Progress

Ok we're in... We moved in last Saturday and have made tiny steps of progress each day. Although sometimes it feels like it is 1 step forward and 2 back!

This is our house...

I'm not sure if you can see it in the picture but we are very close to our neighbours, like I mean very close - last night George and I were sitting in our living room and I'm sure I heard the guy next door fart! No joke.

This is our living room...

Yes pistachio and chocolate seems to be standard fare in Nepali interior design, all our walls are lime green, and all the floors and skirting boards are choclote brown. Yummy! All our rooms were bare when we moved in but slowly by slowly we are getting somewhere with furniture. We now have a cane sofa, table and chairs in the living room and will hopefully have some curtains by the end of today!

This is the view from the roof... It's great, we've got 3 balconies - 1 from the living room looking out front, 1 on the second floor with space for an outside table etc and then we have the top floor which looks out over the hills (these are just hills, the mountains are way higher!).

Anyway it's great but living here takes a little getting used to...

Just as an example, we moved last Saturday, had a play date with another UMN family and then returned to our house for our first night and guess what? There was a power cut - all round Kathmandu there is electricity 'load shedding' because they don't have the infrastructure to meet electricity demmand so right now we're on 2.5hour power cuts 3 times a week. (It's rises to 50+ hour cuts per week in the winter!) So we arrived in the dark, spent the next 15 mins looking for our torches, in rucksacks, day bags and barrels, bathed the kids by torch light and then had to peg up some curtains in their rooms to prevent them waking at 5.00 in the morning! Nightmare.

Since then things have gotten a little better - but it takes ages to make progress.

Sunday morning I tried to connect our cooker and tripped all the electrics in the house...

Monday we had our first cup of coffee, but were struggling with the water here - it's a long story

Tuesday we discovered the German bakery round the corner and managed coffee and croisants for brakfast!

Wednesday we got our sofa delivered and managed to get broadband installed - but not in that order, for a while we literally had wi-fi internet but no furniture!

And today we're getting curtains!

Who knows what dizzy heights of progress we will scale tomorrow!