Nepal 2

The ancient city of Bhaktapur was a great site to see.  The city dates back to the 1400s and is filled with temples, squares, and markets.  It is a popular place for all the tourists to see because it is  walkable, for the most part, and rich with history.

 A picture in the walled city with our tour guide Babu and Nancy from Malta that was also staying at the same guest house.

A lot  of the historical structures were damaged in the earthquake so there was a lot of effort to stabilize things so they could start repairing the damage.  A year after the earthquake it appeared that little progress had been made.  The construction process here will be a long one.

This was once a royal bath for a king.  Now it sits with stagnant water and a bit of disrepair, but it was marvelous to behold.

The people of Nepal don't have electricity regularly, they get it for a few hours at different times each day.   This means that you see a lot of people coping with their day to day tasks without electricity.  This particular woman was spinning thread to make clothing.

As you can see from the picture above, they are still digging themselves out from the earthquake rubble.  This was us on our way into where they make paper.  Half of the building is collapsed and they use the other parts just like normal.  Our guide told us that for many months after the earthquake they would get tremors, we even had one while we were at his homestay, a little 4.3 earthquake.  It made me a little nervous to stay in these buildings very long.

We visited a paper company that makes hand made paper.  It was vey interesting to see them make pulp, dye it, and dry it into sheets of paper.  It was all made by hand.

A local woman was drawing water from a very old well.  The water was filthy.  This was one of the other problems in Kathmandu.  The whole city is on the search for clean water and there just doesn't appear to be enough.

Outside of the temple we found the "holy goats".  They were quite large.  The locals

 told us not to get too close because the goats were known to charge without warning.  

At the top of this particular temple we ran into a private school field trip.  These kids were all very well spoken in English and absolutely thrilled to talk with us.  We felt like celebrities.  It was increasingly difficult for our children to deal with people in such close quarters.  The people of Nepal have a much closer bubble around them than we are used to so it feels a bit like a mob when you are swarmed by them all at once.

Here was a local market experience.  We loved walking around the shops and enjoying interacting with the people.  Max was brave enough to negotiate his own price for the marionette that he bought. The shop keeper was quite impressed with Max.