Julius Dreyer

Although it hasn’t even been 24 hours since my plane arrived in Nepal’s capital,  it feels like so much longer to me already. There are so many impressions, emotions and thoughts in this short time; I have serious troubles starting to write about it.
Arriving at the airport was the usual laid back developing-country-mentality. Going through the security checks is mandatory, but nobody minds if you don’t follow it. In short, just do whatever you want as long as it won’t bother me…
Being not in the mood for big taxi negotiations after flying for half a day, I followed the first best taxi guy into his old, classy silver car. The trunk wouldn’t open, so I had to squeeze with my luggage in the back. The taxi guy was sitting next to the driver in the front. After driving for a few minutes, the streets got narrower and there conditions worse and worse. When we finally drove into a small dark alley that seemed to end at a dumping site and to my surprise the car suddenly stopped in the middle of this shabby road next to a big guy wearing a raincoat and scanning our faces with a torch. I started to have a strange feeling about the whole situation, after all I was in a very poor country, people get robbed like this on daily basis everywhere in the world. So there was no sign of the nice inviting hotel I had booked for my first night, and I really wasn’t sure what to expect when leaving this car, but hoping for the best I reluctantly followed their request to get out of the car.
As it turned out, we were of course standing right in front of a small hidden door, that lead into the patio of the hotel I had booked, the strange man was in fact their security guard and very friendly helping me with carrying my luggage. I remembered how Danielle told me how they are shutting down all electricity at night and I couldn’t help but smiling about my silly thoughts and was simply happy to be arrived after 11 hours on the road.
But giving it some after thought I felt more and more guilty about my thoughts. What is running these kind of processes making me feel this way. How come I judge friendly people by their appearance and have my emotions getting lost in such superficial prejudices as wealth and surrounding?
As a German I always considered myself pretty open minded, and a practicing enemy of any form of prejudices. In school, we got confronted with the second world war several times every year and this helped me a lot in learning not to make any judgments based on ethnicity or religion. But this was different. And I felt guilty about it.
One of my favorite quotes is “the more you travel the more you wise”. I must have been a teenager of maybe 14 years, when hearing it the first time. In fact I didn’t even know the meaning of “wise”, but I sensed some importance in it and somehow this quote made its way through my memory until today. The 14th Dalai Lama said, that one should be the scientist of one’s own body and mind. As I am going to be traveling for more than one month now, this might be the perfect opportunity to start practicing on both of these.