This is what you can expect:

No day will ever go the way that you've planned. Nothing simple will be simple, nothing straightforward will be that. There will be traffic jams with exhaust fumes so thick you can't see your own hands (especially when you're already late). There will be an endless string of no's before you ever hear a yes. Not a single person will have ever heard of the place you're trying to get--most especially, not the taxi driver who agreed to take you there. The meter will always be broken, the restaurant will always run out of the thing you most crave, the street dogs will never stop giving birth to puppies so painfully helpless that you, too, are rendered helpless, and you will never stop wanting to take them home. On the most important day of the your week--your month, your year--there will, without question, be a bandh.

But every now and then, a complicated thing will come easily; there will be no explanation. You will be wandering a dirty, motorcycle-jammed street in search of a glue stick in a world that seems void of glue sticks and you'll stop, hands on your hips, to find yourself in front of a store that sells nothing but glue sticks. Which do you want, madam, Big Size or Small? And on the walk home, glue stick in your pocket, you're hungry so you buy a bag of Moong Daal, and you wonder why you'd ever want another snack besides Moong Daal. Or you get up early early early in the morning to hang your laundry in the sun on the roof, only to find out that your early isn't early enough--the mothers and daughters and didis at all the neighboring buildings got up to their roofs first--and you have a wordless ritual with them, t-shirt, jeans, underwear--everything on the line, and black crows circling overhead.

The tongba--boiled water and Tibetan millet, gives you food posioning. The green salad does not. Go figure. The boy in the leather jacket who asks for your phone number turns out to be a journalist; he wants to talk politics. The middle aged man who you pass in your neighborhood reaches around and grabs your ass. You spin, fast, and yell at him but he keeps walking like nothing happened, and then you're the angry foreign woman yelling at no one, so you turn around and keep walking too, red faced, indignant, already late to work.

When you need a pick-me-up, you can always get your eye brows threaded. Fifteen rupees. When you're cold, there won't be any hot water. The woman who sells ticket to foreigners at Patan Dhoka will call out to you as you pass each morning--ma'am!--and when you turn, she'll recognize your face and wave you through; you can go in free because you live here, but she'll ask you again tomorrow, no matter how long you stay.