A new country! Kathmandu is a short, direct flight from Bombay. Check out those mountains!

First stop: US Embassy. I give a talk at the Embassy's library. I talk about astrobiology, exoplanets, the search for life, and the Mars Curiosity rover (see those pictures they're holding -- sent to me from NASA HQ).

At the US Embassy library in Kathmandu. I've presented a bunch of programs through the US Embassies, and they are always really well organized, and a great way to reach students.

As do most visitors to Kathmandu, I had a hotel on the edge of the dusty historic district, near Durbar Square. My hotel was around the corner from this awesome 'Family Dental Clinic.'

Check out those teeth! They're just sitting in the window of the dentist.

Another dental lab, here with a nice skull!

And another dental lab! There are a lot of them around here.

Near Durbar Square.

Mangos being sold! Like India, the digital scale has hardly made it to commerce. Almost everything in the informal markets is sold using metal weights on a balance.

This is not a hill -- this is the aftermath of the earthquake 2015 earthquake, three years earlier. Downtown is built of many many centuries of bricks and mortar and concrete.

This was downtown, but they certainly looked like sherpas.

Whoa! It's Dorje Gurung, who I have not seen since 1994 when we finished at Grinnell College in Iowa. Dorje grew up in rural Nepal, went to high school in Kathmandu ('KTM' in the local vernacular), and then college in the US. One of the original draws to visiting Nepal for me was to give a talk at his high school -- St. Xavier's. It didn't work out for scheduling reasons, but I was happy to see Dorje after so many years!

Oooh, guess which building does *not* fit the Nepali architecture? This very out-of-place-looking structure of Greek columns was donated by the German government a hundred years ago.

To explore the downtown area, I enlisted the services of Anup Karki, a local guide. He was at the central tour office, and is super. Anup is great and we've kept in touch.

I did get scammed earlier that morning a 'tour guide' who claimed he was 'an art student,' took me to his 'gallery' to sell paintings her claimed to have made, and then fleeced me for money in a cooking-oil-and-rice scheme.

So, this is... a monument. Or it was, until the 2015 earthquake three years earlier. So many old buildings -- made of bricks and other brittle things -- collapsed into rubble piles. "But they will rebuild this" -- as indeed they are. Same bricks, same site.

Inside the palace at Darbar Square, this is the Kumari Ghar -- house of the Kumari. The designated 'living godess' makes appearances occasionally through the windows. I'm not so sure about this practice -- it has a lot of Nepali history, but a litlte hard to get behind in this era.

Nepal has several Kumaris, but the Royal Kumari, is the most famous. Selected in early childhood from the caste of goldsmiths and silversmiths, potential candidates are placed in a darkened room with freshly severed buffalo heads and dancing men wearing demon masks. If one candidate is not frightened, she is the reincarnation of Taleju. Once chosen, her feet will never touch the ground and she will only leave during festivals and religious duties. Each day she makes appearances from her balcony. As soon as she begins menstruating, or loses blood from an injury, she reverts back to mortal status as the selection process begins again.

Oh, check it out! Like everything else in downtown Kathmandu, this is ancient. Apparently the temple (out of carved rock in the backdrop) is form the 15th century or older. Now it's a chai stall.

Friends of Anup's run the chai stall (or at least charge their mobiles there). You can see the sugar in the plastic pot, the milk boiling, and the gas tank.

Nepali pastries!

One thing that Kathmandu does great at is spectacular displays of wiring. There are truly epic nests of cables. (Lok closely and you can see a lot of coils -- hey, why cut the cable to length if you can just stash an extra hundred meters on the pole! I like the optimistic small white connector box midway up -- implying secret, organized wiring structure within.

One thing that Kathmandu does great at is spectacular displays of wiring. There are truly epic nests of cables. (Lok closely and you can see a lot of coils -- hey, why cut the cable to length if you can just stash an extra hundred meters on the pole! I like the optimistic small white connector box midway up -- implying secret, organized wiring structure within.

Check out that cable tangle!

Ooo! Mountaineering and Nepali trinkets: it looks like I'm back in Boulder!

One of my favorite restaurants in Boulder was called Sherpa's -- in fact, run by an off-duty sherpa who guided during the climbing season.

