Saskia arrived on the 5th April which was god for me because Fleur had left the day before to spend the weekend with the teachers from her day-care centre visiting their village. On the Saturday morning I walked up to the Castle Resort (a hotel only accessable by a 20 minute walk up a hill) to deliver soem photos Sharon had left. On the way up I found myself walking with an American woman who had managed to acquite about 6 Nepali kids. I sat with them at the top. The kids didn't sepak to me much, only a few could speak any english but Ellen, the american, spoke Nepali.  On the way back we could only get rid of the kids by getting into a taxi!

When I got back to Bindu's Saskia was already there. That afternoon I showed her round Lakeside a little and we took a boat across the temple which is on an island. It was nice but there isn't really a huge amount to look at there. On Sunday it rained all morning, which is very unusual. There isn't much to do at Bindu's and after playing cards until we got bored the ony other thing we could find to do was play dominoes which Saskia had brought for the kids. It turns out that dominoes is in fact a real games with strategy! Me and Saskia are getting quite into it!

On Monday at work I found out that my place had adopted a monkey. Some boys brought it along who didn't want it anymore. It's sad to have a monkey as a pet but I suspect that this one has been a pet too long and couldn't really live in the wild. They named it Raigon. It's so cute and very friendly so long as you don't push it. If you just sit there it comes and sits on your knee. It ended up sitting on my shoulder and looking for lice in my hair!

I took Tuesday off because Fleur and I wanted to see some disability homes that Phil knew about. We also looked at a couple of placements for Saskia so visited my placement. In the end, only one of the disability home was open, the other seems to be a day care and it being the elections it was closed. The one we visited seemed to be half farm half home. I think they had about 4 residents and maybe other people who come sometimes. There wasn't a huge amount that an untrained volunteer could do there but me and Saskia were thinking of going to teach english to the residents and the people who run it and their kids. However, it now looks like that may not fit with Saskia's other placement. It is also very far away.

Thursday was elections. Unfortunately I was ill on wednesday night so spent most of saturday morning in bed. When I did venture out it was amazing how quiet Lakeside was. All vehicles had been banned form the roads so there wasn't the usual beeping. Many more of the shops and restaurants were closed than I expected. It was a national holiday but usually Lakeside is all open on holidays. Many places had said they'd stay open as well but in the end more than half were closed. Everything seemed very calm. There were a few big groups of Nepalis wandering around and some young Nepali men racing the trekking ponies (poor things) down the street.