Declining Youths & Spitting Snakes

More details about Nepal (especially our trekk) to follow when we reach our laptop in Kathmandu. But in the meantime, faced with some internet access via internet cafe, not a lot else to do, and the following encounter to relate...we bring you this as an entertainment nugget.

After careful discussion of the matter, we have decided that the sample of tomorrow's leaders that we have made the acquaintance of while in Nepal does not bode well for the planet. Case in point...just moments ago, we were sitting in one of our regular dinner establishments waiting the requisite 45 min. for food at a table next to that of a young, female, dreadlocked Canadian clad entirely in purple. She regaled us with a story of a snake which clearly portrayed her as an individual of unnatural IQ as well as powers of underestimation of the entire human race.

The story was this. While trekking from Pokhara to the Annapurna Base Camp (referred to by Ms. Purple as "ABC" but which Amir and I were able to discern immediately having been in possession in one time of a map of the Annapurna region), the young lady was in process of dragging herself up a hill in the name of great photo opps when a snake crossed her path. According to her own description, the snake was the entire width of her arm span and at least 5 inches in diameter. Ms. Purple avowed that it took her brain some minutes to comprehend that her increasing proximity to the snake may in fact be increasing the danger to her hairy-legged person.

At this juncture of the tale, she told us for our edification that there are some species of snake that have the innate capability of spitting venom from their mouths at potential threats, even threats happening to be of a human nature. Ms. Purple further intimated that her understanding of the matter includes the knowledge that one can be "sort of fucked" if said spat venom makes its way into the human threat's eye(s).

Going back to the story, Ms. Purple had occasion to notice two young Nepali girls, cowering at a far, safe distance from the snake. She asked them, after the snake's departure from the path and disappearance among the brush, whether the snake was poisonous and the girls affirmed that it was. Ms. Purple laughed off her near brush with death to them, as well as to us, and then dug heartily into her hummus falafel plate going so far as to pick it up when the food had vanished and suck all the juices of a tomato cucumber salad into her mouth. Fortunately, our food had not yet arrived.

Thus it was that we formed the above opinion about the fate of tomorrow in the hands of such as these.