Early days

I started this blog at 2am when the call of the dogs and roosters seem to own the night. So does my jetlag.  I really pushed hard to stay up until 9pm last evening but every minute began to feel like an hour so I caved at about 8:30pm.

My first impressions of Kathmandu are the obvious ones you read about in the travel books. It’s busy and the traffic is a bit nuts with arbitrary rules and no concern for how many people and cars and bikes can or should fit on a narrow roadway.  Every now and again you catch a waft of delicious smelling food coming from a restaurant so I really hope I can indulge tonight—Qatar airlines fed my about 3 times my normal caloric intake en route here so all I ate last evening was a few bananas I was probably overcharged for from a fruit vendor.  I am looking forward to getting my haggling chops back on! When I arrived at the hotel they were in the middle of the scheduled power cut.  There is shifting power cuts throughout the city, largely on a schedule supposedly once a day but when I showered this morning it cut again so I had to go au naturel with my hair.

Durbar Square

I didn’t wander too far from the hotel last night because I was literally scared I would get lost… when you look up it’s all signs and powerlines which kind of look the same if you’re not really paying attention and makes it hard to navigate. 

When I was picked up from the airport another guy staying at my hotel had just arrived as well.  His name is Rob and says he quit his job and came to Nepal looking for change. He’s never been out of Europe so I imagine he achieved his goal-- he looked expectedly shell-shocked when I ran into him later last night.  At any rate, we toured around together today and spent way too long looking for Durbur Square which was supposed to be a 15 minute walk away from the hotel. It took us over an hour. Needless to say navigating is insane.

Tonight my plan is to find a decent meal and stay up until 9pm.  Tomorrow morning I will meet with Srijana whom I met at the Coady course in Nova Scotia this past spring—I’m excited to see her on her turf!  She has offered to introduce me to her boss and coworkers who work at a nonprofit here in Kathmandu.

That's all for now, thanks for reading!