My garden is coming along!

When we heard we were getting Nepal as our next post, the stories of “Delhi Belly” were rampant and I thought the upside might be a 20 lbs weight loss on the “Amoebic Dysentery diet.”  Surprisingly, nothing like that has happened (so far, knock on wood) and, apart from a couple of 24 hour bugs, I haven’t really been sick.  Yesterday evening my tummy didn’t feel right and the short version is that I had a bad night’s sleep.  The next morning I was exhausted and still wasn’t feeling confident enough to go back to work, so I took a sick day.  The plan was to go back to bed for a couple of hours and catch up on sleep and make sure that I recovered for the rest of the week.

That did not happen.  Our Didis showed up, the door bell started ringing.  A team of guys showed up to fix our bedroom window.  Another team showed up to fix the generator fuel supply.  The water truck came.  More delivery trucks.  The phone rang and rang.  I got no peace and no sleep.  I headed outside to the 75 degree November sunshine to sit in my favourite porch chair, look at my little flower garden and watch the butterflies.  It didn’t last long.  The horns blasted away outside, the generator kicked on, and the neighbours lit a fire to burn their stock pile of plastic. (A terrible, but common practice around here.)   It was a strange mix of peaceful insect buzz inside and chaotic honking outside.  But I did stop and takes some photos for a little while before the acrid fumes drove me back inside the house.

Here are some insect and flower shots that give no clue of plastic fumes or car horns. I’m very glad they still hang out with us anyway:

Bean flowers from the feral Nepali bean vine that is growing over our wall. We’ve had a crop of about 10 kilos so far!

Marigolds.  The most Nepali on flowers!

The dragonflies were everywhere.

butterfly