Nepal Visit #3 - Some "Legal" Issues

[This post was originally intended as part of the Nepal sequence in February
but "disappeared" into the internet ether.
It just reappeared in a folder (!?), so here it is!]

Currency Exchange
The first day we had an extraordinary encounter with a money changing office in which they claimed we had passed a counterfeit Indian Rs. 1,000 bill (India is experiencing quite a problem with counterfeit currency, especially Rs. 1,000 and Rs. 500, but recent reports include Rs. 50s and Rs. 20s).

As it turned out, the bill wasn't counterfeit, merely an older version, but we suspect this exchange might have been another variation of a currency scam.

An interesting final note: as we were leaving the Kathmandu Airport for return to Delhi, there was a sign posted at the departing security gate notifying travelers that it was illegal to even bring into Nepal Indian Rs. 1,000 and Rs. 500 currency. We wondered why this sign was posted here rather than at entry :)!

Brief Conversation
[Fortunately, there is no known connection between this incident and the previous one.]

One afternoon as we were eating, two gentlemen at the table next to us engaged us in conversation. As we talked about education and life in Nepal, we discovered one of them was the founder and principal of a near-by school. We also discovered the other was a policeman!

Some of us assume a police officer is an officer of the law, which however is not always true in some parts of the world. We became more than a bit alarmed.

At this point it seems to have been nothing more than an innocent conversation, but it made us aware of how vulnerable we were as guests in another country and hoped we hadn't given out "too much personal information.".