Exploring Kathmandu

So Kathmandu has a lot of smells in the heat, and is a pretty damn polluted city, but it still has some amazing sights to see! 

Durbar Square is the main hub of temples in the city and palaces.  It is amazing the abundance of temples, but apparently it is not the best Durbar Square in the valley, I think it is 3rd, with Patan 2nd and Bhaktapur 3rd.  There is a palace where a living Goddess lives, the Kumari, who is a reincarnation in a 6 year old girl.  It's pretty interesting to hear about but obviously something we would never ever see in the UK.  She came to the window where she looks over her worshipers so we saw here highly made up face and elaborate clothing, but photos are forbidden. 

Wandering the streets is interesting in itself, especially when you get out of Thamel the tourist area.  There are so many street sellers and little shops and every 2nd corner you come across a small (or sometimes large) Hindu Temple or Buddhist Stupa. People are walking around carrying the most amazing loads on their heads and often a cow will just casually saunter past or maybe a few chickens will appear!

We have been to one of the largest Buddhist Stupas in Nepal (or the largest?) - Bodhnath Stupa.  It was such a place of tranquility with prayer flags hanging everywhere waving in the breeze.  I found it a nice thought that when these move they are meant to send the prayers on into the sky, to travel on.  We went in the evening and had dinner in a cafe overlooking the stupa, where we tried traditional Tibetan tea - Buttersalt tea.......it's not something I'll be having again but it was worth a try, it tastes oddly of the left over dregs when you make plain buttery pasta!!  We watched people doing their evening worship by circumnavigating the stupa in a clockwise direction and spinning prayer wheels.  We also managed to enter a Buddhist monastery or gompa and be blessed by the monks and their lama.  We joined in the chanting of mantras while holding incense sticks and then the lama chanted blessings while we sat and put a scarf around our necks and basically hit us on our heads with a prayer book!   

The next exploration will take us further into the kathmandu valley and away from the hubbub of kathmandu!

Two welcomes to Nepal

So we were lucky enough to get 2 welcomes to Nepal:

1) on the first night we went for dinner with some other medical students, including 2 from our year at uni who had been doing a module out here for the past month - Rebecca and David, and 3 other students we know that are also doing their electives at the children's hospital here - Kenny, Alex and Shorsha!  It felt so odd to be socializing with so many people from home in somewhere so far away and different as Nepal. But it was nice after the journey and the culture shock to see some familiar faces and get some much needed tips for our time here!



2) after a few nights adjusting to our new home for the next month and recovering from jetlag, and the 'altitude' (which we are determined is high enough here to affect us as kathmandu is actually at a higher altitude than anywhere in the UK including the top of Ben Nevis!), we moved in with the Nepali family we are going to be staying with for the next month.  They made us feel so welcome, and told us we are to treat their home like our home and hope that we feel like part of their family! Soo lovely!  There is another medical student from Germany also staying here (also called Kat!) and so she is going to be our nextdoor neighbour for the next wee while and already we have had many adventures together.  The home we are staying in is slightly out of the busy tourist area of Kathmandu, for which I am very grateful as I don't know if I could have stayed there for an extended period, and has amazing views from the roof out over the mountains surrounding the kathmandu valley.  I am looking forward to the many gorgeous sunsets we will be able to see from here!

Journey to Kathmandu

27/28th June 2011 - London

So we left Scotland on an overnight train to London, it was cold and we didn't sleep much.  Arriving in London I already felt like a tourist!  We put our bags in storage and headed out to explore the big city.  Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery (and some lovely Degas work! :D ), Westminster Abbey and Big Ben.  Sitting outside the Queen's home (Buckingham of course) we wondered who all the people arriving in fancy clothes and extravagant hats were.  Many blacked out cars were pulling up and being searched for bombs and then heading in to the palace.  We overheard a tour and found out that today was the day of the Queen's honours list, we kept an eye out for old Brucey but no luck!!  Later when texting our friend Toby, Morven found out that he was casually at the palace at the same time we were but on the other side of the fence!! His dad was getting an OBE.  All we can think is how funny it would have been if we had seen him strolling across the front of the palace as we stared and screamed through the fence!

After tiring ourselves out with our sightseeing we headed to the airport in hope of a cold pint of cider and a bit of Wimbledon....however no luck on one of the points, they weren't showing the tennis at any of the airport pubs!  Crazy in London where it's going on!  We bumped into a girl on our course, Sarah Clelland, who was flying to Australia to do her elective, so said hello and had a wee chat, but soon enough it was time for us to board our Kingfisher flight for Delhi.

28/29th June 2011 - London to Delhi

Let me just say after flying ryanair and easyjet for so long now, flying economy kingfisher was like luxury! Although I'm not saying I wouldn't have preferred to fly first class, as that looked pretty damn good, we're hoping to somehow blag first class on our way home!

After a tasty curry dinner and a watch of the classic cartoon Anastasia we were soon off to sleep.  

In the morning, after breakfast, cabin crew told us we were soon landing and people should take their seats.  I have never been on a flight before when we are nearly landing and people are still wandering about!.  The Indian people on this flight are crazy, they do not listen to the hostesses and were just freely wandering around when we were at a proper decline!  Getting off the plane, the heat hit us like a wall!  If Kathmandu is this hot all the time I don't know if I'll be able to do anything!

29th June 2011 - Delhi to Kathmandu

The flight to Kathmandu was on a much smaller plane, and minus the hour wait on the runway in Delhi was actually quite a quick flight.  We spent the journey eating another delicious curry (if only all airline food could be this good!) and watching a ridiculous Bollywood film about a girl who had basically been drugged in a club in an attempt to date rape her (which she managed to avoid), however having forgotten the night she was then a murder suspect, and at different points of the film people thought she was a vampire or a ghost! and in the end she married the policeman......very odd....

It was raining when we landed in Kathmandu, it is monsoon season so not entirely unexpected.  Our luggage was lovely and soaked through (you would think with a season of rain they would learn to put a tarpaulin cover over the bags or something!  Getting our visa was an easy process....getting to our taxi without shelling out money was not!  We saw the sign with Morvens name for our hotel pickup, and headed over to our taxi, many guys offered to carry our bags and we assumed wrongly the one with our sign was our taxi driver so gave him a tip.... when our actual driver appeared we felt confused and robbed, but also felt we had learnt our lesson and would not let it happen again! 

The drive to the hotel through the polluted and busy streets of Kathmandu was absolutely mental!  I have never experienced a drive like it....half the journey our driver had both his hands off the wheel and spent a lot of time speaking cantonese at us as morven had said she could say one phrase!!  We wove amongst many cars, vans and hundreds of motorbikes many carrying a ridiculous amount of people and on smaller roads you often end up driving on the other side of the road as if it is a one way street!

We arrived amazingly at out hotel in one piece!