The Martin's Blog

Helen – This morning at breakfast I met a fellow Fulbrighter (Alenka) from Croatia.  She is currently living in Virginia with her husband and children and is in Nepal for 8 months.  As always, I love speaking Serbian with anyone who will tolerate me and we will meet again this evening.  I went to the conference with Tom this morning to hear several of the 10 minute presentation from the Fulbrighters on their projects.  Both Tom and Traci present this afternoon and then we will hopefully go into town to the bazaar for a little shopping.

 Forget the shopping!!!  The session ran almost two hours late and we finished about 6:45.  Tom and Traci were both near the end of the session and many of the participants had left.  Tom’s presentation was very good but he had some technical difficulties with his PowerPoint presentation (e.g. the power in the room went out!) which ate away at his time limit.  The technical difficulties were the main problem, computer shorting out and the microphones malfunctioning, causing the extended session; but then there were also those people who ignored the warning signals and just kept on talking until they finished their presentation.  We were tired and irritated by the end. 

Dinner plans had changed and it was arranged to be in the ethnic village. The restaurant was set outside on a raised platform with rugs and low individual tables.  Women preparing bread for our meal –

Tom and Tissa, our Fulbright director, both had chairs brought in because they could not sit cross legged for that period of time.  

The waiters served us our dinner with a flare and much chattering (which we didn’t understand).  They slopped the different curries into small dishes around our main dish then put rice and some other treats on the bigger dish.  The milk and yogurt drinks were served in pottery glasses (some leaked) and we enjoyed the waiters’ antics as they overfilled our plates even when we said “no.”  They would laugh and say “yes” as they put more on our plates.

After dinner, we strolled around the complex to see the events and marveled how exotic everything looked at night with the twinkling lights.