Out And About

Well, my lamentation about not taking enough photographs can now be considered over. Muni had an important business-related appointment, so he drove Sabrina and I to the New Road and dropped us off so Sabrina could get some sight seeing in before she left Kathmandu, and I was charged with being the tour guide. Our first stop was the bank so that we could change some money. As we stepped inside the gate, I said to Sabrina “do you see the sniper? He’s above the building we are walking to”. She looked up, and sure enough there was a guard menacingly holding a rifle pointed towards the gate. Yikes — an interesting sight, but not the kind of thing you would want to take a photograph of.

From there, we walked to a few temples I visited in the first week I was in Kathmandu: first off, we went to the “Living Goddess” temple. Sabrina was taking in all the sites and I was trying to be a good tour guide: “this temple has a living goddess, who is eight or nine years old. She will occasionally stick her head out of the windows — she lives here year round. If you get a photo of her. they are worth thousands of dollars”. Nodding, Sabrina walked around the temple taking photos of the interesting, hand-carved architecture. While she walked around the court yard, I took the opportunity to poke myself in the eye with my camera strap while taking a photo, so I slyly hid in the shadows rubbing my eyes with my back turned, writhing in agony. Good save.

We walked through the temple some more and saw a gaggle of positions and two cows in the square (in the exact position they were in three weeks ago), as well as tourists. It always shocks me to see other tourists in Nepal, as there are very few in Kalikasthan, which is a more residential area. And yes, the tourists were just as rowdy as they are in the rest of the world.

Really, guy on street? Really?

After this, Sabrina and I decided to get lost, purposefully, to see an area that was more interesting and local; so we just started to walk down back alleys. I’m really glad that we did this, there were a lot of things that we wouldn’t have seen on the more commercialized main streets (the New Road is one of the most expensive places in all of Nepal, because so many tourists stop by).

The celebratory flowers from the first day of Diwali are still up in some places

A worker tends to the field in the center of Kathmandu

We then went into a long market covered in a blue tarp, which was perhaps a half mile long. It was amazing to see a vibrant, bustling marketplace that from the road seems like a vacant lot covered in tarpulin.

That’s all for now.
Charles