To Kathmandu

After a whirlwind couple of days of last minute vaccinations, laundry, packing and the beginning of goodbyes with my new friends in Norway - it is finally sinking in that I am really going to Nepal. My flight(s to be precise - the 4 leg flight-plan is roughly mapped above: Trondheim, Oslo, Munich, Delhi, Kathmandu) leaves on Thursday, and while there is plenty left to do I thought it a good time to give a little bit of an overview prior to being tossed into the life scale reality of Kathmandu.

The country of Nepal is about 4,000 miles away from my current home in Norway - just slightly greater than the distance from New York to Norway which I have already traversed. The country is nestled between India and China (Tibet actually), just at the base of and including much of the Himalayan Mountains. Interestingly, the time zones add just another 3 hours and 45 minutes to the time difference.

I will be staying in the capital - Kathmandu. A small but dense city, holding over 1 million people in an area of about 20 square miles according to Wikipedia (by comparison, New York holds over 8 million people in about 470 square miles which is about 1 in 58).

There have been a lot of questions about what my expectations are for Kathmandu and what I will be doing there. I don't have many answers - my personal intent is to remain as open as possible and involve myself primarily with taking everything in. My only expectation is that I will realize and embrace this as a very new experience and way of life for the next two months. My course program will guide the field work, so hopefully we will be able to gain some perspective on the urban problems in Kathmandu and manage to initiate something in the way of promoting communities to find means towards positive change.

On a lighter note, I'll share a bit of the pertinent advice I've received from my professor and local Nepalese students which I have been repeating as a small mantra in my head..

1- Don't pack too much, you'll "be heavier" coming back.

2- Don't drink the water.

3- Don't get knocked down a mountain by a donkey.

I'll do my best to keep aware of these three items, and will be blogging whenever free time, internet access, and electricity supply allows.

Also, my class will be contributing to a blog so feel free to keep an eye out for postings here as well: http://uep2009-kathmandu.blogspot.com/