The Gallivanting Grasshopper: Hasili Maya's Recipe for 2017 -- Pokhara, Nepal

I suppose most travelers visit Nepal for the adventure. Mountain climbing! Elephant riding! Paragliding! It's one of those bucket-list destinations wherein people get to explore the depths of hardcore. To discover how intrepid and gutsy they really are.

I visited Nepal and promptly settled into blissful domesticity.

Matt and I have started cooking breakfasts in the morning. We can buy eggs for 15 cents apiece and a whole bag o' veggies for less than a dollar. Fresh buffalo curd costs 50 cents and bananas are next to nothing. So eating in is going to do wonders for my dwindling checkings account. In this country, we can prepare glorious breakfasts for approximately 75 cents each.

More money for coffee. Mmmm... my cup of coffee costs more than two breakfasts. Mmm... priorities.

Not only is eating in cheap, it's immensely satisfying to cook again. To smell onions and garlic frying in a pan. To plop an omelette onto someone's plate and tell them, "I'll be sad if you don't eat it while it's hot," and then hurry to make my own.

However, cooking at Ganesh's homestay has some serious drawbacks. Namely, Ganesh. This goodhearted, meddlesome fellow can turn something as beautifully therapeutic as cooking into pure torment and vexation. Something I need therapy to recover from.

"No, the oil is not hot enough!" he exclaimed as I dumped onions into a what appeared to be the love child of a Wok and the cauldron from Macbeth.

"It's fine," I insisted and passed the spoon to Matt. "Can you stir?"

Ganesh had asked me to prepare dinner for his family one night, so I'd decided on the easiest, cheapest most flexible dish in my repertoire. Spanish Omelette accompanied by a simple sort of curry with aubergine, courgette, onion and tomato.

"I made pasta for them before you got here," Matt confided. "They hated it."

"That's encouraging."

I dislike cooking for people who hate food. Who hates food? I mean, I understand liking one food more than another, but to actively hate a food?

Blurgh.

Ganesh observed my fingers as I chopped the garlic, with all the focus of a bird of prey.

"I watch everything. This will be a great meal. You chop very well."

"But you said the same thing to me when I was cooking the pasta!" Matt protested.

Then Santa, who had come down from the village to visit her husband, blew into the kitchen. And promptly stood behind the propane stove (there's no oven), grabbed the spoon from Matt, started stirring the curry and asking whether or not I'd added salt.

Just... let me cook, dammit.

Ganesh watched my chop the bell pepper. Santa lifted the plate off my Spanish Omelette and asked why it wouldn't be better to flip it.

"No, the oil is not hot enough!" Sandesh mimicked his father's concern when I poured eggs into a wannabe skillet and the oil only sizzled seductively instead of violently spat. "And if you had boiled the potatoes first, they would have cooked better."

AGH! Did they ask me to make dinner so that they could try my food or so that they could spend the whole evening hovering over my shoulder and telling me all the things I'm doing wrong?

Never again. I will not cook for this family again. Lord.

"Santa," Matt said firmly. As one says to Santa. "Please sit down. Would you want Aimee to teach you how to make dal baht? This is what Aimee makes. Dal baht is what you make."

After a torturous two and a half hours fighting off criticism, Santa's spoon and Ganesh's "Yammee, is your work done yet?" dinner was finally ready.

"Are you tired?" Ganesh asked as I collapsed into a plastic chair at the table.

"No," I tried to smile. "I'm not tired."

I'm just exhausted from all your meddling. It's hard enough to prepare a meal in a kitchen without an oven, no hot pads, wannabe skillets, no sponges for washing up, no towels, no forks, no spatulas, dull knives and none of the seasonings I'm used to working with. I don't need to be told on seven different occasions that the oil wasn't hot enough.

I held my breath as Ganesh took his first bite.

"Hasili Maya," he grinned. "It's very good."

What a relief.

So when Matt and I prepare our breakfasts, we try to wait until Ganesh has left to teach English and Sandesh is at university. Then we commandeer the kitchen, play some music, cook our eggs and take our breakfast to his balcony, where we celebrate our thriftiness as we watch people go about their days on their rooftops.

After breakfast, we pack our bags and stroll down to Easy Cafe. Where the servers have become so accustomed to our presence that they a) know exactly what we're going to order, b) have stopped charging a service fee, and c) have removed the napkins from our usual table, because they know I steal them for toilet paper.

Matt and I work on our writing for hours, headphones in, occasionally gazing off at Phewa lake and the Himalayas. Feeling a moment of gratitude for where we are. He takes the uncomfortable chair (it's the productive chair) and I sink into the armchair (because my ass misses cushion, and I will happily take cushion over productivity). I've begun submitting articles to various travel websites, in hopes that one day, I can actually make money off this thing I like to do.

That would be the ideal world, wouldn't it?

Matt is an inspiration to me, because Matt is already supporting himself off of his writing.

So it's possible.

When we're not writing or cooking, we take little adventures. Like walks up to the Peace Pagoda and boats onto Phewa Lake.

I find myself slowly falling in love with Pokhara. Leisurely walks along the tranquil lake, the odd boat making its way across the vast blue, rippling expanse. Looking up and having to take a moment to realize whether it's clouds I'm seeing, or the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas.

Matt introduced me to a bar with free movie nights and board games. So every Monday and Thursday evening around 7:30, we mosey down to OR2K and engage in a cutthroat game of scrabble, drink cocktails and watch whatever film happens to be on.

I could get used to this.

Peace Pagoda

ANGRY BUDDHA!

Peace Pagoda

No Naked? But... but... I love the naked...

We spent New Years Eve rowing on Phewa lake. Bottle of wine, bar of chocolate, bag of crisps and journals in which to write our resolutions.

"Do you take them seriously?" Matt asked.

"Nah. I treat resolutions like a recipe. When I cook, I like to find a recipe for a sense of direction. But then I fuck with it as much as I want. This is the recipe for my 2017."

Hasili Maya's Recipe for 2017

Practice yoga three times a week. Any kind of yoga. Could just be breath work. Whatever I need.
Read one poem every day. Actually have a favorite poet by the end of 2017.
Write a short play inspired by a quote once a day. Can be a monologue. Can be ten pages. Just write.
Submit two articles a week for potential publication. Travel articles, personal essays, poems, whatever I happen to be writing.
Read a book for pleasure every month. Books like Mindsight and Healing Trauma through Yoga are amazing, but I've kind of lost the joy of reading.
Read one play a month. Get back into your theatre habit, Girl.
Learn to prepare one local dish in every country I visit.
Study French three hours a week. Blurgh.
Learn to edit photos better. Find someone to teach me this. Or youtube the hell out of it.
Spend two + hours painting every week. I love painting. I'm so much happier, more grounded, more in touch when I paint. I just don't do enough of it.

Watercolor of a sunset in Rovinj, Croatia

After briefly docking our boat against a much larger vessel teeming with unwashed hippies strumming guitars and passing around plastic bottles of raksi (nasty, nasty millet wine), we reluctantly returned our rowboat.

The rest of the night was spent wandering through festive Lakeside and enjoying the sensation of strangers shouting, "Happy New Years!" without then asking us to buy something.

This feels like the first time in ages wherein I've been greeted without ulterior motives.

"Happy New Years!" I yelled back.