Nicely done video on OLE Nepal

Found this video on Twitter the other day and thought it’s worth sharing here:

OLE Nepal from INVISIBLE HAND on Vimeo.

Of course it doesn’t come close to my favorite OLPC feel-good video from about 2 years ago… ;-)

My last 24 hours in Kathmandu

I can’t believe it’s already been 3 months since I posted that I was on my way to Nepal. Now it’s Friday afternoon of my last day of work here at OLE Nepal and in a bit more than 24 hours I’ll get on my plane to head home to Vienna via Doha.

It’s all a bit crazy at the moment and this last week since my return from trekking (which I’ve also still gotta blog about) has gone by unbelievably quickly. After arriving back in Kathmandu on Sunday evening we decided to indulge in civilization by going for dinner at the awesome 1905 restaurant.

On Monday we spent some time hanging out with our trekking guide and his family who had kindly invited us to their house for lunch. Afterwards we went to see the Swayambhu stupa which is quite an impressive sight and offers great views over the city. In the evening we had great Thai dinner at Yin Yang in Thamel followed by some beers at one of my favorite bars, De La Soul.

On Tuesday we still hung out in Kathmandu’s center for a bit before I dropped off my visiting Austrian friend at the airport. The evening was spent hanging out with some friends on a nice terrace overlooking Kathmandu.

Wednesday I went back to work and then to my last Sanepa poker-night in the evening and yesterday we had a great OLE Nepal dinner-party to celebrate the Dashain festival.

Today I was woken up by a call from Pablo Flores of Project Ceibal fame who arrived in Kathmandu in the early morning. After picking him up I spent several hours finishing up various remaining work tasks and in the afternoon we had an interesting meeting with him to discuss a broad variety of topics.

Now the plan for the remaining 24 hours here in Nepal is to have dinner with some friends at Bhumi in Lazimpat before heading to Thamel for drinks. Depending on how long we stay out I then might try and attend some of the animal sacrifices happening tomorrow morning. In the afternoon I’ll be going to my last Hash Run before then directly heading to the airport to make my way home…

Notes from a Nepali deployment

As previously mentioned I unfortunately haven’t been too great when it comes to blogging about my experiences here in Nepal. The one thing I did  manage to write up are some of my impressions from a visit at two schools here in the Kathmandu Valley where students in grades 2, 3 and 6 are using XOs. The two-part article was published on olpcnews in early September, let me know what you think about it:

Notes from a Nepali deployment, Part I: Updating

Notes from a Nepali deployment, Part II: Challenges

OLPC Austria meetups in autumn

After the summer break OLPC Austria is going to restart its monthly public meetups at the Museumsquartier in Wien in October. Apart from the normal socializing component this time ‘round we have organized a series of presentations that will look at the OLPC project from a global perspective and present the current state of affairs in various countries.

For that purpose presentations about the projects in Nepal (October 3), Peru (November 7) and Graz (December 5) will take place as part of our public meetings each first Saturday in the month, always starting at 3PM at Museumsquartier Quartier 21, Room D.

I’ll of course report on these meetups as we go along and might even try to set up some live streaming of the presentations. But most importantly I hope to see you there in this thing called meatspace! :-)

Trekking

Just a quick note to say that I’m off to do some trekking in the Langtang valley region (north of Kathmandu) for the next 11 days. Needless to say I’m seriously excited! :-)

All of today was spent organizing things like the bus tickets, national park entries, figuring out the route, buying some appropriate clothes, etc. As always with these things they all took longer than expected but now I’m sure we’re well prepared for what’s ahead.

Things will get started tomorrow morning at around 7AM when we get on a 7~9 hour bus ride that will take us up north. The first day of walking will be Friday and we should arrive at Kyanjin Gompa, which will be our base, on Sunday evening. From there we plan to do one or two day-trips, of course depending on how well how things go with the walking and the altitude (Kyanjin Gompa lies on ~3800m above sea-level and one of the peaks we’d maybe like to tackle is ~4900m).

Well, I better turn off the laptop and get some sleep, seeing that the alarm clock will go off in roughly 4 1/2 hours…

Will report back in case I stumble across an Internet café (haha) or upon my scheduled return to Kathmandu in 11 days.

Blogging about Karma

Admittedly I haven’t done too great a job in keeping the blog updated with my impressions from my time here in Nepal. Looking back at the archives the entries have been mostly limited to links to my Flickr album.

(Though I am somewhat proud that I’m at least taking the time to go through all the photos as soon as I get home from taking them to compile best of selections. There’s still several thousand photos from my previous trips in China/Mongolia/Russia and USA/Canada which I haven’t even looked at!)

