The Swiss love mountains, and they love Nepal. Amongst the visitors we met many people who had trekked in Nepal, some more than once. We also met people who had worked in Nepal for some period of time. We also had several school classes coming to visit the exhibition with special questions and assignments, prepared by their teachers. Some visitors had made a special journey to come and visit the exhibition, including some ICIMOD alumni members.

It was very encouraging to get very positive feedback from the general public in Berne. People found the exhibition informative, interesting and visually beautiful. Some people said it could have been more extensive in terms of number of panels, and be shown in more cities in Switzerland. Generally the people were very pleased with the exhibition and experts (e.g. climate change specialists from the University of Bern) highly appreciated the effort of ICIMOD to raise awareness on climate change among the Swiss public.

We engaged four students from Berne University to take turns to volunteer at the exhibition. This was crucial as many people spoke fairly limited English. All students came from natural science background helped a lot and they were able to grasp the contents very easily.

On Monday 26 October, a small media event was held at the exhibition. Dr Madhav Karki from ICIMOD and Mr. Jean-Bernard Dubois from SDC welcomed the guests. Mr. Peter Gueller, the first regent of ICIMOD, spoke about the history of ICIMOD and finally Prof. Bruno Messerli spoke about the impacts of climate change in the Himalayas. The exhibition gained excellent media coverage, the following day we occupied the front page, and all of page 2 of the main newspaper (Der Bund) in Berne. The exhibition was also covered in many other paper- and online publications. As a result many people came especially to see the exhibition, sometimes from far a distance.