Travel/First Day

It's just about ten o'clock and our team is getting ready to board the our plane to Kathmandu. Yes, it's true, we're still traveling. It's been quite the experience. We left Indy on Saturday (11:30 a.m.) and flew into Detroit. From there we flew twelve and a half hours to Tokyo. The flight wasn't as terrible as I had envisioned it, but I was ready to land just as we flew over Alaska and my legs started getting cramped. I was lucky enough to get a window seat next to two people who slept the entire flight. In fact, as the plane lifted off, the women sitting between some man and myself mummified herself with a blanket and stayed that way for the majority of our journey west. My 12 hour flight consisted of four episodes of Lost (I think the end of the finale was predictable) and several attempts at sleep, all of which ended in vain. Finally, after what seemed like two days, we landed in Japan. It was surreal for me – touching down on a on a place that seemed so foreign and untouchable to me as a kid. The airport accommodating, especially if you happened to be an alcoholic or makeup artist. There had to be at least thirty Duty Free stores between Detroit, Tokyo, and Bangkok that sold mostly expensive liquor and foundation. Anyway, Tokyo was nice. I ate from the cleanest McDonald's I've ever seen and looked around in Japan's own Origami Museum, both helped lessen the drowsiness I was feeling from the long flight. Overall, Tokyo was very enjoyable, even considering how tired we all were. The next stop was a Bangkok (only a six hour flight this time, thankfully). I could hardly stay awake from the moment I sat down in the last row, corner seat of that plane. I somehow managed to make it through, though. I started watching Erin Brokovich and fell in love with Julia Robert's title character. What a good movie. The important thing is that we made it to Thailand safe and sound. Once we got off our plane, we went through immigration and claimed our bags. Someone (I'm not naming any names) thought it would be a good idea to pack nine hundred Beanie Babies in one of my checked suitcases for the kids in Nepal, and consequently I had to carry three items of luggage that weighed the same I did. Needless to say, my back still hurts. We spent the night in Bangkok and got little sleep with howling dogs and clucking chickens only ten paces outside our windows. The following morning we returned to the Bangkok International Airport and boarded our plane heading to Kathmandu.

And to make this long travel story short – we got there. We got here and it's now nine o'clock Nepal time (11:08 Indiana time).

It was a long, long first day. We met up with our ServLife guides at the airport and headed to our hotel. After settling in, we took a van to the most holy place for Hindus in all of Nepal: Pashupati. Pashupati is the home to some really big temples, hundreds of monkeys, and some bearded men who make you pay money for a picture with them. Being in this part of the city is hard to describe. There were people chanting and singing, swimming in a contaminated river (one that is supposed to be holy...), and cremating other people – burning them for all the world to see. It was intense, and not necessarily a good intense. Between the countless children asking for money (always wondering but never knowing where their parents might be), the sadness that seeped from the eyes of most people we walked past, and the overall spiritual darkness that loomed over all of us in the Pashupati, it was evident that this was a city longing to be free. I counted five people who smiled earlier today and four of them were children, everything else was a frown ---- While I'd like to finish this entry, I am about to pass out on the keyboard. The power just went out in our hotel, which is probably God telling me it's time to go to bed. I'll upload pictures tomorrow, add some captions, and finish this entry. Good night.