Anyway, one of the topics which I haven’t really talked about here is the work I’ve been doing as part of my volunteering gig at OLE Nepal. The project I’ve been spending most of my time on is Karma (Web site / entry on wiki.sugarlabs.org) which was supported by Google as part of their Summer of Code program.

In a nutshell the goal of the Karma project is to provide an easy-to-use framework for interactive learning activities based on HTML 5 and Javascript. I’ve been mostly working on several issues related to the user interface and I’ve documented some of my work over on the Karma blog:

• Chakra Progress
• Karma Lesson Navigation
• Karma Pages

Since this is the first time that I’m really working with HTML, CSS and Javascript things take a little longer to get done but I’m really learning a lot and having a great time doing it. Plus being able to collaborate with two awesome fellows, Bryan and Felipe, makes the project all that more more enjoyable, even those weekly IRC meetings at 8AM on Tuesdays;-)

330° panorama from the OLE Nepal offices

Admittedly I’ve been quite obsessed with panorama photos lately mainly thanks to Microsoft Research's awesome Image Composite Editor. So today I took my camera to work and sneaked up on the roof in the morning while everyone else was in a meeting;-)

I have to say that I’m really quite happy with the resulting 330° panorama! I’ve included a small version of it below but admittedly it doesn’t really do the whole scene justice so I’d recommend you to look at the full-size (8770 x 1180 pixel, 3MB) shot for an impression of the environment around our office.

On a related side-note I took two more photos today which worked out quite well thanks to the awesome late-afternoon / early-evening light:

View from the office

The hill across the Ring Road at 6PM

Hope you like ‘em!

Kathmandu photos

After being here for almost 8 weeks I finally managed to spend an afternoon exploring the greater area around Kathmandu’s Durbar Square. Until today my exposure of Kathmandu had been mostly limited to Thamel which happens to be the part of town were many restaurants, bars and most of Kathmandu’s night-life can be found. Anyway, today I had a great time wandering through the city with Daniel and Vikki, hanging out on Durbar Square, climbing up the Bhimsen Tower, enjoying delicious lunch at a tiny Korean restaurant and dinner at OR2K and – I’ve never been more surprised – actually finding a quiet street in Kathmandu. To cut a long story short: I had a great day!

Not surprisingly I took a ridiculous amount of photos and I now spent the past 3 hours going through them, picking the best ones and subsequently tagging and uploading them to the Kathmandu album on Flickr.

Photos of the Teej festival in Patan

I spent the afternoon hanging out on Patan’s Durbar Square where I enjoyed observing the Teej festivities going on there. I took quite a lot of photos and have uploaded a small best of selection to Flickr – you can find them in the Teej Festival album.

I also took a short video of the festivities which you can find here.

Bhaktapur photos now on Flickr

On Sunday I went to Bhaktapur, the third city here in the Kathmandu Valley (besides Kathmandu and Patan). While the trip back and forth was amazingly bumpy and slow it was well worth it as the city is absolutely stunning! So while I’m quite happy with some of the photos I took they simply don’t come close to doing the squares and streets there justice.

Anyway, you can find a selection of photos in the Bhaktapur album and for the lazy ones I’m including two panorama shots that I’m particularly fond of:

180° Panorama of Bhaktapur's Durbar Square

Panorama of Bhaktapur's Taumadhi Tole square

Photos from Hash Run 1607

I just uploaded some photos from this weekend’s awesome but seriously exhausting (well, at least when you’re not feeling too great to begin with) Hash Run 1607. You can find the photos here.

Next weekend I hope to bring my video camera along which could make for a nice YouTube video:-)

More photos on Flickr

I’ve just added a bunch of photos taken this weekend to the Nepal 2009 collection on Flickr.

The first set are some impressions from Run 1606 of the Himalayan Hash House Harriers (“a drinking club with a running problem” – see the corresponding Wikipedia entry for more information on the Hash House Harriers).

I’ve also added some more photos of Patan which I took during a nice 3 hour walk through the city earlier today. You can find them in the Patan set I started 2 weeks ago.

Different country, different lifestyle

One of the things that always strikes me when spending some extended period in another country is how quickly one’s lifestyle changes and adapts to the local environment. Interestingly this includes many areas of life such as sleep patterns, nutrition, communication, etc. which are normally seen as being very ingrained and hard to change.

Anyway, below is a list of areas where I consider my Vienna and Kathmandu lives to be (radically) different.

Sleep: Back home I generally average between 4.5 and 6 hours of sleep per night during the week. Here in Nepal I normally manage to get 6 to 7 hours of sleep which really does make quite a difference in terms of how quickly I manage to get out of bed in the morning.

