected, but that said, I'm really happy with the results, and I'd rather have it take longer and come out as we envisioned (better actually) than have things rushed and have compromised considerably. Now we aren't exactly done yet, but we bring full time staff on for training starting Monday, that elevator which has been being put together since November is in test runs, our interiors will essentially be completed this weekend, kitchen equipment is all up and running, final arrangements are being made with sponsors, and everything from China is unpacked. Oh and we have kick ass menu that was printed at full size the other day for the first time.

I forgot how big the type of menu we are doing is compared to what you normally get in Nepal. We are doing ours on A2 paper folded in half, essentially the same as any menu you would get at say something like Fridays, Applebees, and the like. Here though you never see menu's that size, normally it's just sheets of A4 (8.5 x 11). Not only is the menu physically large, but it's contents are almost equally large, and I'll be spending some time over the next week to start teaching staff what it is that they are selling. Most people here are barely familiar with mozzarella, so it will take some training to create a staff that can explain the differences between Gorgonzola and Gruyere. It also means teaching them about our 25 some odd sauces and condiments, which wines go with what foods, and about our rather extensive bar menu.

Wholly Agnostic

A friend of mine recently wrote a post on his blog that touched on the terminology of belief, and he briefly touched upon the terms of atheism and agnosticism (you can read his post HERE), and it got me thinking about how I generally label my thinking, which has over the last few years become entirely dominated by a growing commitment to a very deep sense of agnosticism. (I touched on this briefly in my year in review post HERE). This isn't a rebuttal to my friend's post as I generally agree with him, but more a closer look at what a deep commitment to agnosticism really looks like, and why the term is I think generally misunderstood.

When you say your agnostic most people only think this applies to some ideas about religion, and worse they often take it to indicate that you are kind of on the sideline and haven't looked close enough to have made up your mind one way or the other. In short most people look at agnostics as something akin to undecided voters the day before the some big election....the assumption is that they don't have a great grasp on the arguments that are being presented or are slightly lazy people that just haven't been paying any attention to something that is potentially quite important. This I think though is an unfortunate misconception, and while it may be applicable to a few people out there, I would make the case that anyone that has taken the time to at least come to a point that they are not just accepting what ever cultural stories were put before them has done more thinking on the topic than maybe the average person.

Cultural Divide: Why Whitey Doesn't Understand South Asia

I have about 15 posts I want to write swimming around in my head, but just haven't had the time to write them. The restaurant is still not open, but each day we are moving a bit closer. Something I touched on very briefly in a previous post was how the cultural divide between Westerners and people here in Nepal is both not as wide as they first think, but at the same time very vast in areas that we at first do not really comprehend. Mostly this is due to some very fundamental assumptions made by westerners that just don't get Asia.

Back in one of my first posts I listed a couple of things I thought would take a long time to get use to (link HERE), and one of them was skin whitening creams and their kind of creepy commercials. These are found in most of Asia, be it India, Nepal, Cambodia, Thailand, China, etc. For us the idea that beauty is dependent on skin color is a bit too close to racism for comfort, and thus we in the west have a hard time often relating to it. But it goes a lot deeper than that. This isn't just a status thing here, many Asians look at dark skinned people the same way we in the west view obese people, just fundamentally unattractive not something that is a slight preference. Most Asians are convinced that westerners have just absolutely terrible taste in woman, mostly because we don't get too distracted by skin tone, for us it's often much more about body shape and facial features. I had a successful friend of mine who was starting to see a guy who was from southern India and somewhat dark, and all her local friends were almost aghast- "he's kind of dark isn't he?". As if surely she could find a more attractive guy with fairer skin, didn't matter that the guy was rather athletic and tall- things most western woman are more interested in. I think they find this equally unsettling as we are so white ourselves.

Lights Out: Nepal's Horrible Energy Policy

Last April I wrote about how Nepal's energy policy was creating an unsustainable cycle of gas shortages and crippling availability to energy (article can be read HERE). Predictably we are now in another part of the shortage cycle, and the timing couldn't be worse for the people of Nepal. With temperatures dropping to near freezing at night, we are currently left with load shedding of up to 14 hours a day (and it will soon be increasing to 16 then 18), petrol is scarce and largely available only through non-official channels, and at the same time there is now a shortage of cooking gas. Watching people huddle around burning fires on the side of the road reminds one of scenes from Beyond Thunder Dome or some other post-apocalyptic story, not what one expects to see in the modern world.

