Upon arriving at the airport my initial disappointment of loosing a piece of luggage was overcome by the happiness of seeing Mike at the airport. After filling me in with the news from Kathmandu and EcoSystems he quickly instructed Naresh, our company driver, to take us to Rosie Hughes '07's house. There I was welcomed by a nice little crowd (which included 4 Dartmouth students or alumni) hosing down water from the roof and trowing a banana peel with which Mike seems to have stumbled and fell. A delicious first course in Kathmandu accompanied by gin and tonic.
Our going to bed at deep ours into the night seemed to be no excuse to forget our commitment to our fitness. The next day we woke up to attend the HASH (an acronym). This is an event where a bunch of foreigners, mostly but not exclusively Americans and Europeans, get together every Saturday somewhere in the outskirts of Kathmandu. The HASH has a leader(s) that changes from week to week, and that leader will run through a series of back country trails, brooks and back gardens leaving small trails of paper every couple of hundred meters. The rest of the group attending that day will try to follow his route as fast as possible and when the route is unclear people will go in different directions and when one of them finds the right route he/she will shoute 'on-on' to signal the rest that he has found the right route. The run lasts approximately 2 hours and is of unknown length.
This 2 hour run took the tiny bit of energy I had left after not sleeping for more than a couple of hours in 5 days, a 19 hours of travelling and biking through Kathmandu without a face mask (Kathmandu is a really polluted, smoky city) for an hour to get to the HASH.
Happy nonetheless, the weekend ended with a short shopping day in Thamel, the most commercial area of the city, looking for a present for David Brennan '07 who was flying back to Hanover on Sunday. After a brief goodbye at the airport, I got my remaining piece of luggage back and headed back home to get ready for my first day of work.
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