Food: While I could write a whole weekly column just on the topic of food I’m going to keep it short by saying that my diet here is radically different. Instead of starting into my day with a huge cup of black tea, bread with whatever the fridge offers and yoghurt my Nepali breakfast consists of bottled water and some crackers, a chocolate bar or (if we’ve been to the awesome local German bakery down the street the day before) some croissants or something. Lunch at the office is always daal bhaat (Nepali national meal which consists of rice with various vegetables with quite a bit of curry and chilies) which is served at 11:30AM. In Vienna on the other hand I tend to go out for lunch at 12:30PM or 1PM. Sometimes I buy a snack at the supermarket but most often I eat at university or one of the many eateries close to home or work. In the evenings I almost always eat at home whereas here we always go out to eat something.

Caffeine: I don’t think my caffeine intake has ever been this low in the past 6 years or so. While I’m not much of a coffee drinker - I normally might have 3 or 4 cups a week (and twice that during crunch-periods) - I do drink quite a lot of black tea, ice tea and Coca Cola back home. Around here I only drink two small cups of Chya (tea with milk and some sort of spices) a day and the occasional glass of Coca Cola. I guess it’s really the increased amount of sleep that allows me to stay productive without my regular caffeine fix.

Mobile phone: While I’m not reachable on my mobile phone 24/7 (I turn it off when I sleep) it certainly is a key communication tool for me to stay in touch with family, friends and colleagues. I also use it extensively to check my e-mails when I’m out and about and to manage my schedule, to-do lists and notes. However since my Austrian phone doesn’t work here I bought a cheap €20 Nokia phone (which comes with a very useful flashlight!) and got a local SIM last week. Now except for my daily use of that flashlight and the alarm clock I’ve maybe made and received less than half a dozen short phone calls. Which is interesting because that’s also the way I used my first mobile phone (in late 2001) before these things became mandatory and ubiquitous.

iPod touch: There’s hardly a waking hour in Austria when I don’t have my iPod touch on me or at least within an arm’s length of wherever I’m sitting. I use it to listen to podcasts from/to work or when riding the metro, check  my e-mails and tweets all throughout the day, surf the Web while sitting in lectures or cafés, etc. So I definitely use it *a lot*. In Nepal on the other hand I’ve yet to use the iPod even once. The walk to work is too short to merit listening to a podcast, when I’m out in the evenings or on weekends I prefer to take in the environment around me rather than listen to music and at home I now actually spend more time reading books and articles instead of keeping constant tabs on what’s going on in the depths of the Internet.

Books: As mentioned both above and in a previously blog entry I tend to be quite bad when it comes to reading books while I’m Vienna. However here I’ve already read two books in the 3 weeks since I arrived.

Language: Even when I’m in Austria I tend to spend a lot of time reading, writing and listening to things in English which naturally also leads to quite  a bit of my thinking seemingly being in English. However since I got here I’ve barely written a dozen German e-mails and, what’s more important, have maybe spent a total of 30min talking in German with various people. This is certainly quite an interesting experience which I haven’t really had since my exchange year in Peru in 2000-2001.

1st school visit

Today I visited two schools in the greater Kathmandu area where OLE Nepal has distributed a total of ~180 XO-1 laptops. You can expect a full report over the coming days and for now I’m leaving you with this photo.

Impressions from Durbar Square, Patan

I’ve just finished uploading a small best of selection from the photos I took while hanging out at Durbar Square in Patan [Google Maps] on Saturday. Hope you like them!

My Nepal 2009 album on Flickr.

Signing contracts in Nepal

Today I finally managed to drag myself to a store an get a SIM card and mobile phone since only being reachable when I was online got a bit tiresome in terms of arranging meetings with people. (On a side note: I’m really quite unhappy that my regular Austrian phone is SIM locked and that the fine folks over at T-Mobile Austria don’t even have a roaming partner here in Nepal!)

Anyway, since yesterday’s attempt to get connected failed as I needed my passport and a photo (both of which I didn’t have on me) I went back there today and thought that things should go smoothly. However as it turns out one copy of my password, what the staff had told me yesterday, wasn’t enough so one of the guys working in the shop accompanied me to a copy-shop where we got another copy. Returning to the store it turns out that I’d also need a copy of my visa which they had of course forgotten to mention earlier…

However the real fun began once I started to fill out the forms in order to get my SIM card. Not being all that enthusiastic when it comes to forms to begin with I obviously ended up not filling in some of the information. So when the shop clerk subsequently inquired about my father’s name I was slightly surprised to say the least. It was only after a short chuckle on my part which was quickly ended by a very serious look by the clerk that I realized that she was serious. And to top it off the form also asked for my grandfather’s name, luckily I managed to resist the temptation to ask whether they wanted the one from my father’s side or mother’s side.

