Here I goooo!

I'm off!  The picture above is me with my big backpack, a backpack full of books and games for the Nepali kids, and a backpack to bring with me on the airplane.  Daiva (my sister) was really confused about how I would carry all the backpacks on only one back.  You see, I'm an extreme backpacker.

I took a flight from Madison to Chicago, from Chicago to Abu Dhabi, and now I'm waiting around in Abu Dhabi for about 12 hours until my flight to Kathmandu in the morning.  The woman in Chicago was really nice and switched my seat to a window seat in business class, but unfortunately I ended up sitting next to the smelliest and most obnoxious man I've ever met.  He didn't speak English (and for some strange reason, our flight attendant didn't speak Arabic), so he used a lot of hand gestures and loud grunting noises to express his discomfort with the food, the location of his seat, the woman in front of him, the temperature of the cabin, and on and on and on.  With the few English words he knew, he was full of lots of great misinformation (like, "we land in 1 hour 30" when we were clearly 100 feet from the runway...).  Of course, no travel experience would be complete without an interesting travel-mate.

During our long flight, I had lots of time to cycle between feelings of "what-the-hell-am-I-doing" and excitement.  It's a strange feeling to suddenly be a minority in both appearance and language.  I realize now that I've never traveled somewhere that I did't at least somewhat know the language or have a friend who did.  This trip will definitely be much more of an experience than I expected when I sat on the floor in my Oxford dorm room and thought "why don't I just go to Nepal for a few months?"