Subsistence

I bought a bus ticket to Kathmandu and left this morning. The monsoon is starting here, and the ride through rural Nepal was very interesting. Because the primarily agricultural country is still pretty backward thanks to the incompetence of the king, there isn’t any irrigation technology and everyone has to start planting whenever the rains come. As a result, everyone was out with their buffalos and their plow-looking things, doing whatever the hell farmers do.

In the hilly region of Nepal, the farmers have to cut little staircase looking shelves into the land so there are flat parts to grow rice in. Each plot has raised edges to trap pools of water out of which tall and super green grass grows. I’m pretty sure that somehow becomes rice. Anyhow, it looks pretty neat when the rain stops long enough to actually see it in the light.

After seeing how it's grown, I was disappointed to find Nepali cuisine rather dull. It's basically just rice, dhal, vegetable curry, and maybe some meat. I had the buffalo meat with some rice it may have helped plant. It tasted like cow meat but chewier and less blasphemous.