RYI STUDENT BLOG

After finishing 5 kora at Boudha stupa, I went to one tea stall. The taste of the tea was so good and it was made by an old lady, around my grandma’s age. I asked her about the background story of Boudha during her childhood.  She started telling me the story of Boudhanath. Once upon time, Boudha was a very beautiful village adorned in all directions by thousands of trees and flowers, blooming through all four seasons. Different kinds of insects made noises that sounded like bells. Different birds tweeted like a melody-queen. The main source of local peoples’ income was from agriculture. Almost 90 percent of people were farmers and all the locals were Tamang. Usually, Tamang people worked very hard in the day time but at the night they all needed to have rakshi (local whisky). Boudha’s local people were living autonomously, a simple life. After finishing the conversation with the old lady, I got to know some back ground story of Boudha. It made me reflect on the hi...

Living in Boudha, the Tibetan neighborhood of Kathmandu, and studying at RYI, a very international community, one can sometimes become a little disconnected from the greater context of this unique country of Nepal. Kathmandu is a big city that attracts people from everywhere who want and need to make a fortune, people live in big houses in small expensive apartments, just like in all the big cities around the world. And of course there is nothing wrong with that, but sometimes I feel like I am living in some kind of parallel society, a bubble of RYI students from around the world, including Nepal, and some loose contacts to the shop keepers, restaurant owners, monks and beggars with whom I’ve been sharing the neighborhood for the last couple of years. That’s why I like to spend at least my reading weeks (a one week holiday that we get once every semester) in the countryside. Be it trekking in one of the many valleys in the region, or be it just hanging out in one of the little towns ...