The First Time as Tragedy, the Second Time as Farce

I'm back in the Hong Kong Airport, sitting in the travellers' lounge. I'm not sure if my bags will make it to NY, and I'm really not feeling well. I'm sitting watching episodes of Buffy (it was The Wire the last time I was here) in an effort not to think too much. I was reading The Brothers Karamazov* on the plane, but the travel and the coverage of the Olympics opening ceremony have sufficiently deadened by brain to make me incapable of continuing.

My last day in Kathmandu, I took a ride with my favorite crazy rickshaw driver.** We went up the Monkey Temple and then back through Old Kathmandu.

The night before, I went to the orphanage that my Nepali teacher runs for dinner. In addition to two Germans, there was an American linguistics student, who is in Nepal to learn Nepali, in the hopes of getting a grant to study a largely undocumented language in the east of Nepal.*** There were also some older women from the American south, who work at an orphanage in Pokhara. I could have spotted these guys as missionaries at a 1000 yards, but didn't get a chance to warn the Germans. The Germans asked one (who was 85) how she managed to stay so youthful looking (she looked not a day over 73). So we got a spiel about Christ, but it wasn't so bad. They also figured out**** that I was Jewish. They seemed to know a ton about Judaism, including about the the imminent start of Tisha B'av, which I'm willing to wager many of my Jewish friends don't know a whole lot about. They also had some question for me about how I pronounce a certain Hebrew word, that if I understood them right was a way of seeing if I used the Ashkenazi "s" or the Sephardic/Modern "t," also a pretty inside question.*****

They also told us a story about traveling on the "Friendship Highway" at some point in the mythic past (like 1975). The highway in theory is called this to celebrate the Friendship between China and Nepal, but most people seem to say that it's so called because "if you don't have friends along it you won't make it through it."

* Yes. I know I should have read this along time ago, and Susan "You Can't B. Serious" Anthony and Hank Morgan should have some appropriate amounts of scorn for my weakness in Russian Lit. I have no response.
**To be fair, he is no where near as crazy as some of the cab drivers, but I think pedaling a rickshaw down the busiest streets in KTM while simultaneously conducting a conversation in a language you don't speak very well and hollering at girls on the sidewalk counts as crazy.
***There is also a chance that the existence of this language is an elaborate hoax. Well, probably not, but no two sources seem to agree on how many languages exist in Nepal. In my report, at a point where it was important, dropped a footnote citing to one of my bosses reports. In a country of 23m, with a landmass abut the size of a medium-sized US state, there are 61 ethnic groups, and 125 languages. Yes. More than 2 languages per ethnic group.
****By the incredibly stealthy tactic of asking me outright.
*****I usually use the "s," as in "shabbas," not "shabbat," but that's mostly because the only Hebrew I actually know is liturgical, and most of that I have more-or-less still memorized from a Hebrew School run by older Ashkenazi Misnagdim.