I had been considering how I could possibly document this Nepal trip in a blog post format (without it being ridiculously long and time-consuming for us both, me the author and you the reader), and the idea came to me today: choose 11 of the most memorable moments, one photo each, and tell their stories. This sounds pretty straightforward, except for the fact that I took over 1,000 photos on this two month trip (excessive, I know, but these memories are precious to me so I have no regrets). I hope you enjoy the 1%, the highlights that made this year’s Nepal trip truly unforgettable.
Reading time: 15 minutes
1. Reunion
My partner Sanam and I are quite used to long distance by now. In our 3.5 year relationship, it's gone like this: 14 months together in person, 13 months apart, 2 months together, 10 months apart, 2 months together, and so on. This totals to 18 months together and 23 months long-distance. Although we are used to navigating these shifts, it is an absolute delight every time we get to reunite. The joy of this reunion moment shows well in this picture. Even after 27 hours of travel, my jetlagged self was thrilled to finally be with my person.
2. Engagement
Sanam and I have felt for a long time that we want to spend our lives together. We wanted to make it official in a place that is very meaningful to us, called Bouddha Stupa in Kathmandu. I'll let you in on a secret: this was not a surprise engagement at all, but rather a very intentional and special moment that we co-created (much preferable in my book; I'm not one for surprises, and "engagement" isn't really part of Sanam's culture anyway). We set up my phone leaning against a concrete pillar and began recording a video; from this video, I took a screenshot photo (above). Thus, this commemorative "engagement" photo was born! I love it and wouldn't have had this moment any other way.
3. Taking my partner to Kopan Monastery
You may recall that my initial reason for coming to Nepal in 2019, after teaching English in Thailand for a year, was to study Tibetan Buddhism for a month at Kopan Monastery in Kathmandu. I ended up staying at Kopan for seven weeks in 2019. This transformative time truly shaped my practice going forward, and Kopan remains one of my most sacred and beloved places on earth. Although I lived in Nepal for the entirety of 2020 and half of 2021, I never made it back to Kopan due to the pandemic. My super packed visit to Nepal in 2022 did not include a visit to Kopan, but this time it was a top priority of mine to go there. My teacher, a founder of this monastery, passed away in April, and I knew in my bones that it was crucial to go to Kopan this time. I had asked Sanam if he would be willing to do a day visit there with me, as I didn't want to pressure him into an actual course. To my surprise, my non-Buddhist fiancé actually wanted to stay at Kopan and take a five day course called "Learn to Meditate," including both meditation instructions and an introduction to Buddhism. We lived in separate dorms, with no phones, in all-day silence except for the afternoons, spending about 8 hours per day sitting in the meditation hall doing a mixture of meditation practice, receiving instructions, and short dharma talks. It was definitely a learning experience! I absolutely loved this time, and according to Sanam, he looks positively upon it even though it was actually quite challenging too. His words: "I feel the impact now. It was a hard one but definitely left me with a good feeling." I believe that this experience strengthened our relationship and definitely reinvigorated my practice. We are very fortunate to be humans born in this time and able to access the teachings that reduce so much suffering. To learn more, here is the Kopan website, and here is my recommendation for an accessible and inexpensive book by my late teacher that brought countless smiles to my face. May this visit be a cause for benefit for as many beings as possible!
4. Court Marriage
Our court marriage was absolutely an experience for the books. We had been gathering paperwork for this for quite some time, and we were as prepared as possible, but no amount of research or phone contacting was enough to learn everything we really needed. Ultimately, it took two days in the court — second day was a full 6 hours — and it almost didn't work because the judge didn't recognize the names of the notaries who stamped the California Marriage Law translation we had made in Kathmandu. The District Court where we got married is in Dang, about 400 km (250 miles) from Kathmandu, so it is reasonable that the judge wouldn't know every notary from there, but a simple web database search revealed that these notaries were legitimate. A wonderful office worker at the court printed the database and brought it to the judge, and suddenly the marriage was in process again! Just before the court closed for the day, we were with a judge in an official courtroom. This room looked like something from a movie, ready for an exciting criminal prosecution with a holding cell and everything. In this setting, in the last half hour of the court being open, we successfully completed our marriage certificate, signed and finger-printed by us and the judge! In the photo above you may detect a look of surprised joy on our faces; the thought was, "Did it really work, or are we dreaming? Did we really just get married?" We were so happy, and we did a perfect little five minute ceremony outside the courthouse to exchange rings and vows with our two witnesses there. It was so special and certainly unique!
A little known fact about my husband is that he had a fear of dogs for most of his life, stemming from a dog attack/bite when he was a child. You wouldn’t guess this now, as he is so comfortable with dogs that he happily feeds them from his hands! We lovingly refer to these particular dogs as “our pack,” because last year we met them while walking and they followed us — I don’t even recall feeding them — and this year they found us again and were so excited to stick together and walk through the city with us, like old times. We call them Caramel, Hungry, and Boss. We began a daily practice this year of feeding them biscuits, which seems to have had a positive impact on the local community regarding treating “street dogs” with care and compassion. We are still well known in the city, and it carries a bit of extra weight that the “viral couple” likes to be compassionate toward street dogs. It is something I feel so happy about, that perhaps some people are inspired to treat other beings better by seeing us doing so. (I also love that in this photo, there is a goat watching and wondering why he isn’t being included in the biscuit fest. He decided it was not worth trying for a biscuit and getting the dogs upset with him!)
