Sunday, Busy Sunday

(From 28 July 2013)

Today was a whirlwind of a day. After a memorable dinner last night at the Pretty Family Restaurant in Patan, the five of us staying in Lazimpat spent the night with the other four ETAs who are living in Dhobighat during our orientation month. A fun, but late, night combined with all of today’s activities has left me totally wiped. Here’s a minute-by-minute replay of my ninth day in Nepal.

5:15am  -- Wake up.

5:30am  -- Leave the house in Dhobighat for a morning hike up  nearby “hill.” The view from the lookout point part way up was spectacular; I could have stayed there all day just staring out and marveling at the sprawl of the Kathmandu Valley gently cloaked in fog.

 

7:00am  -- Arrive at the temple at the top of the hill. More marveling. The stupa mixed both Hindu and Buddhist symbols and traditions. I won’t try to describe anything because I don’t have the words to appropriately convey the experience. (I did get permission from someone at the stupa to take a few pictures, but sometimes they’re crooked because I was mainly shooting from the hip.)

 

 

 

 

 

7:35am  -- Just before leaving the stupa my camera battery died. I do have pictures, thanks to the generosity of other wonderful ETAs who let me mooch off their digital power all day long. Unfortunately, I don't have any of those pictures yet. So....sorry.

8:30am  -- Happen upon a great little café and enjoy some warm banana bread for breakfast.

10:00am  -- Look like fools standing on the side of the road waiting for our tour bus. Look like even bigger fools when attempting to convince the wrong bus driver that he was looking for us, when he was there for another group. We’re not the only tourists in Nepal?!?

10:12am  -- Get picked up by the right van and head to Patan Durbar Square. There are three Durbar (palace) squares in the Kathmandu Valley, one in each of the three original kingdoms: Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapour. I was amazed by all of the intricate carvings on the various palace buildings. Every single window has delicate patterns surrounding it, and the support beams along the roof depict various scenes of gods and goddesses. Thinking about how long it takes me to write a devanagari character with a modern ball point pen…it’s astounding to imagine people etching the same delicate curves into wood or limestone.

11:43am  -- Arrive at the base of Swayambhunath. This large stupa is high up on a hill to the west of Kathmandu. From the top you can look out over the entire city. This location is also known as “monkey temple” because of all the little monkeys that can be seen all around the stupa. I wish I could have adopted a baby monkey, but they are kind of aggressive.

1:35pm  --  After Swayambhu, we drove to the northeast side of Kathmandu to visit Boudannath. If you have been paying attention you might be able to predict that this is a temple dedicated to Buddha. The entire stupa is surrounded by little souvenir shops, clothing stores, art schools where you can purchase mandalas, and restaurants. We had lunch at a rooftop café overlooking Boudannath. My ratatouille was beyond delicious.

2:30pm  -- It’s a Buddhist tradition to circumambulate the stupa, always keeping it to the right side of your body. After lunch we walked around two levels of the stupa. One of my favorite parts of this location was walking beneath a massive canopy of prayer flags. Red, green, yellow, and blue, they were draped all the way to the top of the stupa.

4:45pm  --  After the tour, several of us went into the tourist area of Kathmandu called Thamel (tah-mel). We visited Revolution Café and sat on pillows at a low table on a raised platform. You often see this kind of seating alongside tables and chairs. Rather than dinner we enjoyed dessert; I had a crepe with chocolate ice cream. Well worth it.

5:30pm  -- Post dessert, we headed to Pilgrims Book Store looking for a child’s workbook for devanagari. Unfortunately we were unsuccessful, but I did find some Nepali folktale collections.

8:00pm  -- By evening it was time to go home and pack for Monday’s trip to Gorkha. It was loadshedding until 9:30 so I showered and packed by headlamp.

I went to bed at 9:45pm after drafting the first bit of this entry. Now it’s Monday morning and the bus is coming in a few minutes. More to come later!