Numbers and letters are important, and there are some challenges for me in sorting those out here. So far it’s only a plan to be able to read words in Devanagari script but I can read numbers, a handy start. Recently, that’s been helpful to decipher telephone numbers on shop fronts when I’m trying to find a particular shop that I have been given a business card for in script that I cannot read. It would be useful to be able to read place names or bus destinations at the very least, and I’ll report in some time about how that’s going once I begin to make some progress. In Kathmandu it was no problem to only read and speak English, here in Bhairawa, English speakers are far fewer. Practising the Nepali I know however is always greeted so positively, everyone is really happy to work with me to have a conversation.
The Nepali text, dictionary and my exercise book were definitely the number 1 reading choice before Bhairawa and now it’s various work related things. Lonely Planet Nepal has had a good share of reading time and then there’s the time I’ve found to read novels. I have managed to read Stephen Fry’s ‘Moab is My Washpot’ a Kerry Greenwood novel (thanks team who provided the voucher for my kindle) a Jodi Picoult, and Carole Wilkinson’s ‘Sugar, Sugar’ (thanks Carole, really enjoyed it). A couple of random novels picked up along the way too, a pity the copy of ‘time traveller’s wife’ was not actually a complete copy when I chose it from the guest house shelf! Thanks to MaryAnne I’ve now got her selection of holiday reading, and to Jenny who included Clean Cut by Lynda La Plante in her mail to me which I’m racing through. I’m feeling well looked after.
