I went to Nepal with the intention of keeping a good record of the whole trip. I took scratches of paper with me when we travelled, and wrote tiny things down that I would later want to remember by. After we got back to Yale from the trip, however, I never found the time to write about this experience. I've had a few lines with me in Paris, but most material was left home in China. It's a pity.
***
When I got off the plane, the airport was plain in sight. It would have passed very well for a random large farmhouse in rural China — at least from the relatively well-off region I come from. Looking out through the windows, there was no real plantation around the customs building, only weeds about the height of our knees. My grandma's village does kind of look like that, I thought to myself.
We paid the Visa fees and hailed three cabs for the hotel we'd stay in. Now I was finally able to lay my eyes on the urban scenes of Katmandu. I thought of how the town I lived in as a child used to have those small merchant houses by the road. But I lived on a plain, so later the bumpy and sometimes slanted roads reminded me more of the suburbs of San Jose. You could see the dark soil beside the road — they later told me that a lot of the national highways in Nepal were built by the Chinese, and Nepalese are probably one of the friendliest people in South Asia to mainland Chinese, though there was not without Tibetan sympathizers. (These two strains of forces from China didn't bother the Nepalese I later came to know, though.)
Jason started talking to the taxi driver and possibly got some funny responses out of him. The young driver played music in the car, some of the American classics, dance music. Personally I don't really appreciate American dance/club music, but it was night, so I guess the fact that I was still in the States some twenty hours ago hit me especially strongly. The music was familiar; it felt a bit like home.
(I will probably write more about our stay in Katmandu later.)
***
We were welcomed by the school principal, Ajay, somewhere between Katmandu and Dharke, where the school was located. It was a windy day, and the place we paused was not very pleasant, with mild sandstorms intruding our respiratory systems. There was a small market on one side of the road, so Yelin, Chris and I went on a mini adventure and each got a primitive mask. Some of us got fruits, too.
Ajay came with the school bus. A bus painted in blue, with the school name SCA printed on it. It fit in quite well with many other buses we saw on the street that day — they reminded me of Wes Anderson's movie, Darjeeling Limited — thanks to their lively colors. We hopped into the school bus one by one, and as I chose a spot to sit down, I realized I hadn't been in a bus this "dilapidated" for years. I used to be able to get a taste of that whenever I went back to my grandma's village every spring, but I think now even those village buses have been replaced by newer ones.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, it didn't take me very long to have it registered in my brain that I was actually in a country poorer than China, for the first time in my life. (Not saying I've seen the most abject living condition in China, or that the bus looked so bad it was unbearable or evoked sympathy in me. Not to that level yet. I guess Costa Rica could kind of count as a country poorer than China too, but their stable albeit malfunctioning political system made me feel otherwise.)
***
When I got off the plane, the airport was plain in sight. It would have passed very well for a random large farmhouse in rural China — at least from the relatively well-off region I come from. Looking out through the windows, there was no real plantation around the customs building, only weeds about the height of our knees. My grandma's village does kind of look like that, I thought to myself.
We paid the Visa fees and hailed three cabs for the hotel we'd stay in. Now I was finally able to lay my eyes on the urban scenes of Katmandu. I thought of how the town I lived in as a child used to have those small merchant houses by the road. But I lived on a plain, so later the bumpy and sometimes slanted roads reminded me more of the suburbs of San Jose. You could see the dark soil beside the road — they later told me that a lot of the national highways in Nepal were built by the Chinese, and Nepalese are probably one of the friendliest people in South Asia to mainland Chinese, though there was not without Tibetan sympathizers. (These two strains of forces from China didn't bother the Nepalese I later came to know, though.)
Jason started talking to the taxi driver and possibly got some funny responses out of him. The young driver played music in the car, some of the American classics, dance music. Personally I don't really appreciate American dance/club music, but it was night, so I guess the fact that I was still in the States some twenty hours ago hit me especially strongly. The music was familiar; it felt a bit like home.
(I will probably write more about our stay in Katmandu later.)
***
We were welcomed by the school principal, Ajay, somewhere between Katmandu and Dharke, where the school was located. It was a windy day, and the place we paused was not very pleasant, with mild sandstorms intruding our respiratory systems. There was a small market on one side of the road, so Yelin, Chris and I went on a mini adventure and each got a primitive mask. Some of us got fruits, too.
Ajay came with the school bus. A bus painted in blue, with the school name SCA printed on it. It fit in quite well with many other buses we saw on the street that day — they reminded me of Wes Anderson's movie, Darjeeling Limited — thanks to their lively colors. We hopped into the school bus one by one, and as I chose a spot to sit down, I realized I hadn't been in a bus this "dilapidated" for years. I used to be able to get a taste of that whenever I went back to my grandma's village every spring, but I think now even those village buses have been replaced by newer ones.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, it didn't take me very long to have it registered in my brain that I was actually in a country poorer than China, for the first time in my life. (Not saying I've seen the most abject living condition in China, or that the bus looked so bad it was unbearable or evoked sympathy in me. Not to that level yet. I guess Costa Rica could kind of count as a country poorer than China too, but their stable albeit malfunctioning political system made me feel otherwise.)
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