So, here's the reason I'm here: giving a talk at Southwestern State College.

With the Dr. Rajendra KC, Campus Chief of Southwestern State College, Kathmandu.

This talk was put together by my friend Suresh Bhattarai. He runs the NASO = Nepal Astronomical Society. This cup says 'NASO: Token of Love' on it. We had not met before, but knew each other over Facebook from several years earlier.

Questions after my talk.

After the talk, I'm given a tour of the new biology lab at Southwestern State College, Kathmandu. And the Himalaya are visible out the windows (hard to see here).

A whole group photo of my talk at Southwestern State College, organized by the Nepal Astronomical Society. About 200 students from universities and secondary schools across the region came for the talk.

The organizers at my talk at Southwestern State College. SWSC is in Kathmandu, not Arizona, depsite what you might think from the name.

Manishwa Dwa (right) and Suresh Bhattharai (middle), with the posters they made for my talk.

With some local students...

Manisha Dwa, co-lead of the Nepal Astronomical Society, heads back on the roads of Kathmandu. Most of the roads of the city are dirt -- the primary reason why the city has terrible air quality.

Meeting up with friends from Oregon. I asked to go to the most traditional restaurant around, so that's where we are: enjoying a lot of animal parts here. I forget the details, but it probably included a pancreas, a lung, and a brain. It was pretty intense, especially since I'd had a similar number of internal organs at a Ramadan iftar two nights earlier in Bombay.

I was only in Kathmandu for 48 hours. But on my second night, Suresh called me up and asked if I wanted to do an interview on Nepali prime-time TV in the morning. How could I turn that down? So he picked me up, and we headed over to the national Nepali TV studio.

Here I am on the set, being interviewed by their morning host, Sikshhya Bhattarai (*). That's the Singha Durbar in the background, which is one of the big Nepali government buildings, and "one of the most exquisite and lavish of palaces in the world until the 1950s."

(*) Binod, Sikshhya, and Suresh B(h)attharai -- a common last name.

And I'm on the Nepal News set! That's where it all comes from.

OK, switching gears! I've come over to the Meridian International School in Kathmandu. What got me here? A year earlier, at an astronomy winter school in Hyderabad, I met Binod Battharai. Binod was a grad student in Kathmandu. He really stood out: quiet and competent, he'd done real research, and he was finishing up his MSc using NASA spacecraft measurements (SOHO heliospheric data). I hadn't talked with him, but out of the blue I wrote to Binod and asked him wha he thought of me coming to KTM. A month later, here we are! Binod teaches Computer Science here.

That's me in yellow (front row) and Binod one row back-and-right from me (pink shirt and tie).

Update 2022: Binod is now an astrophysics grad student at UC Merced!

Stickers to everyone -- these round ones here are for my employer at the time, PSI = Planetary Science Institute, who is one of the largest NASA-funded research institutes. You can also see a New Horizons sticker and an MSL.

Here we are in the gymnasium, giving the New Horizons talk at Meridian School. (Thank you to the teacher who took a buch of these photos!)

Binod is on the stage, operating my slides.

Q&A time from the students!

Lots of kids had questions afterwards.

With some of the teachers at the school.

Chatting with the principal. He is from Turkey, and came to Nepal on a whim 40 years ago. He has run the school since then, growing it from a tiny place into a really high quality K-12 school with more than a thousand students.

I didn't get to present to the younger kids, but I did meet them as I walked through the school!

One of the science teachers!

On top of one of the academic buildings. We are pretty near the US Embassy. The school is among the best of the Nepal-run private schools in Kathmandu.

Binod Bhattarai administers a test in his Computer Science class!

On my way back home to Bombay!

Returning home, I pass through Delhi. There are dozens of people on the plane wearing these identical backpacks. It turns out that this trek to Kailash Darshan is a legendary high-mountain trek, through a group of Hindu temples in the Himalaya.

Back in Bombay! Anyone who's lived there knows exactly what the blue is, but for those who haven't: they're all tarps! Monsoon season is intense, and you have to cover your roof with something. The tarps are sold all over, and seem to always be blue.