Strike Off, Bought Jewlery

The strike is off.  Infor­ma­tion changes on a daily basis, if not more often.  Seems like lots of peo­ple are upset because they scram­bled to stock up for 45 days, some even tak­ing out loans, and now the party has opened every­thing back up.  I don’t under­stand their tac­tics.  Much of my infor­ma­tion is com­ing via Sarah Besky, a PhD anthro­pol­ogy stu­dent who is work­ing on plan­ta­tion labor issues.  She has been in Dar­jeel­ing for a while and speaks won­der­ful Nepali.  We hung out yes­ter­day at the stu­dent rally (they hap­pen at least once a week).

After­wards, in frus­tra­tion over our respec­tive can­celed meet­ings, we went jew­elry shop­ping.  There are still no tourists, so we were the only ones in the shops over­stuffed with wares from Tibet, Nepal, and Kash­mir.  We tried on every­thing.  It was great fun. The shops don’t allow pho­tog­ra­phy, oth­er­wise I would show you.

Check out the crossed kukuri ear­rings I got.  The crossed kukuris is one of the icons on the Gorkha flag.  I have a few actual kukuris back home from my pre­cious trip.