Instead of eating crackers, yak chese, raisins, dried apricots from Turkey, almonds, trail mix and an orange from my pack for dinner, I went walking about in Thamel.
I went into places that were playing music, trying to find the "right spot".
I went into a half dozen places...
I found what I was looking for at the Northfield Cafe, which actually was just across the street from my hotel, the Hotel Nana. There were 6 men in a band named Samsundra and they were playing traditional Nepali music.
I changed tables as soon as the one table I had my eye on opened up, so I was then sitting right in front. It was the best seat in the house. The music was excellent. All the men were from a small town near Pokhara, my destination in several days. All were brothers, cousins, nephews, uncles.....a whole family. They belonged to a Nepali caste that is "the musician caste".
They accepted donations and.sold CDs to raise money for education programs for children in their community. There are no public schools in Nepal - similar to Lao. You must pay to go to school. All the band members live in Thamal and play music - away from their families for weeks at a time - to raise money for the education programs they support.
I ordered a hamburger to see what a Nepali hamburger would be like. It was different. It was mushy meat, an odd texture. A cheeseburger with grilled mushrooms and onions with a side salad. It was good, but it got me wondering about what kind of meat it was.
The next night I was on the rooftop of my hotel - 5 stories above the main city street in Thamel. No one else was up there and there were lights visible all over Kathmandu - Xmas lights and candles for the Festival of Lights celebration. I heard music at the Northfield Cafe on the street below, so I downed my beer, made a phone call and walked across the street.
When I walked in, I immediately started looking for the best table to sit, eat and watch the band again. I knew what table to look for. At the table I sat at the previous night, there was a lady, white skinned with glasses. She said in English as she saw me scanning for a table "If you are looking for a good place to watch the band, you can sit here" and pointed to an empty seat at her table.
There were no open tables that had a view of the band.
I accepted her offfer and sat down. "Candy from Kathmandu" with no last name, read her business card, which she offered up to me after 15 minutes of conversation. She was an American, from somewhere on the East Coast and had moved to Kathmandu several years ago.
She said, "I don't sit well" and told me of all the places where she had lived. I had lived in more places. I liked the quote and thought that it also describes me accurately.
"I don't sit well".
I took out my notebook and scribbled the quote down. She asked what I was writing. I said, "I like that quote, It also fits me and I would like to use it in my blog".
Candy was in her mid 50s and the Manager of the Northfield Cafe until just recently. When I said, "I would like a beer", she called for the waiter by his first name. When I said, "I would like to learn about the stringed instrument at the center of the music", she asked the band member by name to answer my questions.
I thought about what to ask her next. "Tell me about the hamburger meat. What is it? Water buffalo?"
She assured me it was beef "Actually flown in from Calcutta". She said "It is very finely ground (that again raised some suspicion) but that is why the texture is so different".
After the first set was over, she suddenly departed and I took her seat on the other side of the table for the last set, sitting in the very same seat I sat in last night.
The best seat in the house.
The music centers on the sarangi, a violin type instrument that is carved from a single piece of wood.
From wiki:
Carved from a single block of tun (red cedar) wood, the sarangi has a box-like shape with three hollow chambers: pet (stomach), chaati (chest) and magaj (brain). It is usually around 2 feet (0.61 m) long and around 6 inches (150 mm) wide though it can vary as there are smaller as well as larger variant sarangis as well. The lower resonance chamber or pet is covered with parchment made out of goat skin on which a strip of thick leather is placed around the waist (and nailed on the back of the chamber) which supports the elephant-shaped bridge that is made of camel or buffalo bone usually (made of ivory or Barasinghabone originally but now that is rare due to the ban in India). The bridge in turn supports the huge pressure of approximately 35–37 sympathetic steel or brass strings and three main gut strings that pass through it. The three main playing strings – the comparatively thicker gut strings – are bowed with a heavy horsehair bow and "stopped" not with the finger-tips but with the nails, cuticles and surrounding flesh. (talcum powder is applied to the fingers as a lubricant). The neck has ivory/bone platforms on which the fingers slide. The remaining strings are resonance strings or tarabs (see: sympathetic strings), numbering up to around 35–37, divided into 4 "choirs" having two sets of pegs, one on the right and one on the top. On the inside is a chromatically tuned row of 15 tarabs and on the right a diatonic row of 9 tarabs each encompassing a full octave plus 1–3 extra notes above or below that. Both these sets of tarabs pass from the main bridge to the right side set of pegs through small holes in the chaati supported by hollow ivory/bone beads. Between these inner tarabs and on the either side of the main playing strings lie two more sets of longer tarabs, with 5–6 strings on the right set and 6–7 strings on the left set. They pass from the main bridge over to two small, flat and wide table like bridges through the additional bridge towards the second peg set on top of the instrument. These are tuned to the important tones (swaras) of the raga. A properly tuned sarangi will hum and cry and will sound like melodious meowing, with tones played on any of the main strings eliciting echo-like resonances. A few sarangis use strings manufactured from the intestines of goats — these harken back to the days when rich musicians could afford such strings.
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