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About six days into the Dasain festival, it is clear to me now why I decided to come to Nepal during their season of celebration. Besides awkward shop open hours and fewer running buses, Dasain is not the dreaded time everybody seemed to make it out to be before my arrival.
Streets filled with people, returning home from the cities to their families in more rural and remote settings, out of town. Innumerable goats line the alleys, awaiting their inevitable doom at the slaughterhouse. Strings and strings of the most brightly coloured flowers you will ever have the fortune of seeing. Hundreds of chickens, tangled in handmade, woven baskets, ready to be loaded onto buses and the cars of distant cousins'. We have to weave our way around all these obstacles; a random cow gone astray; little Nepalese women in a tailspin trying to frantically bargain for rice and fresh vegetables; the usual annoyance of motorcyclists trailing sometimes just as inch behind you which gets you wondering, 'is this even a road in the first place', they must be going 2km/h (if that). It's the frantic nature of the whole ordeal that is somehow endearing. It's colourful and vibrant and exotic and - with want of a better word - quite, 'cool'.
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