For those of you who were expecting this to be a blog about travels all over the subcontinent, like me, I'm afraid I'm about to disappoint.  One morning while I was having breakfast at my favorite restaurant in Boudha, Toast, and chatting with some western friends, who were attending the same seminar I was and who are are also students at a monastery college, they introduced me to one of their friends, an Australian woman, who teaches English to monks, small and large, at a monastery in the mountains above the Kathmandu valley.  After we had talked a while she, Johanna, asked me if I would consider coming up to the monastery to teach conversational English to some of the monks, mostly senior monks who knew English quite well already but had little conversational experience.  She said that she had only been asked to start looking for someone the night before and that I was the first one she had met since then who didn't have definite plans, I had said in the earlier conversation that I was going to travel whichever way the wind blew me.  I thought about it a bit while we talked about the monastery and she tried to tell me the possible negatives and positives of the opportunity.  It really wasn't necessary for me to think about it for very long, I had pretty much decided to give it a go within the first five minutes.  Seems that all those places in India and Nepal that I had read about and thought about visiting will have to wait.  This was definitely the blowing wind for me.  I've thought for a long time that the best kind of travel is when you can see the sights but also get a taste of the culture through getting to know the people, pretty difficult under most circumstances, but it seemed to me I had just been handed an exceptional circumstance!

The next three days were taken up by a retreat that was the last part of the seminar I had been attending.  The retreat was held in a monastery in the village of Pharping, about a two hour ride by bus from Boudha and about 2000  feet up in the mountains that form the southern boundary of the Kathmandu valley.  The monastery was built into the side of a cliff that looms over the village and contains on its mountain side a cave made famous by the Tibetan saint Padmasambhava, also know as Guru Rinpoche.   Views from the valley side of the monastery were spectacular, if seldom clear do the persistent valley haze and pollution. The 100 of us who went to the retreat barely fit into this small monastery requiring quite a few of us to sleep in the shrine rooms of the temple.  It was a very pleasant three days, the weather was brilliantly sunny and crisp, the food very good, the retreat talks interesting, the atmosphere very peaceful and there was enjoyable conversation with friends who only days ago had been strangers.  I should add just one negative, the walk up to the monastery from the village was UP and UP many  flights of steps, so many that it seemed like at least a thousand steps, though it didn't seem like that many on the way down.

The bus got back to Boudha about 6:30 PM on Sunday evening, and I hurried through the darkened town, in Nepal they call black outs power shedding, to a restaurant near the huge stupa at its center to have dinner with a American friend who works at the monastery in Boudha where most of the seminar was held.  We had a pleasant dinner discussing our backgrounds, his was Wall Street, early retirement,  trip to India, caught up by some Buddhist teachings, came to Boudha to study, the Rinpoche found out about his background in finance and he became development director. And, we also had a lively discussion of the up and downs of working in another culture, something we both had done.  To soon it was 8 PM and I was tired and ready to return to the Lotus Guest House for a good nights sleep, for tomorrow would be a busy day.  I would need to check out of the guest house, shop for a few essentials and pack all my gear for the trip to Rinchen Palri Monastery, my new home.  I needed to be ready to meet Johanna at 4 PM that afternoon to start the trip.