Getting there (November 19/20)
November 19th rolled around, and we were set to leave for Nepal. I stuffed two suitcases right to their 50-pound limit. The usual stuff was in there: clothes, toiletries, a towel, some emergency flashlights. But most important were 30 packages of freeze-dried green apples (my favorite food) and 2 volumes of children’s poetry. “Where the Sidewalk Ends” and “New Kid on the Block” had been so instrumental to the beginning of my love affair with the English language that they seemed essential to any attempt to teach it. Jack Prelutsky’s work had an especially dramatic effect on me:
You’d need to have an iron rear
To sit upon a cactus
Or Otherwise
At least a year
Of very painful practice.
How could you not fall in love with English written with a playfulness like that?
Flights from JFK were 200 dollars cheaper so we drove all the way out to Queens rather than the much closer Newark Airport. Schuyler and I said goodbye to our respective parents, and then each other’s parents, and then my parents came by the security line to say goodbye again and then suddenly we were on a 14-hour flight to Abu Dhabi.
Neither of us had much luck sleeping on the flight. We watched a couple movies, ate some surprisingly good airplane food, and texted each other using the inflight messaging system. I found it strange to be on an airplane of that size, with two decks and almost a thousand people on board. It was disorienting, light flashed in from one or two open window shades, the rest in darkness. I had never been on a flight of that length. The plane became a world within itself. I learned to recognize people. The redheaded British flight attendant, the man in the really nice hat, the woman I thought might be a minor celebrity. I tried not to stare. When I got restless I’d walk the length of the plane, doing my best not to get in peoples’ way. I got a better sense of the plane as a plane that way, not just little compartments, sectioned by curtains. A big, solid thing, a ship in the air.
On both ends of the plane, two roped-off staircases led to the first class compartments. I had the urge to sneak up, to see how the other half flew. I did my best to suppress it. The plane chased the sun, cut short the night and we got to Abu Dhabi around noon. Security was crowded and long, we had to go down the same 500 yard hallway twice, once to get to security and again to get to the bus that would take us to the next plane. We were both exhausted and Schuyler took such a long time in the bathroom that I feared I had lost him. Thankfully, he re-emerged, and we got on a smaller, but still sizable plane that took us to Kathmandu, crossing time zones again and emerging in the night. We read through a guidebook my mother had bought, and argued about proper pronunciation. On our descent, I started a little, the lights on the ground looked weird, and there was a lot of turbulence. But the plane was not in trouble, and the lights were not on the ground, they were in the mountains, uneven pinpricks tracing the rim of the valley.
We were there! In Nepal! I was tired and a little anxious. Was being here really helping? Would I be able to give what was needed? Could I adapt to this new place? It was a lot to think about, and I had a lot of time to think about it, waiting in line at customs, getting through a crowded security line, and finding our bags at a claim that reminded me a little of an Ikea checkout. I didn’t, have any way of contacting Dr. Santschi, and could only hope that she’d be there waiting for us. We got our visas, and trundled out the gate into a dark and dusty Kathmandu.
And there Dr. Santschi was, smiling and standing with The Venerable Metteyya, and after a few words of greeting we were off on the streets of Kathmandu in the dark, bumping up and down in a taxi, a little nervous, very excited, and ready to sleep.