Big Girls Do Cry

After 8.5 hours in the Istanbul airport, and 6 more hours on the plane, I was really looking forward to breezing through security with my visa from DC and enjoying my day in Kathmandu. At the desk, the security officer (side note: there is no way to tell who is a security officer and who is just a regular old Nepali man, as the officers seem to where whatever they want to work) asked me when my visa was issued and I was so confused why he was asking, as the issue date was listed right there on my passport. Can't this dude read? Well, it turns out that the security officer can, in fact, read and the reason he was asking was because the Nepal Embassy of DC wrote September 23rd as the issue date but forgot to write a year. I insisted that my visa was issued this past September and the Embassy probably didn't write the year because...well, isn't it obvious that it was 2013?! To make a long story short, I waited almost 2 hours trying to get the issue resolved, even tears didn't help. I was told I would have to go to the Immigration office Sunday morning at 11am to retrieve my passport, which was quite unfortunate because I was supposed to catch a 9am flight to Surkhet the next day... welcome to Nepal! 

Even though I was 7 hours late, Rijen (the travel agent for Kopila Valley fellows) was waiting for me outside the airport. He drove me to the Buddha Garden Hostel and said he would help me figure out the visa junk in the morning. I was feeling super frustrated and sad and scared and already missing home and I almost resolved to going to bed at 5pm. But thanks to a little note Erin stuffed into my backpack before I left, I mustered up the energy to shower and venture out onto the streets of Kathmandu. I walked around for a while, exchanged my dollars for rupees, and even had dinner with an ex-Kopila Valley fellow who happened to be in the city for the night. Talking to someone else besides myself and getting some physical activity after sitting for 30 hours straight really helped my mood, thanks for rallying me from afar, Bear! 

The next morning, Rijen's dad took me to the Immigration Office at precisely 11am to retrieve my passport. To get a sense of what an immigration office in Nepal looks like in Nepal, picture a 3 story cement building built in the 70s that hasn't been cleaned, vacuumed, sanitized, or organized since it was built, and there ya have it. I was shuffled around from one story to another, one office to another, and told to "wait just 10 minutes" every 30 minutes or so. One officer would read the report that explained the situation at hand was that the year wasn't written on my visa, then he would pass the report to another officer who would read it and tell me the issue at hand was that the year was not written on my visa, then send me to another room to pass the report to another officer who would read it and tell me the issue at hand was that the year was not written on my visa then send me to another room to meet another officer who would read the report and tell me the issue at hand was that the year was not written on my visa.  This went on for TWO AND A HALF HOURS until some officer read the report, wrote 2013 under the issue date, and I was on my way. Welcome to Nepal!

I got a quick tour of the Thamel district, Durbar Square, and a Buddhist stupa, before heading back to the airport for one more flight. The max weight limit for luggage was hefty 20 kg and with precisely 57 kg, I was told I would have to pay 4000 rupees. This time the tears helped and somehow I convinced Buddha Air to let me bring three times the weight limit for less than $20! My flight was delayed 2.5 hours of course, but my kindle and some Nepali food that resembled Vietnamese pho helped me keep my sanity. 

I landed in Nepalgunj at 7:30pm, and was greeted by Prakash who would drive me all the way to Kopila Valley. He and I passed the time talking about anything and everything, our conversation went like this: Prakash would yell (literally, yell) some Nepali phrase at me, then I would either laugh, say I don't know or count to 3 in Nepali, for which, Prakash would respond by laughing, yelling another Nepali phrase at me, or practicing the 4 words of English he knew. The best exchange was when he said, "I make one and one baby, a ladies and a gents!" - another way of telling me he has two kids, one girl and one boy. We stopped at a couple security checkpoints along the way and on the side of the road of some village for Prakash to grab some dinner. While he shoveled some undistinguishable yellow goo and rice into his mouth, I asked to use the bathroom. I have seen some rough looking squatters in my life (remember India?), but this one, this was the sultan of swat, the king of crash, the colossus of clout of the most disgusting squatters. I have never had such a horrid and overpowering stench infiltrate my nose like the smell that escaped from this bathroom. It was so bad I could not even get without 10 feet of it; instead, I wrapped my scarf tightly around my face three times and popped a squat behind the "bathroom." Once Prakash finished eating, we were on our way, and I fell asleep to the soothing sound of Nepali electronic music blasting in my ear. Two hours later, I arrived at Kopila Valley Children's Home and School! It was 10:45 so the kids and Maggie were already asleep, but I was graciously greeted by a couple of fellows who made the 63 hours of travel seem insignificant. 

I cannot believe I'm actually here and I cannot wait to share more about KV, stay tuned!

xoxo, shannon

 buddhist stupa 

art class outside of the stupa