Albany?!

I've had pretty much identical conversations with 2 kids this week. Both of them stopped me near my hotel, on the outskirts of Thamel (pretty much the tourist ghetto here) and asked why "westerners" were so rude when they tried to speak to them. I wound up having pleasant conversations with both of them, and I don't mean to justify the behaviour of others, some of whom were probably complete dickheads, but it's hard to explain how frequently you get hassled here, particularly in this neighborhood.

On a related note, one of the favored local scams involves impressing tourists with knowledge of foreign capitals. One guy, who seemed perfectly nice, correctly identified Albany as the capital of New York, something I had a lot of trouble getting my students to do. The only problem with this is that he was a drug dealer, and one who seemed to have taken the phrase "expressio unius est exclusio alterius " to heart, insofar as he understood my "no" to his offer of hash to be an invitation to offer cocaine. And to think, all this time I thought I needed to convince my students not to join the drug trade.

In other news, the one day I left my camera at home, I saw an elephant on my way to work. This would've been much more surprising about a week ago (seeing the elephant, not forgetting my camera).