Political and Seismic Instability

Yesterday was Kukur Tihar, a holiday on which Nepalis show their appreciation for the dogs, domestic and stray alike, not that the difference is always apparent.

I meant to get out and get some pictures, but Amanda and I had a very busy day. I Googled up a couple of pictures that summarize the mood among Nepal’s dogs on this special day.

I just smelled the smell of pepperoni coming in the window. It was a waking dream, not real, but it smelled like real.

Maybe it was the discussion with Vishwa over his towering basil plant downstairs. He brought it from Japan a few months ago. He was asking me about its uses. He loves Italian food but in Japan he picked up the misconception that spaghetti sauce is made with ketchup. I’ve been scratching my head over what to do with the basil. My impression is that while Thai or holy basil (known as “tulsi” in Hindi and Nepali) is common enough, sweet basil is a bit of a rarity here. The other ingredients for proper Italian food are unlikely to be any more common. I’ve also been discussing with him how to reseed this plant. It’s flowering, and normally I would pinch off the flowers so as not to let the flavor and leafiness diminish, but we also want it to reproduce so it won’t be the last of its line. I was advising him on how to make pizza sauce taste like pizza sauce, and how that didn’t involve ketchup, and it reminded me of the conversation in the gym between Sal and the Nepali guy who wante to know if Sal’s pizza had potatoes for a topping option. Maybe I could make killing selling homefries pizza for Nepalis.

Anyhow, back to the subject of actual pizza. I didn’t post an update on the topic after Amanda and Laurie and I went to Mike’s Breakfast for pizza because their pizza wasn’t all that encouraging. We ordered three single-person pizzas to share. They had overly thick, doughy crust, made soggy by overly thick layers of toppings. The three pizzas were mostly indistinguishable from one another. The one that was supposed to have pesto on it had the same tomato sauce as the others. Maybe the pesto was mixed in with the tomato sauce? In any case it didn’t taste like much. And if there was extra cheese on one of the pizzas, that wasn’t distinguishable either. Maybe the chef was being generous and put extra cheese on all three. It wasn’t enough. Amanda and Laurie pronounced it inferior to Fire & Ice’s pizza on the spot. I ate most of it anyhow, because I was hungry, and the wine was pretty good.

So the other day, Amanda and I went to Sal’s pizza after the gym. They’re close by, down a long narrow alley between brick compound walls overtopped by flowering vines. It’s a quiet, out-of-the-way spot. The store is inassuming and clean. The day we went was mid-desain and all of the shop fronts were closed but Sal’s was open, and a gaggle of teenage boys were sitting on footstools around the lone table on the shop step, drinking tea and playing chess. We ordered a garlic and mushroom pizza, and a mixed meat pizza. The dough was already rolled out, sitting in a plastic bag inside a dormant convection oven, on top of which was stacked another, hot convection oven where the action was taking place. The menu was promising but the convection oven situation wasn’t. We waited a good while. They seemed pretty busy, and the boy who was taking orders and assembling the pizzas was swamped with requests for tea and soda from the other customers. Sal (at least I assume that’s his name) himself wandered in after a while and asked his employees if they needed more dough, and we spoke with him for a few minutes. He was surprised by the amount of business they were getting. He’d thought it might not be worth it to open, but his employees had said there would be a lot of business. My guess is that with most places closed for desain, it’s good to be open. Sal also apologized for the quality of the pizza while it was still in the oven. Most days, he said, they use the tandoor of a nearby restaurant. (There are several tandoori restaurants there on Lazimpat, the main road off which the alley runs.) In fact, after several failed attempts at producing a satisfactory dough, they just decided to have the tandoori restaurant make naan for them. But it makes sense. A good bubbly, slightly burnt naan is closer to what a New Yorker considers proper pizza dough than, say, even a top-notch Chicago deep dish pie. He asked us to come try them again when the tandoori restaurant is open to bake their dough for them.

