Kathmandu arrival (post 2 of the day)

In the Hong Kong airport my left sinus and ear became stuffed up. Once we hit the air and began climbing to 19000 ft my ear didn't just 'pop' it 'burst' and became unbelievable painful. I jumped up and found my tylenol as soon as the flight seatbelt warning sign went out. That calmed things down a little bit and let me go to sleep finally. But we briefly touched down in Bengladesh and each time we flew up my ear would burst with liquid pouring down the back of my throat and when we landed it felt like packing my ear with stirofoam. I still can't really hear anything on that side. But it feels much better today.

Kathmandu - It's dark outside when we arrived but I can still say that this place isn't anything like home. At the airport there were military uniforms everywhere and running everything, but really poorly compared to Canadian customs. The guy who scanned my bag didn't even look at the screen. I know, becasue I was puuled aside at each airport I'd been too so security could check out my Solar charging bag. I guess all the wired look scary. But I didn't get hasseled at all and neither did any of our group. In fact the officers took one look at us and waved us right past the long security pat down line ups.

In the parking lot we met with the Kathmandu project coordinaters (our bosses for the praticum placements) they brought us over to the private bus that would take us to the Hotel Moonlight. This really nice porter started chatting to me about Canada and what a nice country it is as he loaded my bags up onto the bus. Then he turned to me and said that the custom is to give a tip for the service. I didn't have any nepali money yet and this set off alarm bells in my head as Robin my teacher had said to avoid tipping anyone since services are provided as part of the money spent on the trip. Sure enough, this guy was just someone who saw us and decided to try and make a quick buck off the tourists. He followed us and continued to hassle us for money until the bus pulled away.

From what I saw of Kathmandu so far in the dark, it isn't at all how I imagined it. Everywhere there are brick buildings wall-towall witheach other. The streets are all unpaved and narrow winding things. Horn honking and headlight flashing are almost as important as stearing and fast usage off the break. There was actually very little traffic on the roads at that hour, but we passed several packs of dogs and young men. We also passed a herd of cows that were just wandering along in the middle of the city.

When we got to the hotel, the front desk gave us (Isha and I) the key to our room. When we went to open the door we found someone already there asleep! The front desk then gave us a different key and it turned out to be our classmate Garrets room. Finally they found us an empty room and I am now getting ready to sleep in a real bed for the first time in over 40 hours. It was really nice to find that this room comes with a bathroom as well.