One of my most joyful experiences of this trip was a scholarly one: I resolved to try to learn how to read and write in Nepali. This is something I sort of began over 3 years ago, but I never stuck to it so I just knew a few letters and no more. This year, I got a notebook and stuck to a daily practice schedule, including “exams” where Sanam would give me words or sentences to write and I would make my best guess. At first there were so many mistakes, but these got less and less as time went on, and now I can read and write at roughly the level of a young school child! Woohoo! Sanam wrote “So proud of you my student” at the bottom of the exam in this photo, and I just love that because it perfectly conveys how supportive and encouraging he has been as my Nepali teacher. A language with 36 consonants and 30 vowels to learn isn’t particularly breezy, so I am grateful for all of his help!
7. Stranded by Monsoon at the Birthplace of Buddha
Sanam and I have visited Lumbini (the birthplace of Siddhartha Gautama Buddha) three times together. It is actually in the same province as Sanam's home, but it takes about three hours to drive there through the mountains and jungle. I find the place magical by nature; the holy site is an enclosed and protected space of refuge containing temples representing many countries/lineages, green jungle with monkeys, and a general reverence for Buddhist practices and beliefs. I tear up at the actual birthplace site thinking, "Wow, someone who has so positively influenced countless people is believed to have been born here," and beyond that, "The person accredited with the teachings that have reduced my own suffering so much in this lifetime is believed to have been born here." It really brings me so much joy...
Anyway, the story behind this photo is a kind of funny, kind of twisted one. Sanam and I woke up to the peaceful sound of rain the morning we were going to the temples this year. We went to the site where the Buddha was born around 7am when they opened, and it was only lightly raining then. We went to the hotel to wait out the rain a bit, but it didn't stop. We decided to go back to visit some temples anyway. We made it to the Thai temple and the Cambodian temple before the monsoon came so intensely that we truly had to wait before we could possibly get to our bike or drive. We happened to be stranded inside the Cambodian temple for about an hour, with one group of many kids and a few adults. The adults slept on the floor while the kids slept or played games. Sanam and I played "I spy" with the paintings on the temple walls and witnessed what arose in our minds as we waited out the seemingly endless storm, trying not to think about our shoes pooling with water outside at that time. We ultimately decided that the rain wasn't slowing down but we needed to check out from our hotel, so we drove back in the pouring rain, arriving absolutely soaked. We waited at the hotel until the rain was lighter, but lo and behold, the roads were so muddy and flooded that it was very challenging to get to the last temple we really wanted to visit, the Tibetan temple. We made it there after an hour of confusing dead-end flooded roads. It was not the idyllic Lumbini trip of years past, but I think we learned so much from it! The photo is from our last moments of being stranded in the Cambodian temple, wearing blessing strings, before we decided to go brave the rain.
8. The Cow who Finally Loved Me
Cows and buffalo have been my favorite animals for a long time. They are so sweet, peaceful (usually), and gentle (sometimes). (By the way, I'm used to referring to bulls as cows, so my apologies if you are more accurate and bothered by this, ha!) I had been trying to befriend the young bull in this picture for quite some time, but he wasn't interested. On this day, he walked directly up to me without me beckoning or calling him, and he let me pet his head. He then fully rested his head in my hands, which is actually quite heavy, and stuck his nose into my shirt and arms playfully. His mother was walking nearby and seemed very relaxed about the encounter. It made me incredibly happy that this cow actually initiated this connection with me, even though my attempts to make friends with him before hadn't succeeded. What a treat this was!
9. Blessed by Rain singing mantras in the mountains
After returning from Lumbini, I felt extra impassioned to bring positivity to as many places and people as I could. I felt compelled to go to the mountains to chant compassion mantras, for the trees and animals and people all around. Sanam took me to a lovely nature place I had never been to before, where we hiked a few minutes uphill for the mantra singing to begin. I felt so joyful and fulfilled while chanting, and just as the words were flowing from my lips, drops began falling from the clouds. Before we knew it, surprise, it was raining, big drops with space in between, a lazy and warm monsoon shower. We made our way back down slowly, careful in the slippery mud, still singing and feeling so joyful along the way. We took this photo when the rain had just started. Wonder!
10. Cultural Wedding
About a month after our court wedding, Sanam and I fulfilled our dream of a small cultural wedding celebration, including very close family, to commemorate and enjoy our big life step together. Our lovely aunts' and uncles' household helped us with outfits, traditions, cooking and preparation. It was perfect for us: low cost and low stress, exactly as we had dreamt. I feel so grateful that we did this. I laugh now remembering that I almost opted not to have this celebration out of fear for how much the red sari would cost, which ended up being a whopping 3,500 Nepali rupees (about $30). Anyway, with mehendi on my hands (left done by me, right done by my sister-in-law), a red sari on my body, a red veil on my hair, and a grass necklace around my neck, I was ready to be a true Nepali bride. The most important tradition to us was the application of tikka (red powder) on the forehead, especially the hairline tikka indicating that a woman is married. Here you can see Sanam applying the hairline tikka on my head, the cultural symbol that we are officially married.
11. Baby Buffalo born on our wedding day!
I will wrap up this post with a wonderful bonus cherry-on-top to our wedding celebration day: this baby buffalo was born next door! I saw him from afar while wearing my sari and became so excited. I got to meet him up close a couple days later, when this photo was taken. He was so precious!
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It has been so fun to share these stories with you, and I truly hope that they have brought you some joy and positivity. If you'd like, leave a comment telling me what story was your favorite. Thank you for reading, and may you be well!
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