Shiva Day

Ok, so I'm foolishly attempting to replicate my picture success from Friday morning. However, I also foolishly assumed that the electricity and Internet would concurrently cooperate all day Friday and that failed to be the case. Anyway, after my big picture posting success Friday morning Niraj met me here at the Internet cafe and we went on a temple tour. Kathmandu has approximately a billion temples. For Ganesh alone there are literally 1,000 temples in the Kathmandu Valley. Our main objective was to visit the Monkey Temple which has another more professional sounding name but is thus referred because monkeys line the walkway to it. To reach if from the front you must climb 365 steps up a large hill. From the temple you can see the entire valley. The view is quite spectacular and is only marred by the pollution. It's rumored Kathmandu has the 2nd worst pollution in the world following only Mexico City. What an illustrious claim to fame. Anyway, we also visited a variety of Hindu temples along the way. Friday was a huge holiday here. It was Shiva's birthday so the temples were full of people making offerings and prayers. The streets also had intermittent civilian road blocks where children (and some teenagers - they blocked a main road with a giant bamboo pole) would hold up string across the road to stop vehicles to request money. They use the money collected to have a big party at night. I went to bed early on Friday but definitely heard parties until 4am (I had to get up at 4:30am to leave for the bungy trip). Anyway, the holiday made for some good sightseeing/people watching.

The monkey temple is quite impressive and I'm not brave enough to attempt spelling the real name in print. The steps up to the temple are lined with vendors, statues, and monkeys. One of the more interesting and horrifying things we saw was some of the monkeys carrying something and then taking it up into a tree and dropping it repeatedly. On closer inspection it turned out to be a rather large frog they had found and the repeatedly took it up into a tree and dropped it onto the rocks. After 5 or 6 repetitions that Niraj and I observed they managed to kill it and instantly lost interest. On the way down we fed them some cookies we purchased at the top. The monkeys are shameless and will pluck them right out of your hand with the big ones wrestling food away from the smaller ones if you aren't very deliberate. We also visited the Durbar Square in Kathmandu. The architecture is interesting. Lots of very old temples. Many of which have been converted into businesses. Alright, better move onto the rest of the weekend before it gets too late.