Mr Smith in Kathmandu Two Years On

Sunday marks the two year anniversary of my arrival in Nepal, and what a two years it has been! If you had told me then that in two years I would be opening a restaurant, selling salsa at farmer's markets, had written a book and forging ahead with some other plans I would most likely have thought you crazy. But even stranger really has been getting to know Kathmandu, and to a lesser extent Nepal as a whole. It's one thing to visit another place, but it is another thing entirely to live in another society so different from where you come. On one level your initial reaction to the more outward differences, such as what seem like crazy driving habits, a very alien religious systems and styles of dress that are very different from where you come from are all overcome by the similarities of a common humanity. This is the "no matter where you go, people are people". But this isn't the whole story. Because although this is definitely true, there is a second level you begin to see the longer you stay somewhere, and that is that, it may be the same but cultural differences and the weight of historical outlooks forge differences in people that are much more subtle than the outward appearances but differentiate us much more.

One of these things that I never really appreciated before is that Nepal is, for the most part, a much more socially tiered society than the casual observer from the west first understands. I mean people in the west hear about the caste system, and we in a vague way understand that it's a hierarchical system, but we don't usually understand the real nature of it. For us I think we instinctively relate it to our most common understandings of hierarchy, so we relate to it in an abstract way with the most common form of hierarchical system that we are familiar with, something like a work setting, where high caste people must be born into something like the bosses position, and low caste folks fill the roles of low end workers. This though is not really the case, and the ways it affects the social currents and the ways that people interact with each other is very complex and although it is a somewhat fading system, it has left a very big impression on the mindset of how people relate to each other. This isn't a judgement statement about this being a good or bad thing, but more just an observation that it is very much something that differentiates the psychologies of natives and foreigners. There are many of these subtle differences that you begin to pick up on over time, and it is increasingly clear that there are some subtle differences that add up to some very different outlooks on living.

Another thing I've noticed is just how small the world seems to have gotten, mostly due to the internet. While you never really forget that you're in Nepal, there are times when I've been in my apartment, and maybe I spent Tuesday morning watching a Monday Night Football game (Monday morning I'll be watching the Pats take on the Ravens) and maybe I'm talking to friends or relatives back home over Skype and then I'll go eat breakfast with cranberry pancakes and maple syrup...and finally I step outside and see woman dressed in saris, and taxis honking as they turn the bend and remember "oh yeah...I'm in Nepal". With information technology what it is and global shipping infrastructure allowing almost anything from back home to be available, back home never really feels all that far away to me, despite literally being on the other side of the planet. 

My two years here have been two very different entities. Both years are marred by months of chasing expensive paperwork, lawyers and bureaucrats for the ever elusive visas, but year one saw mostly a lot of getting to know Nepal and Kathmandu, and  plenty of exploring the different trekking circuits up in Annapurna, Langtang, and the Everest region interrupted now and again by a good amount of writing and trying to find my place here. Year two on the other hand has been almost entirely committed to forging that place, bringing the restaurant from a crazy loosely formed concept to the near reality that it is today. In fact it will be almost exactly a year after Donnie and I first started dreaming this thing up while craving burgers, chicken parm sandwiches, and buffalo wings on a trip up to Everest base camp that this place will open up to the public. In between has been many twists and turns that have kept life interesting, and although this all seems to be taking forever to get put together,when I sit and think how much we've done to go from a vague concept to actual reality that far and away surpasses any initial expectations, I can't help but be impressed, and think that possibly my expectations of things happening even faster were perhaps quite ambitious, even if this wasn't Nepal and things went as slow as they do.

Lastly, some thoughts on this blog, which I have maintained since even before I left to come here. Obviously my number of posts have dropped off significantly since i began committing myself full time to opening the restaurant. I don't see this changing in the near future. When we initially open I can't wait to post pictures of the space (Interiors are going in this week!) and I'm, sure some posts on the menu and such will get posted as well, slightly bumping my post count in Feb and March. But my most popular threads here are mostly about trekking, and I don't see myself getting back in the mountains any time before next Dashain at the earliest due to my obligation to get this thing off the ground and fully functional. I will maintain this blog, and hopefully sometime after the initial crazyness of running this restaurant has passed I'll get to some things that are of maybe greater general interest to readers. Until then, meandering posts of random thoughts such as this one will most likely be the norm. But such is life in Nepal.

I Miss America

Every time I talk to Kim on Skype she asks me if it's cold here. It is- well it's in the 50s and there's no central heating. She asks me if I have electricity at the moment. Half the time I don't. she follows this up with a bit of a giggle...you have water? Yeah I usually have water. "Well it's sunny and warm in Florida, I have all the electricity I need and the even fast internet" she reminds me. Har har. But despite all this I don't really want to go back. I mean I miss my family, I'd rather that Kim was here, but I also really miss America.

This photo brings tears to my eyes

Not the physical location so much as the ideal, the idea of what America is supposed to be. Because when you really boil it down a country exists only in the minds of people that we all agree that it exists and that it binds us with certain rules. The rules of my country were some of the better conceived in man's history, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, while not flawless documents set out to do something different from those before it- not dictate to the people what rights the government had over them, but it enshrined protection of the people from the hands of the government. If the founders who wrote those documents could see what we are putting up with and allowing now they would be deeply ashamed of us.