The next challenge presented itself when they asked me where I lived. Since there basically are no addresses here in Nepal you normally describe you location relative to the nearest chowk (a street corner in most cases). However I quickly realized that trying to describe where I lived was a pretty pointless endeavor. I do find my way walking around the neighborhood and manage to tell cab drivers where to go. But explaining to someone who speaks very broken English where exactly you live without actually walking or driving along the road is beyond my capabilities. So after some deliberation by the shop clerks the field, which understandably covers a third of a page, remained empty.

Next up I was asked to sign the contract at three different spots, funnily enough one signature was required to confirm the information of where I lived. Thinking I was done it took me awhile to realize that the inkpads suddenly laying on the table were waiting for me. So I confirmed the contract with fingerprints from my left and right thumb (US immigration anyone?). And just when I thought everything was over I was again asked to sign something, this time the photo which was attached to the application form.

So 30min after I walked into the store I left it being 1000 Rupees poorer, having thumbs with blue ink that probably won’t come off for a few days but proudly owning a SIM card.

Why this Friday evening is different than others

I’m in Kathmandu, Nepal. (Okay, that one was too easy.)

I don’t usually crash invitation-only garden parties  where all drinks and food (and amazing food that is) are free (with neither having an invitation nor an excuse for leaving early that is).

I don’t usually remember the awesome BBQ that we had in Washington, D.C. in early June 2008.

I don’t usually meet a bunch of people where 80% of them work for one NGO or another.

I don’t usually meet people who will work in Afghanistan for extended periods of time.

I don’t usually have a girl order a drink for me (unless it’s well past the official - and even unofficial - closing time and she knows the bar staff really well).

I don’t usually happen to bump into the main country correspondent for a major international news publication while hanging out at a random bar.

I don’t usually get stopped by police and military police on my cab ride home from going out.

I don’t usually come home after an evening out in town and think it’s interesting enough to merit a blog post;-)

First photos going up on Flickr…

I just uploaded a handful of photos that I took this morning to my new Nepal 2009 album on Flickr. So far the album is limited to some initial impressions from home and work but I hope to go out and get some touristy shots (especially at the gorgeous Durbar Square in Patan) over the weekend.

Random observations after 6 days in Nepal

Kathmandu could easily be called NGOville as the number of NGOs in this city is simply insane. Especially the part of town where I live (near Sanepa Chowk) hosts what must be at least two dozen NGOs, ranging from UN organizations to World Vision and GTZ.

Traffic here is just insanely chaotic. And watching it is an experience in itself.

There are basically no street names here in Kathmandu. Directions are given based on the closest chowk which, if I understood it correctly, is normally a major street crossing or market area.

Nepalis eat fast, seriously fast. We are served lunch at work and people are normally done with the second plate right when I’m about half-way through my first one.

Building construction here basically seems to be done without the use of machinery. There are two major construction sites on my way to work and the only machine I’ve seen on both sites is a concrete mixer.

If what the guy I met on the weekend told me was true then I actually spoke to the person who made F1 the standard help-key on PCs.

The streets and newspapers are full of advertisements for (pre-)schools, colleges, universities and other educational institutions. One of them even boasts to be connected with the University of Applied Sciences in Salzburg, Austria.

Apparently Sunday is the start of the week around here. Which also means that children have to go to school on Sundays. And in many schools their only time off is Saturday afternoon.

It’s slightly odd to live in a house where a guard is on-site 24/7.

This past weekend must have been one of the most relaxing ones I’ve had in quite awhile.

I originally wanted to mention something about my new disconnected life-style here in Nepal (with only 8 hours of Internet access while I’m at work and not owning a mobile phone) but seeing how I just got connected to the Internet here at home I’ll have to revisit my thoughts on this topics.

An important point of the recently announced Nepali budget for the next year are infrastructure projects such as the road network. Apparently 3 districts are still not connected to the national road network.

Hopefully I’ll have time for a more structured post next week…

Going to Nepal…

YES, I’m back on the road! :-)

I’m typing these lines as I’m making use of a kiosk with free WiFi and charging here at Doha International Airport while waiting for my flight to Kathmandu.

I’ll be in Nepal until the end of September, hanging out with my friends of OLE Nepal and soon to be joined by the one and only Daniel Drake.

However before I get too carried away getting my online fix (and potentially missing my plane like at PDX last year;-) I’ll rather head to my gate and see that I keep this blog updated over the coming weeks and months.