The first day is always the most foolish...

My Nepali/Canadian hosts at CECI (my new French-acronymed employer) graciously opted, in light of my midnight arrival yesterday, to begin my day with a leisurely 12:30 lunch, for which I am boundlessly thankful. I awoke at 6:30 and briefly chronicled the sunrise with my shiny new Canon (still waaaay too much camera for me, I’m willing to admit). I sleep-chewed my way through an inoffensive hotel buffet breakfast, hunted down some bottled water, and quickly toddled back to bed for a few more hours. I roused myself for a lovely lunch with my new overlords and my fellow volunteers, and enjoyed chorizo enchiladas, a noted traditional Nepali delicacy. I suppressed jetlag yawns through a few hours of orientation, and then bravely (though not wisely) decided to walk hotelward from the CECI office.

Nepal’s now-extinct(dormant?) civil war left a heavy legacy of militarization, and so major government buildings remain lightly surrounded by manned gun nests, with sixty-year-old bolt-action rifles resting lazily on sandbags, indifferently attended by soldiers a third their age, barrels consistently pointed out into the streets and sidewalks. In the 30 minutes it took me to get badly lost, I walked in front of these ancient arms at least a dozen times. I’m sure they’re appropriately locked down, and so forth, but I find it unsettling to be forced to march point blank in front of the bloody things anyways. While observing this absurdity and wandering through this mangled labyrinth of a city, I unsurprisingly ended up badly off course, and was retracing my steps when a CECI coworker miraculously happened by on a motorcycle. He offered a courteous and very welcome ride back to my hotel (in unnerving Kathmandu traffic, of course, but there’s some line about beggars and choosers) and I wisely resolved never to try anything new or adventurous again.

Once returned to familiar territory, I purchased a single local electrical adaptor. Marveling at my ingenuity and financial acumen, I ingeniously plugged in my single Canadian power bar and ingeniously saved myself the cruel expense of buying multiple adaptors for my multiple toys. My power strip abruptly surrendered to the unfamiliar Nepali voltage, waving a furious white flag of searing blue plasma, molten plastic and acrid dark smoke. I’m reasonably thankful I didn’t ingeniously try this on my Xbox first. Ye GODS, my room stinks now.

And so I go looking for food, in the hopes that the stench of electrical experimentation will have evacuated in an hour or so. More to follow tomorrow.

P.S. Nepal is 13 hours and 45 minutes ahead of Vancouver. Ponder that briefly. If that’s perplexing to you, imagine how I feel, stranded in this temporal no man’s land.