February 18, 2012

I got up early to work on my presentation tomorrow at the NELTA conference. I tried to practice reading it to give myself more confidence and yet, I still dread the idea of getting up in front of a bunch of people to talk about this somewhat obscure topic. When I got to the dining room, only Magda was having breakfast as apparently everybody else had chosen to walk to the Saint Xavier’s School to avoid paying for a taxi. Lisa joined us a few minutes later and we all agreed on sharing a taxi to get there on time. I was wearing my dress boot and was not about to walk forty minutes on them.

Registration was a fast process, but the event went down from there. Some of those invited to sit at the dais were late, supposedly due to the traffic even though it was a holiday in Kathmandu. The organizers refused to modify the agenda and proceeded to have one person after other give speeches, some of them in such poor English we couldn’t understand anything they said. They gave bouquets of flowers to everyone of them in addition to bags containing books and other materials. At the end of these frivolities, we were already one hour behind schedule and then came tea time for which I didn’t even bother as standing in line doesn’t appeal to me. We then had three keynote speakers in a row, something I had never seen done at a conference, with the last speaker finishing at 2:30pm. We were given half hour for lunch in the school’s canteen and told individual presentations would start promptly at 3:00. The lines snaked around the school yard, but I acted in a sneaky way and told one of the organizers we were presenting after lunch and needed to be fed immediately. He took us to the front of the line and we got some more daahl baaht, this time cold for the most part, from huge stainless vats. I wasn’t even that hungry as my cold had taken my appetite away.

I had a chance to observe Joe, David and Valerie’s presentations, all of which faced problems with technology, lack of space and then time constraints. Magda and Harry observed all presentations which made me even more nervous about tomorrow. At the end, we went to the Himalaya Hotel for a reception hosted by the British Council where we were offered a repast of what we had at Fife’s house: wine, beer and whiskey, and some terrible appetizers, all of them fried. There were no pakhoras or samosas to be had. I had two glasses of white wine and a couple pieces of fried paneer and left it at that. Apparently the idea had been to just have a mixer as no one spoke and we just mingle in the courtyard until a few of us decided to take a taxi to back to the hotel. Once again, I didn’t bother with dinner.