Judging by the quality of what’s on top of the dough, we’ll be giving them another try. They import their mozzarella and use plenty of it, so they’ve got that part right. The sauce is pretty good, if a little sweet. The other toppings were all fine. They have a couple of oddball toppings that got my curiosity up, as well: “spicy buff[alo]” and “Ramesh’s achar” (but no damn potatoes!)

Thinking I was well-prepared for our electrical outlet multiplication needs, I brought to Nepal a five-tentacled PowerSquid powerstrip (or, as they’re known here, “multiplug,” which is more appropriate anyhow because the PowerSquid is not in any sense a “strip.” It looks like a squid, with female outlets on the ends of its tentacles to prevent transformer bricks from blocking access to outlets they’re not using. Clever.) It also has built-in surge protection for power outlets, coaxial cable, and phone jacks.

And I brought an adapter, since the Nepali outlets look like the one depicted in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. Baseboard outlet

Needless to say, you can’t plug an American-style plug into that without using a hammer. You can plug an American-style plug into such a one as depicted in Fig. 2…

Fig. 2. Wall switch with “universal” outlet

…but only if it’s not a grounded (i.e., three-prong) plug, which doesn’t help us, as all of our 220V-tolerant appliances have grounded plugs.

Now, these are the crucial electronic items I need to plug in to enjoy all of the gadgetry without which I’ll lose my identity as a westerner:

1) laptop computer;
2) external hard drive, chock full of music;
3) little speaker capable of loud volumes, without which aforesaid music is useless;
4) VoIP router, for unlimited calling to the U.S.; and
5) AirPort Express wireless router, so I don’t have to be sitting near all this stuff when it bursts into flame.

The plan was to plug them all into the PowerSquid’s five tentacles. This is why I thought I only needed the one adapter: to plug the American PowerSquid into the Nepali outlet.

Of the above appliances, two—the speaker and the VoIP router—aren’t spec’d for 220V, so they needed to have their voltage converted. No problem. I went to the Bhat Bhateni supermarket, where they sell everything that can be bought, and bought myself a stepdown transformer.

Fig. 3. Stepdown transformer

Here begin the complications. The stepdown transformer, you’ll notice, says “110 VOLTS.” The PowerSquid, particular creature that it is, raised in the unwavering currents of the American electrical system, considered this voltage abnormal and wouldn’t have anything to do with it. (The stepdown transformer seems to have its reservations as well. Now and then it shuts off. The light stays on, but there’s no juice. But if I flip the switch to “OFF” and then back to “ON,” all is forgotten, and the power comes back.) So there went both my surge protection and my outlet multiplication. If I wanted to run those two 220V-intolerant appliances, they had to share the stepdown transformer’s single outlet, which looks, incidentally, like the outlet shown in Fig. 2.

I needed a splitter, preferably one with American female outlets and a Nepali male. If that couldn’t be found, I would need 1) a splitter and 2) an adapter and 3) another adapter. And in either case, there had to be room enough for the two transformer bricks to plug into it at the same time. I had little hope for something as clever as the PowerSquid. What I ended up with was one of these:

Fig. 4. I don’t know what you call this thing

This thing is basically a plastic box with three prongs sticking out of it, and outlets on three sides. Three different outlets. Three outlets that differ in ways that are subtle and, honestly, a little disconcerting. When it comes to culture shock, it’s the little things that get to you. But yes, I find their similarity-yet-difference menacing. Look:

Fig. 5.

No plug in the house, mind you, fits snugly into this thing. Most plugs fit, loosely, into at least one side of it. As to how the screws and wires and metal strips come together inside there, I won’t speculate. When you plug something into it, it snaps and arcs. It has burn marks on the metal. It looks like a skull. But I managed to plug it into the stepdown, jammed on top of one transformer brick and with other balanced on top of it, in such a way that both are getting power and the smell of burning wires isn’t noticeable from more than a few feet away.

Fig. 6. Don’t try this at home

As for the other appliances, they can make do with 220V, so they get to hang out with this Chinese power strip which is less discerning than the PowerSquid. This strip, interestingly, features yet another variation on the “universal” outlet.

