Guitar Battles

After the school, we stopped at a restaurant for lunch; it was good, but took forever. People are definitely not in a hurry in Nepal. We had originally planned to visit Orchid Gardens, a school/day care across the city, but lunch took long enough that we had to postpone that until near the end of our trip. Most of the group went back to the hotel, while Shailesh, James and I went to buy the guitar we had searched for the previous day. We rode in one of the many open-backed mini buses that were zipping all over the city. It was very cheap, although without Shailesh there I would have had no idea how to know where it was going or when to get off. It was about half empty when we climbed on, but by the time we reached our destination it was packed full of Nepalis (and one other American/European.)

We went into a few stores, but the prices were a bit higher than we wanted to pay - much lower than they would have been in America, of course, but we were looking for something pretty cheap. We ended up buying a "Givson" acoustic, black, with a decent neck and awful strings, haggling it down to 2700 rupees, which is about 30 bucks. The whole experience actually didn't seem all that different from shopping at a local music store in the U.S., only with a significant difference in the brand and quality of the guitar choices...

We tried to worship right after we got back to the hotel; that was when we discovered how bad the strings were. They held the tune for about 30 seconds, after which they would devolve into a dissonant sound that didn't exactly complement the praise songs we were singing, so we eventually gave up on it and worshiped a capella. That evening, a bunch of us walked back to the same guitar shop to buy a pack of strings. We went without Shailesh, who gave us directions, although without any street names it still wasn't easy to follow. But we only got lost once, and managed to make it there before they closed and buy what we needed.

I changed the strings that night, which was no easy task; I didn't have a bridge pin puller, and the pins were really stuck down into the guitar, probably sealed in with the layer of hardened dust that seemed to cover everything in Kathmandu. For non-guitar players, the bridge pins are the six little pegs with circular tops that go into holes at the bottom of the guitar and hold the base of the strings. I borrowed a wrench from the front desk in the hotel and spent a solid 45 minutes working at them until I had all six out. I was tired when I started, and exhausted when I was finished, but I put the new strings on and tuned it up before we all met for dinner. I went to bed after barely touching my food.