Pokhara 6

 This is "Mr Whippy" Nepali style. As you can see he came right down our lane. He cooks snacks on the spot. He had several customers while we watched. This was late Sunday afternoon, but we have noticed quite a few of them are out and about on the roads when students are coming home from school and they seem to do quite a trade.

 We have included some pictures to show housing construction in Nepal. There are three being built in our lane at present. The first two you can locate by the concrete-making pile of sand in the street. They seem to form a mound of cement and sand with a hollow in the centre and then add the water to it, in much the same way as my mother used to mix her pikelets.

 On the building site closest to us (where the red bucket is in previous photo), they have partly knocked down a lean-to kind of construction next to their house and are upgrading it. They have left some of the original walls at the front, although roughly kind of leveled them off, presumably so they can add some height with new bricks. The steel was dropped off beside our house and the chap in the photo is cutting it and starting to bend it. It was a very hot day and Ken was amused to see him use both the umbrella and a towel down the back of his neck to try to keep cool. Every now and then he had to readjust as the sun moved.

The owner of the property, in the darker hat, is helping to bend the steel and tie it up so it  will form a columnar shaped reinforcing which they will form the boxing around and then pour concrete down.

The pile of bricks is now starting to disappear- brick by brick. We have been watching two women trudge in and out, load up their baskets by throwing the bricks back over their own heads and then trudge back to the building site. While we were taking these photos the owner came out, took a brick in each hand and walked back! The women seem to do most of this carrying work. On the site below we saw one woman shoveling metal chip into the other's basket and the head jerked with each shovel full. When they were on site they somehow pulled a string, the basket lurched sideways and emptied. Must be a huge strain on their body.

These three picture are from the site right at the corner of our lane and the road. The young chap (red shorts) has got quite friendly with Ken and likes to try out his English. He seems to be living on site in a rough shed made from piled up concrete blocks (not concreted together). On Saturdays when we go out to church we see his trousers and two shirts hanging up to dry on a pole at the front of the hut. You can see the columns and reinforcing as we described for the previous house. The bricks are quite roughly mortared in ( more mortar than bricks in some places). Ken also noticed that on some walls they are in a line with the outer edge of the columns and in other places with the inside edge. Today it is raining, and as we walked past we noticed they had spread tarps out so they could keep on working.