Fig. 7. Fang An Safe & Durable

I wonder why each outlet seems to have its own label. Are they for different purposes? They are labeled, from left to right, “NOISE FILTER,” “CIRCUIT BREAKER,” “SAFETY SHUTTER,” “MULTI PURPOSE,” “NEON SWITCH,” and “UNIVERSAL USE.” This power strip is everything the PowerSquid is not. For one, it’s actually a power “strip.” For two, it’s so unpicky about its job that you can actually twist the plugs inside the outlets with about thirty degrees of play. Look at those first two plugs. This is a power strip with a can-do attitude. Ajay, our Indian/Nepali ex-marine-engineer-from-a-landlocked-country technical guru, took one look at it and informed me that such loose connections are the leading cause of electrical appliance death in Nepal. He then warned me off of Chinese electronics generally.

Which brings me to the UPS. Load shedding has been fairly frequent, as have other types of apparently more spontaneous power outages. In order to prevent any more downtime than necessary, I saw fit to buy a UPS (uninterruptible power supply), which is basically a big battery (second plug from the left). Ajay sold it to us, and even hand-delivered it. It’s of Indian manufacture and is a darn solid and reliable looking piece of equipment. It weighs more than it looks like it should, unlike the Fang An Safe & Durable, which weighs almost nothing. And it has four snug, no-nonsense American-style outlets on the back. Of course the cable modem, which was the item most in need of backup power in order to keep our internet connection alive during power outages, has a Nepali-style plug on it. This is why it’s plugged into an adapter and then into the UPS:

Fig. 8. Behind the UPS

That thing on the left with the phone cables running to it is the PowerSquid. Did I mention that the Chinese phones we keep buying keep breaking? Well, we’re on our second anyhow. When we plug them into the VoIP router, the handsets stop working. The speaker phones work, but the handsets die. Vonage tech support blames the phones, and we already know Ajay’s opinion on the matter. Anyhow, to prevent further damage to the current broken phone, I plugged it into the PowerSquid’s phone jack surge suppressor. It may be too little too late, but dammit I brought that thing all the way from the U.S. and I was determined to use it.

I did not expect this to happen so soon but I have become infected with amebiasis, the condition caused by entamoeba histolytica. Thinking back on it I did drink the water they were passing around at the national convention I went to in Chitwan. I kind of had to, I was in the convention hall for nine, ten hours a day, and at times they would not allow you to leave the convention hall (literally they barred the doors). Plus, I figured I should fit in. How better then sharing water with people? I know excuses, excuses. I guess communists don’t prioritize potable water, even though they serve it to you in plastic bottles.

I have attached the life cycle of this little creature as well as its picture, so you can become familiar with all that we are exposed to. Apparently, it is second to malaria for fatalities caused by protozoans. If not treated it can result in brain or lung abscesses. It burrows into the intestinal lining, gets into the blood stream, and then it has a field day. But the initial side effects are debilitating enough that it would take a really unaware or very poor person to let it go to the point of fatality. Believe you me! In order to keep my body from fever and wracking body pains, and also to hold onto foods and liquids long enough to digest them, I decided to seek some sort of medical treatment. The stool sample cost me 40 rupees, then the lab called up my neighboring pharmacy at my request and gave him the diagnosis, and then he gave me the meds I needed, which cost 35 rupees. No doctor needed and for about a dollar, I have avoided brain abscesses. It should be completely out of my system in five days and I should start feeling better by tomorrow.

Besides reports on the failure of the impending peace talks, the front page of the Kathmandu daily carried this picture today . Unlike other adverse reactions to this picture on the worldwide web concerning animals rights, the Nepali daily took kindly to it, reporting that it was part of a “week-long national day holiday…celebrating the 57th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.” It added that China was expecting more than 330 million people to be travelling during this time, that is 35 million more than all the people in America. Imagine if we all decided to take vacation at once?