The time difference in Kathmandu is like two and a quarter hours from Lhasa, so I’ve gone back in time slightly.
I’m in the hotel room and it’s about 2 pm. I’m exhausted. It’s a culture shock: Lhasa seemed so clean and orderly compared to the chaotic streets of Kathmandu. I don’t think this city is meant to have so many cars! It has lots of bikes and motorcycles, too, but it has so many more cars than an Indian city, or at least it certainly seems to. And the streets of Thamel are medieval—narrow, winding, potholed—and everything’s crowded together.
I met up with the travel agent, Naresh, and he gave me some beautiful postcards to entice me to tour Bhaktapur, and it worked—I came up with 10 am tomorrow as a good time to meet up at the hotel. What the heck, I may as well do a little more touring while I’m in Nepal. I also intend to get a statue or two for Elaine (and probably for myself!) and some Dalai Lama postcards. Elaine, as I may have mentioned, is the coworker who will be picking me up at the airport in Kansas City.
The lights all suddenly came on! I’m tempted to go to the Cybercafé but like Naresh’s manager pointed out, I should take it easy and rest today, because of the transition from Tibet to Nepal. It’s like suddenly returning to India after visiting Tibet. Just the change from “Tashe delek!” to “Namaste!” is startling. However, I might want to just lie down and mindfully breathe for, like, half an hour, because there’s noisy construction going on really close by, like next door, and there’s no way I’m going to sleep through that.
Walking from the travel agent’s office, I got lost again! It’s embarrassing to admit I could be so stupid. It seems like such a simple walk. But the streets are so chaotic and bewildering, and they have no names. After a week in Tibet, Kathmandu seems crazy, chaotic and noisy—I thought the blaring megaphones were bad, but here there’s constant honking and zooming of motorcycles! In Tibet, the steering wheel is on the left and they drive on the right side of the road, just like in America; and although they still honk more than Americans, it’s not like in Nepal and India, where they don’t get a lot of use out of breaks.
A musician showed me the way to the hotel, and I thought I should pay him, and I bought his CD; he tried to sell me his violin-like musical instrument first. He seemed nice, but I was paranoid because of my experience with the rickshaw driver last time I was here, but I’m thinking the musician didn’t rip me off—the CD was $15 or 1500 rupees—Nepalese rupees are less than Indian.
I’ve developed a cough again since arriving in Kathmandu. Clearly I can’t live in a highly polluted city; my respiratory system is too fragile, thanks to all that secondhand smoke my mother forced on me for the first nineteen years of my life. Although Tibet has so much less pollution, many people (mostly women) wear cloth masks like surgical masks. At merchants’ booths, you see them hanging in colorful clusters, for they’re made from a wide variety of colors and patterns. But then, in Tibet I can see how it would be useful against winds and dust storms—certainly, I wouldn’t expect so many germs and so much pollution there.
I spent over an hour at the Cybercafé and forgot to send an e-mail about riding a yak! I’ll have to do something about that.
Now it’s 7:27 pm and I’m thinking I’ll lie down and read Tricycle magazine some more. Oh, yeah, I haven’t mentioned: after lying down and mindfully breathing (but not actually taking a nap), I got up and went wandering to find the Naga statue that I fell in love with and that I’d decided I want to get Elaine. I originally saw it the first time I was in Kathmandu, walking past and totally not in the mood to buy anything, and I saw it again while walking to the travel agency. So I went out…and there it was, displayed on the front left corner of a table in front of the shop. The shopkeeper also had a few Nagas like it but half the size, so I also got myself one that’s half the size of the first. Mine is about five inches tall, and both metal statues are heavier than they look. While in Tibet, I was struck by how often the Nagas appear in temple architecture, as part of the elaborate carvings and murals. That’s not terribly surprising with all the water in Tibet; the Brahmaputra in particular snakes around a lot. Tibet has a lot of sand—something I didn’t think of in spite of all the sand mandalas. Ah, one of which I saw in a somewhat dark room at the Sera Monastery. It was inside a glass display case, like the one at the Tibetan Nuns Project nunnery in Dharamsala, even though normally sand mandalas are destroyed, representing impermanence and detachment.
