No egrets

When not making lists about planes in my head, I keep busy at the hospital by patrolling the four floors of the paediatrics department, along with Louise and the many Nepali interns and doctors. White coats are compulsory here and we look like a flock of egrets, craning our necks to see what this or that patient is up to, flapping up and down the many stairs in the heat and constantly keeping a beady eye out for a 'learning opportunity'. Without fail we all make it to the fourth and top floor for tea and samosas at 12 o clock on sundays, tuesdays, thursdays and fridays.

Yes the Nepali week is 6 days long, GUTTED!! but I think the Nepalis realised they were getting a bit of a raw deal too, so the working hours at the hospital are only 9-3pm.

We quickly worked out which doctors are lovely and which are to be avoided; we carefully crafted our first 24 hour on call to be with some of the lovely ones, only to be scuppered by a swap late in the day, which meant we got stuck for 24 hours with the doctor we put at the top of our avoid-at-all-costs list. Contingency plans are now in place to make sure this doesn't happen again; there are so many extremely friendly, helpful and knowledgeable doctors, it would be ashame not to go with them.

At 3 or sometimes 4 o clock we change out of our suffocating and sweaty white coats into shorts and t shirts; the swish of my shiny shorts and the cool breeze is such a relief, so I always leave smiling. We say goodbye to the families camped out by their children's beds and spend a good five minutes sturggling with an unpredictable bike lock before riding home through the dusty chaos of afternoon rush hour.

The cycle back is a constant compromise between eyes on the road and eyes to the side. Both options have their advantages; eyes to the road allows you to spot the motorbikes going the wrong way up the street, the cows and dogs parked in the middle and also the large holes that definitely weren't there that morning. Eyes to the side means seeing people, animals and vegetables doing all sorts of interesting things.

I started off in an eyes to the road sort of mentality, arriving home with a heart bursting with adrenaline from constantly swerving things that were bigger than me, now for some reason less stuff seems to head straight for me and I'm swaying towards eyes to the side. I can look for the best tea shops with the stickiest looking sweets, the most colourful cloth shops, the best places for rip-off t shirts, I see the innovative ways people turn rust into bikes, the way parents look to the future as 5 year olds meander to and from school in skirts, shirts and ties that might last them all the way through to 18 and I see how wasteland is cajolled into becoming green and fertile rice fields and vegetable patches.

Most of the time it is possible to see all this, some of the time I can't see anything because my eyes are full of dust, thinking about it, it might be at these times when it feels like all the traffic is coming straight for me....