Nepal - We circumambulate and dance!

The next day I treated myself to a non-meat-tasting breakfast and spent some time reading before transferring to another hotel and reading some more. I can't be blamed. The new hotel had these cushiony window seats in the warm sun and they provided a whole pot of complimentary tea. That evening I moseyed down into the city proper for dinner with the Yale girls! We ordered enough apple cakes for an army and caught up until late (9 pm).

On New Year's Eve, Nara (my Korean bestie who has braved four countries and five New Year's Eves with me) and I headed to Swayambunath, a Buddhist stupa on the west end of Kathmandu. Not only were we unable to negotiate a good price with the taxi driver but he also very nearly set us on fire; as we rounded a corner his incense burner fell off the dashboard and onto the floor. It was a toss-up between dying a in a conflagration or a traffic accident but he managed to retrieve it. Having narrowly escaped death we were unceremoniously dumped at the bottom of a long slight of stairs. I took quite a few photos on the way up the temple if only because I needed to catch my breathe; a trekker I am not.

Nara and I did our three circuits of the stupa and then retired to a rooftop tea shop to consult the guide book and learn what we saw. Such as: 

• the tower has thirteen levels, a symbolic number in Buddhism
• the eyes represent the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha 
• the nose is not a nose but the symbol for "ek" the number one
• the dome at the base represents the world
• the monkeys that live there are holy! Evidently, Manjushri the bodhisattva of wisdom and learning let his hair grow long and his lice transformed into the monkeys. Not holy lice but holy monkeys  

holy monkeys!

A scientific interlude: the air quality in Kathmandu is so bad these days that even Nepalis are wearing facemasks. In fact, the 2018 Environmental Performance Index (which A worked on) names air quality as the top public health threat and Nepal is in the bottom five.

See?

Then I spent an hour watching Nara agonize over which carved mountain stone to purchase.

That afternoon we went to A's mehendi celebration where all the ladies ate lunch, got henna tattoos, and danced the afternoon away. I was genuinely surprised that I could sit still for the twenty minutes it takes to get henna'd. I also didn't touch anything for the hour it takes to dry!

My freak of nature fingernail has never looked better.

Then the dancing began in earnest. We were subjected to learning "a traditional Nepali dance" which turned out to be the equivalent of "my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard."

After this good-natured hazing, the Yale girls crammed into a taxi (with a driver who taught us to count to ten in Nepali) to get a New Year's Eve dinner. We talked career and personal goals while accompanied by sitar music and headed home once midnight struck in Korea. That's right, we made it until 9PM. Have to rest up for more family festivities!