Today we ventured out into Kathmandu together! Elysia has been travelling around on her own up to this point, but today was the first chance to do some exploring with Mike. We hired a taxi for the day for $25. It turns out that we got majorly ripped off, because the hotel was hiring them for $15, but at the end of the day we felt that we got our money worth and the extra $10 we paid will definitely make a big difference to him. We asked our driver to first take us to Bodanath, but he didn't understand us and took us to Patan instead. So, we explored Patan. Patan is one of the three ancient kingdoms of the Kathmandu Valley. Patan is known as the City of Fine Art. Everywhere you go are ... read more

Today I made the trip to Nepal. Actually, I started the trip yesterday and finally made it to Nepal today. Overall it was a rather uneventful trip, which is a good thing. But it sure was long. It was about 30 hours of travel time overall, with two stops: Vancouver and Guangzhou, China. Each stop was only a couple hours though, so the connections were pretty efficient. The airline that I flew was China Southern Airlines, and I was worried that the airline would be super sketch, but it really wasn... read more

Not the best of days that's for sure. It started off fine, I met up with the other volunteers for breakfast and then we went to the hospital as usual. Unfortunately, my stomach was on the rocks and I didn't realize just how much until just before lunch. We were going to get started on the murals in the deluxe cabin. I started to not feel too well, so I went with Erik to the cabin where he started to do the rough sketches of the murals on the wall. I just laid down on the bench and watched his artistic genius. I kept feeling more and more sick unfortunately and got sick in the washroom. It took me awhile before I had the courage to take the bumpy/crazy cab ride back to Thamel. It was ... read more

Today I spent another day at the hospital. In the morning we saw a hydropressure reduction procedure for intussusception in a young child (basically they use water pressure to pop out the telescoping intestine and monitor via ultrasound). Dr X was working on this for his PhD thesis and is a novel way of treating intussusception. Yesterday, I was talking to the head doctor and asked whether he had some walls to be decorated in the hospital, so we came up with the idea to paint the walls of one of the private rooms (cabins) to something more cheerful for sick children. I'm not much of an artist but fortunately one of the Ottawa group, Erik, is. Today we picked out the pictures we'll paint on the wall; Disney themed — Aladdin (Genie and The Carpet), ... read more

This morning I awoke early to arguably the loudest thunder I've ever heard in my life. It was so loud, like the sky was ripping apart, and it was almost alarming. This was accompanied by very heavy rain, so I wondered whether this might be the start of the alleged monsoon, which apparently was supposed to come sometime this week. Fortunately, by the time i got out of bed it was much lighter, and rained on and off very lightly all day. Today I was going to get back to work volunteering at the hospital after the Holy Day (Saturday). Once I woke up and got all ready to go, I went to ask the front desk to get me a taxi, and they told me that today the taxis in Kathmandu are on strike. This ... read more