Thamel

Today we met a group for lunch at the Imago Dei restaurant. It featured some interesting variety on the menu, everything from broccoli soup through chicken alfredo to taco wraps and mutton kabobs. This is pretty typical for Kathmandu; tourists and foreigners frequent restaurants that are reported by word of mouth as good and safe. In return, the restaurants seem to like providing an eclectic menu of foods popular with foreigners.

Everything was very good. The cheesecake for dessert was excellent, too, and described by one long-term resident of our group as “the best in Nepal.”

Afterward a few of us walked around the wall of the former king’s palace (there are plans to turn it into a museum) to Thamel.

Thamel is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Kathmandu. Basically, it’s one long shopping district along narrow roads; shops sell everything a tourist could desire to carry home for proof they’d visited Nepal. Buddhist thangkas, Hindu statuettes, Pashmina shawls, Gurkha khukuri knives, and carpets of intricate design… you can find multiple shops selling them all, in Thamel.

Unfortunately we forgot to bring a camera with us, so I don’t have any pictures of my own yet. But to keep this post from remaining sadly pictureless, I found an image from wikipedia licensed under Creative Commons–ie, reusable for free, as long as you don’t try to pass it off as your own. So if you want some sense of Thamel, you can try to read all the signs and understand what’s happening in the picture.

A view of a typical street in Thamel*

Except the picture can’t capture everything. For one thing, not only people and motorcycles meander down the roads, but angry beeping cars as well. Pedestrians are wise to cling to the walls as they walk, and unhurriedly move over when loud beeps grow louder right along with engine sounds. Too, most of Thamel doesn’t really include sidewalks, although occasionally something like them exists, uneven rock or asphalt or brick at the edge of the road. You have to watch your step. Not too many dogs wander through the streets in the inner part of Thamel, but occasionally there are some, or random garbage. And what with the monsoon, there are frequent puddles.

But I have yet to see a single cow within Thamel itself. Probably they think it’s too crowded.

The drawbacks are minor. The shopping is fun. Intricately carved wood, sticks of incense, book stores with clever names like Barnes and Noble “We sell good books” and Walden Book… the variety is endless, and quite Nepali.

We managed to resist buying either used or new books (we rarely manage a trip like that!), or a beautifully carved wooden bowl that nevertheless seemed a little high, at US $50. But we found both a small and large chess set, each unique, and incense and tea, and a better map, and several paper lanterns with popular local designs: a pair of fish, the eyes of Swayambhunath, and Tibetan mantras. They’re all beautiful, and weren’t expensive at all, at 3 for 200 rupees–roughly US $3.

I’ll take and post pictures of everything, eventually. For the moment, for more information on anything, you might want to read wikipedia:

Thangkas

Khukuri

Swayambhunath

Meanwhile, as we acted like tourists, the Nepalis held an important event: the election of their first president. But they aren’t yet through counting the votes, so more on that later.

* This image was originally posted to Flickr by mckaysavage at http://flickr.com/photos/56796376@N00/492181084. It was reviewed on 00:53, 9 October 2007 (UTC) by FlickreviewR, and confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-2.0.