Sure, before I was born much damage had already been done to remove us from the true ideals of a free society. At no time have we been pure, be it the acceptance of slavery, the institution of Jim crow laws, Connecticut Blue laws (some of which are almost humorously still on the books), the removal of States representation in DC by making the Senate popularly elected, the suspension of Habeas Corpus during the Civil War, the confiscation of private gold holdings under FDR, the violent crackdown of peaceful assembly in the 60s, and the rise of the public-private partnership of the military industrial complex following World War II were all tings that have at one time or another put a bit of a black mark (or continue to do so) on my country.

Since September 11th 2001, my country has become almost unrecognizable. We have become so deeply paranoid and filled with fear that we have given away all those things which actually made America what it was. Fast forward ten years from that date and we now have to be groped and photographed with X ray machines just to board a plane, and it looks like the TSA will be adding buses, trains, and large public events to that list. Recently three American citizens, including a 16 year old, were assassinated on foreign soil by executive decree. While one of them was most certainly a bad man, we are supposed to be a nation of rules, and not one driven by the whims of men. We knew Al Capone was a bad man, but we couldn't just off him without nailing him by the law. We are supposed to be able to have our day in court, our right to defend ourselves before our peers, the right to challenge the legality of the laws that have condemned us. Just last week in the passing of the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) language was included that allows the indefinite detention of American Citizens on American Soil without charges and allows the transfer of those people to prisons over seas such as Gitmo. The idea of military detention of citizens on American soil is to me abhorrent, but the idea that it can be done without charges and thus not allow the accused to fight the legality of their detention is so un-American as to leave my country almost unrecognizable from its founding intentions.

While it's cliche to say "the terrorists won", what other conclusion can there be? We gave up some of our most fundamental rights, we chased boogeymen all over the globe at the cost of thousands of soldiers lives and trillions (with a T) of dollars, spilled the blood of thousands of innocent people, and propagated more wars out of our growing insecurity. Sure we got some of the bad guys, and some of them certainly were more than legitimate targets, but the way we went about it was misserable. And why are we still even in places like Afghanistan? What the hell is our end game there? We keep trying to build up democracy and infrastructure in these far off lands that don't want it, while our Republic's physical and philosophical structure decay back home. We are spending billions of dollars overseas while Americans at home struggle without jobs.

More damning than 9/11 to me though was the handling of the 2008 financial crisis. No other event by my country in my lifetime left me so disillusioned and angry. It became very clear that our elected officials did not represent us, but were there at the behest of large banking interests that appear to have had not just the billions of dollars that were given out in TARP (something that I think was very wrong) but the Fed appears to have given out some 16 Trillion to both domestic and foreign banks.To give you an idea of how much money this is, it was enough to have paid off the consumer debt of every single American (credit cards, mortgages, student loans, etc.) and still give them $8,000 each just for fun. Not that I believe that's what they should have done, but it would have been better than what they did which was to essentially make our money worth less. Something seems wrong that average Americans are paying 8% on federal student loans while banks are given money at 0% interest.

At what point does the system become so broken and corrupt that our social contract is broken? Our forefathers raised up arms against Great Britain for far less transgressions than the current lot of would be kings in DC now put us under. I don't mean this in hyperbole either. Our tax rates are higher than theirs were under Britain, we have a dismally low opinion of those who "represent us" in DC mostly because we don't believe they do, our civil liberties are constantly being "redefined" and there are now pushes to limit our voices over the internet under the guise of an anti-piracy bill. I'm not some gung ho whack job calling for armed revolt, but if people want things to change there needs to be at least a realization that they didn't have the right to make these rules, and just because they write them down on paper doesn't bind us. They were never properly given the authority to take away what they took- but as long as we all play along they do have that power. I guess if the guys with the guns say it's law though now, it must be law. But that is not America.

Have you seen my country? I don't recognize it any more.

A Perpetual State of Doubt

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.  ~Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

As this year draws to a close I and you naturally reflect on the year that was I realized that despite the restaurant taking over most of my time and being the focus of most of what I have been doing since May, as a dominant story in my inner life it has possibly played second fiddle to a new found respect for the state of doubt. Doubt gets a bad wrap in my opinion, naturally people want to alleviate themselves of it, they want answers, and in that I think we find one of the more noble aspects of humanity- our search for answers and truth to what existence actually is. The flip side of this is that in order to alleviate ourselves of this sometimes uncomfortable state we just make shit up, make horribly unfounded assumptions and can often find ourselves basing much of our lives on completely unfounded beliefs.

