In Kathmandu and I'm guessing most of Nepal, kids love to fly kites. All over the city you can look up into the air and find a least one kite soaring over your head. Currently, it is the biggest holiday of the year. It's called Dashain and one of the traditions besides the public beheadings of goats and oxes (they eat the animals) is kite flying.
I took Shusila's 12-year-old nephew Netus rock climbing the other day and since I was in kid mode (maybe I always am?) I decided we should buy a kite. Netus is a really awesome kid and speaks almost perfect English. He prepped the kite while I did some work and then we set off to fly it. The wind was a bit pathetic, but I forgot that mattered. We tried unsuccessfully three or four times and then ripped our kite. I fixed the kite with some tape, but our spirits were defeated to try again. Plus, I figured it was the wimpy winds fault. Right?
The next day Meredith and I smoked a cigarette and then decided to try flying the kite because that's easy to do. Plus, look how pretty the view from our roof is:
Our roof was, like, made for kite flying. It basically has a runway to throw the kite up into the wind and then run with it to keep it flying. Meredith and I tried 10 or 12 times with no success and then broke the kite. Then we tried to imitate the knot Netus had tied:
Is this boring? Not for me.
The whole point of this story is that we broke all the kites I had bought and didn't get the kite higher than 9 feet in the air and couldn't keep it up for longer than 10 seconds. I can't do something that the 8 year old on the adjacent roof can do. His kite was so high in the air you could barely see it.
2 comments:
Try it again without smoking the cigarette.
Flying a kite is hard. Somehow though children have special kite flying magic that wears off as you age. It's totally not you.
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