Since 'tis the season, I thought I'd write about a strange Christmas experience I had. It's the only Christmas I've spent away from my family, and the only Christmas I spent outside of North America.
By Christmas, I had been in Nepal for about three months. I would leave in another month, but the amount of time I had spent in a very narrow geographic area (mostly around Kathmandu), meant that I had become extremely familiar with my surroundings. After I left the country, I actually produced an extremely detailed map of the tourist area for a friend of mine, outlining the best places to get every variety of food, the best bookshops and so on.
But Christmas, which should have been a happy time, was tinged with a sense of loss. Every foreigner living in Nepal falls into one of only a few categories - they either work for large international organizations (like the UN or human rights organizations), are there to volunteer, are there to hike or are there as part of a larger backpacking trip. Only occasionally do you meet a foreigner who has managed to find a way to live in Nepal comfortably. Because of its demographic makeup, a mass exodus of foreigners occurs around Christmas, and the areas that were previously thronging with gullible tourists become barren.
Because I had become accustomed to bucket showers, scary toilets and beds that were too short, I decided to indulge myself for Christmas by staying at the hotel that the Beatles had allegedly stayed at when they passed through Kathmandu. Hardly fancy, it was nevertheless a modest step up from what I had been used to.
The whole day, the tourist district had been filled with Nepalis, something I don't think occurs at any other time of the year. Christmas may lack religious significance to Nepal's Hindus, but it was a day off, and the most expensive and fancy clubs and restaurants in the entire country were all located in the main tourist area.
Most of my friends had left the country, so I went for a Christmas eve dinner with an Australian girl I had met in the lobby of the hotel. I don't think we ever spoke again, but the dinner of faux-Mexican food was good enough. Sitting on cushions on the floor, we were at one point given a platter of frozen "guacamole" - something the Australian girl immediately pointed out to the waiter. This being Nepal, though, the waiter was nonplussed, not realizing that guacamole was something that was not supposed to be frozen.
For Christmas dinner, I went out with the sort of people one often sees in Nepal - a brother and sister about to embark on another chapter of their lives. Over yak steaks (because the Hindu faith of the majority of Nepal's residents are forbidden beef), the two future doctors described, with medical precision, the perfect hangover cure.
After parting ways with the Aussie siblings, I made my way through crowded streets to meet up with a friend who had actually managed to live in Nepal. She and many of her friends were out, enjoying Korean food, and the night went late. I stumbled back to my hotel room at some ungodly hour, possibly with food poisoning.
More than anything, the experience was a sad one. Over the past month, I said goodbye to many friends, without much chance of meeting many more. And though I could hardly say my Christmas was traditional, it fit with the larger experience of travelling. In foreign countries, tourists are drawn to each other like magnets, quickly forming friendships that dissolve just as suddenly.
Perched at the back of a rickety bus, I would sometimes be overcome by feelings of absolute loneliness and emptiness, a feeling that comes from switching locations, cultures, religions and languages every few weeks. My Nepali Christmas gave me a reprieve from those feelings, and I see that as a small grace.
