Arrived safely in Kathmandu yesterday. Singapore seems a world away. Except that all the tourist-oriented cafes look like they belong in Singapore, with prices to match. My friend Lauren came to pick me up from the airport with the guy from the guest house we're staying at. It's always nice to see a familiar face upon arrival.
I've start Nepali lessons tomorrow. I've booked in for about 15 hours of lessons starting tomorrow, with plenty of opportunity to practise out of class. I'm also meeting a speaker of Kagate (that Lauren introduced me to online) later in the week to talk about some dictionary making. I thinking I'll use a program called WeSay, but more on that later this week.
At the moment, my Nepali is really basic, but knowing some Hindi helps, and I can read Devanagari alright, albeit very slowly. My main problem now is that because I spent the last few days on Bintan (an Indonesian island just 1 hour away from Singapore), my brain keeps going to the little Malay / Indonesian it knows. Incidentally, Malay has historically borrowed many words of Sanskrit origin which are cognate with Nepali words e.g. bahasa 'language', so sometimes it helps, although the two languages are still grammatical worlds apart.
For non-Singaporeans, I also explained over breakfast that the name 'Singapore' itself has roots in Sanskrit (via Malay) - singa 'lion' and pura 'city / town'.
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