For a couple of days, we were working together. Remember when the organisation asked me to become lead developer for the career advice project? That’s what happened and for the days following, I endeavoured to assess my coworkers abilities. I knew that they had some deficits, but looking at the total work done by 2-3 people over the course of a year and a half, it’s hard to tell who can or can not do what.

Blood is running in the streets and the air is filled with biting smoke. Fortunately it’s not a return of the Maoist insurgency but merely another religious event. This time every family worships its cast’s deity by means of a goat sacrifice. Right in front of their houses. Sadly the meat is only shared with members of the same cast, which puts me as an atheist a long shot away from getting any piece of the barbecue.

Bhaktapur has a Jatra and it has a chariot. Both are huge. But Bhaktapur is not the only city in the valley that sports these kind of things. I had heard marvellous stories about the Bunga Dyah Jatra in Lalitput, supposedly featuring a 20 metres high chariot. I couldn’t believe that and put it off as a conversion error, surely they meant 20 feet, right? Boy was I wrong. But all in due time.

It has been more than twelve years since I began to make a living with developing software. From the beginning I took to it like a duck to water, which wasn’t much of a surprise, given that I had spent most of my teenage years in front of a computer. There were times when I doubted my career choice. Spending every day in front of a computer is not a healthy thing to do, neither for the body nor the mind.

Since my arrival in Nepal, there have been three earthquakes. The first one I slept through and the second one I didn’t notice because I was under the shower. But when the third one happened, I was sitting on the floor in my room and that one I did notice. The floor was shaking and the door, leaning at an angle, was moving back and forth. It was a light quake, just a 4.

Over the past six years, my photography has developed at lot. I started out with a run-of-the-mill point-and-shoot camera (Canon A570 IS) and didn’t have any clue about what I was doing. With every blog post, my interest in using photos as a tool to “tell the story” grew. Slowly I started to learn more about composition, lighting, depth-of-field and how a “good picture” is foremost an interesting picture, not a technically perfect one.

One month to go till my scheduled return to Europe. There is a lot to look forward to, as I hope to see my family and a couple of friends again. Also clean air and non-bursting buses are highly tempting… It’s not all roses and butterflies, though. Over the past weeks I had a couple of chats with people who’ve been to Europe recently. And the picture they paint doesn’t look overly bright.

Saturday, the Sunday of Nepal. Although most people still work seven days a week, so it’s not a proper Sunday, really. Be that as it may, I took a day off from volunteering and headed northerly out of Bhaktapur. My destination was a temple sitting atop a hill, and my aim was to get a whiff of nature after more than two weeks in the city. It would have been an option to take a bus for a part of the trip, but I decided to walk all the way.

These days I’m staying with a Newar family in a local residential neighbourhood. The other volunteer and I are about the only white faces you’ll ever see in the streets here, which is just my cup of tea. On my way to work, I come by a smith, a vegetable merchant, a carpenter, a butcher and a couple of other small businesses, who all conduct their work pretty much in the open.