Katmandu living

the van de Wiel/Schou Hansen family blog


After quite an impressive start after we arrived to Nepal I have slowed a bit down with the publishing of news. By any measure today was a historic day with Obama winning the presidential election in the US. It was also a very typical day here in Nepal – to watch the election. I got up at 5.30 only to find out that we had a power-cut. The demand for electricity in Kathmandu is 700 GW but only 500 is produced every day – so to alleviate this, scheduled brown-outs have been introduced. So on average we have 2-3 hours without electricity a day. To avoid this most people have installed generators or inverters (a kind of massive battery that store electricity for the power-cuts). Anyway, I had to go back into bed as there was nothing much to do without electricity. The electricity returned half an hour after we got up, and I just managed to see that Obama had won Pennsylvania before the electricity went at the cable provider – So now we had electricity in our apartment but no cable television. So I logged on the internet and tried to follow the election on the New York Times website, but it didn’t quite have the same excitement as watching it on television. After being without cable for 2.5 hour it finally returned in time for the second wave of results coming in, and I could enjoy the rest of the morning of election, knowing that both we and our cable provider had had our scheduled brown-out ……. Needless to say that the first thing we need to invest in is an inverter. Liva came home at 15.00 and the rest of the day she was singing BRAK OBAMA – It turned out that they had interrupted the lessons to tell the kids that the US had elected the first African American as president – So she is already getting brainwashed by going to an American school…

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