Cooking hornets in Nepal

This video shows a family preparing, cooking and eating hornets in rural Nepal. Like many of these types of videos I suspect it is largely staged. I think the hovel they supposedly live in is actually a set, and they live elsewhere. Still, it an interesting video and certainly an exotic dish.

 

A weekend market in Nepal

This video is a walk through a market in eastern Nepal. It is a weekend rather than a daily market, so I suspect it is much more of a social event than regular daily shopping. It certainly is crowded, and the crowd is cheerful and energetic.

 

Rainy days in Nepal

These are a few videos of a village in a valley in Nepal on rainy days. The people seem to be primarily herders, although some cultivation also takes place. The scenery is frequently spectacular. That much rain would drive me crazy, but the villagers seem quite cheerful and unbothered by it all.

They are all from the YouTube channel VillageLifeNepal. If you're interested, there are longer and less rainy videos there.

Chicken dinner in Nepal

A group of people in Nepal cook and eat a meal. A comment to the video that I translated says it was a meal of chicken, soup with millet flour, fish, pickle, radish pickle and veggies. I don't know about the soup -- maybe that brown goopy looking stuff was a sort of millet paste?

The group cheerfully chats as they all have hand in the cooking at one time or another. It looks cold there to me. I did find it interesting how much time the kids spent fiddling around with their cellphones.

Walking in Katmandu

A couple walk through Katmandu headed to Durbar Square. As they mention, there is a lot of beeping by the vehicles. Also, the subtitles they added were a nice touch.

Mithila art

Click any image to enlarge

Mithila art comes from a region that spreads between northern India and Nepal. Originally it consisted of wall and floor paintings to decorate houses. In the 1960s, in an attempt to alleviate the poverty of the area, the All India Handicraft Board collected samples of their drawings on heavy paper and sold them in New Dehli. They sold well, and since then Mihilia art has been actively collected.

The topics of Mithila art are every day activities, myths and a lot of politics. For example, the image above is captioned "Chief Minister Modi rises as a hero for Hindu fanatics while Gujarat burns and Gandhi is forgotten." They are striking in how detailed the patterns in them are, as well as by what seems to be a mix of both modern and yet very traditional graphic styling.

I've gathered a few more samples of Mithila art, some of which are after the jump. They are all from the Oberlin College Digital Collections. I found that site via 50 Watts.