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| View of the Himalayas from our Hotel |
Windows into Nepal
February 2013
Our amazing trip to Kathmandu gave us a glimpse through the Nepal window of time. It was like traveling back through the centuries to see how people lived their everyday lives.
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| Rickshaw Drivers Waiting for Customers |
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| Selling Clementines in the Street |
Although Kathmandu is a very dusty polluted city, it is filled with living history, the streets lined with ancient buildings busy with markets, school kids, motorbikes zooming by, laundry hanging out windows, bicycles carrying huge loads of wood, carts laden with bricks, women carrying large baskets of sand, and chickens running about.
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| The Pots and Pans Traveling Salesmen |
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| Chickens in the Streets |
We were in Kathmandu to attend an English Language Fellow summit and present at the Nepal English Language Teachers Association Conference. It was great fun to meet the other Fellows and teachers from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Nepal.
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| Jenise and Her Fellow ELFs |
While we were there, we got to do a bit of sight seeing and saw several World Heritage Sites. The Hindu Temples and deities were amazing, one of them houses the living Goddess Kumari, who is a 7 year old girl held in the temple until she becomes a woman. The belief is that this Goddess is reincarnated every 13 to 15 years and is taken to live in the palace/temple. Seeing her is very lucky, but alas, she was not a the window when we were there.
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| Women Glazing Pots in the Square |
We also got to see a Maoist parade celebrating the government transition to the Mao Party.
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| The Palace of 55 Windows |
After the conference, we spent two days in Bhaktapur, an ancient city just outside Khatmandu which was the capitol of Nepal in the 12th to 15th centuries.
Amazingly the buildings with hand-carved window grates and doorways have survived.
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| Carved Door to Place |
Religion and everyday life go hand-in-hand with a shrine in every courtyard and on every corner, and a huge Durbar Square filled with multi-roofed temples and giant lions, elephants and bulls guarding the stairs that lead up to the deities at the top.
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| Five Roofed Temple in Bhaktapur |
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| Riding the Winged Lion that Guards the Temple Door |
One of our favorite sites were the wells where the women gather water in big metal pots from alligator spouts at the bottom of the walled structure.
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| Woman Getting Water in the Well |
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| Girls at the Well |
In this city the ancient crafts are kept alive, so you see hundreds of clay pots laid out to dry, women winding long, long warps on the streets, men carving masks and clusters of women knitting on doorsteps.
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| Winding a very long warp and threading a reed in the street |
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| Pots waiting to be fired |
Namaste