The most obvious can be religion, which I don't really feel like picking on in this post, but it is very low hanging fruit for an example. The more I have traveled and experienced religion all over the world the more absurd it all seems to me. Beliefs for instance here insist that bells have to be wrung to wake up spirits or ward off bad luck etc, and yet in other places around the planet this doesn't happen and one experiencing this would have to thus wonder if people around the rest of the world are less lucky or do their house spirits never wake up on time? Maybe, but at what point did it become clear to people that there were house spirits that had to be woken, or that bells would ward off bad luck? I'm not sure, but it seems to me that a lot of people have made up a lot of shit in order to fill in the gaps of what we just don't know.

Maybe In Time For The Super Bowl

It's now December and the restaurant is still coming together, but we aren't quite there yet. We are being held up by a lack of doors and windows going in, which once done we can get seriously started on painting, which once completed means we can move in all the other interior elements and equipment and furnishings that we got in China. Right now the trellises out on the patio area are going up, the bar and service counter granite tops are going in and the tile for the outdoor area should be going down soon as well. Primer paint is up, floors are in and the bathrooms walls are tiled. Our counter tops and shelving for the bar and kitchen are scheduled to be ready in just about a weeks time as well, so physically we could be put together quite quickly.

Floors Are In, Primer is Up

Aside from the restaurant Kim has also been in the country for the last three weeks and just landed back in Tampa this morning (my time). Was great to have her here, but it's unfortunately no longer her favorite place on the planet. Visiting is fun for most people, living here is more difficult and if you can't find that groove than it can become just maddening. For what ever reason Nepal seems to agree with me most of the time, and though it has its challenges it also has some advantages that I find compelling. So while it isn't the ideal situation to be some 8,000 miles apart, we are both essentially where we want to be at the moment, and if the last three weeks proved anything it was that I'm too busy to really do anything fun around here at the moment- at least anything fun outside the valley.

Most of Our Interiors Are Ready Off Site- Such As These Pots

The Busy Life in a Laid Back Country

So with the holiday season ending it was time to really start moving on getting stuff done, and that's exactly what has been going on. This is also why this blog has experienced it's longest black out since I started writing it. Every time I would think about sitting down to write something I just couldn't justify it, because I had a meeting to go to, or some cooking to do, or pricing spread sheets to work on, or something else that I should be doing. In fact even now I really should be arranging lists for the upcoming International Food Festival that will be taking place this Saturday, but that can wait until tomorrow anyway.

So what's been going on?Well of course the restaurant is still the big focus. The floors are in, the granite counter tops for the bar and service windows are being cut, the stainless steel counters and shelves are being manufactured and many of our interiors are coming together. We even have the sliding window for the bar apparently figured out. Also Kim arrived back from the US just this last Monday and so I've been trying to spend the little free time I do have with her.

In addition to the physical space coming together we are also getting the the word out by catering events here and there, and next we will be participating in the previously mentioned food festival that is sponsored by the Himalayan Times, representing the US. The menu was kept fairly simple with dishes that we thought would quickly have cross over appeal to the Nepali audience. So we are doing Cajun fries, beer battered onion rings, Buffalo or BBQ wings and burgers with the option of chicken/beef/veg. I'll be putting together large amounts of ketchup and mayonnaise from scratch for the burgers, rings and fries as well as the Buffalo & BBQ sauces. I'll also bring a bunch of the bottled products to sell, including the chili, hot pepper sauce, Buffalo sauce, and BBQ sauce. All this combined with the normal cooking for the markets has left me spending about half my week in the kitchen, and we haven't been able to find any staff to start training, so I'm still at this essentially by myself.

Due to budget and a lack of local experience with foreign restaurant set ups I've been wearing a lot of hats on this project. I am defiantly the establishments chef, so I have no problem embracing this roll, but I am also at times acting as our general contractor for the building site, the companies representative to other parties, our graphic designer for the menu, logos, and product packaging. At times I'm designing the bar space and kitchen set up, other times I'm programming spread sheets to calculate product costs from a database of suppliers products. I rush from one location in one role to another location in another- all the while wondering how I got so busy in a country where it takes weeks for even simple things to get done.

As always the differences of how things are done here as opposed to what I am accustomed to in the US makes things just that much more difficult. Coordination of events and times are very haphazard and every day I find  out something that I didn't know before about what is going into our floor of the building. Still things appear to be moving forward which is good and we'll get from point A to point B it appears even if that line is a horrible zig-zag instead of a nice straight arrow. The latest set back is that the building may not have power until some time in January, but even this can be worked around. It's just a matter of working with what you do have before you, and not dwelling on what you wish you had.

All this said, I hope when people one day sit down and enjoy a bacon Swiss burger with a strawberry daiquiri   cheesecake for dessert they'll appreciate the sheer difficulty of what we have accomplished by pulling all of these elements together in Nepal. Because I can attest that setting this up here hasn't been a piece of cake, but as they say, if it were easy everyone would do it.