Western Standards

11th of October

In the tourist area of Lakeside in Pochara can you enjoy most of the Western Culture you would need, from icecream and cake to an English bookstore and a proper clean toilet. You have food from all over the world, just slightly adjusted to fit the supply of raw material, which I imagine is pretty local or extremely limited. All and all, they make a pretty good impression of a western society, it's even filled with westerners by the looks of it.

That's as far as it goes around here, unfortunately. When passing the cake shop and seeing the cakes in the window, even thou my mouth is watering up, I know that they taste horrible since I've already tried them. If you are one of those overly positive people you might put it as "not as the ones at home" but the attitude would be the same. The manager will comment that it's a newly produced cake, baked just two days ago and that it never left the refrigerator, which makes the question of what actually goes for a refrigerator due to the manager, since the cake was warm when I got it.

The icecream doesn't taste as bad, just "not as the ones at home" and not rarely with some additional pieces of plastic mixed in to remind me that I'm still in Nepal. This usually makes me head for the bathroom, in a discrete motion, to steal a roll of toilet paper. Even if the hotel got a proper and sometimes kind of clean toilet, it rarely comes with any toilet paper. The department store knows this and charge more for a single roll then for a can of soda.

The western culture might have reached Nepal and makes a pretty good charade of it as well. It's just that the western standards are still far away, much of this wouldn't people charge for at all back home. It's like building a boat but not making it watertight, you may very well call it a boat but it just won't float. Therefor I stay with a slightly more nepali culture, and continue to eat my Dal Bath.