{"id":24354,"date":"2018-04-21T10:00:15","date_gmt":"2018-04-21T14:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.runkevinrun.com\/?p=24354"},"modified":"2018-04-21T10:00:15","modified_gmt":"2018-04-21T14:00:15","slug":"april-21-2018-a-day-tour-of-kathmandu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/?p=24354","title":{"rendered":"April 21, 2018 – A Day Tour of Kathmandu"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the official itinerary:
\n“Morning: sightseeing tour of downtown Kathmandu. You will visit Durbar Square and Swayambhunath also called Monkey temple because of the many monkeys that live here. This day we also visit the Boudhanath. This is one of the largest stupas in the world.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Let me explain.\u00a0 No, there is too much.\u00a0 Let me sum up.\u00a0 Our guide’s name is Arry.\u00a0 I’m sure I’m butchering the spelling but I clarified with him how to say his name.\u00a0 He told me the easiest way to remember it is that it’s like Harry Potter without the H.\u00a0 As a longtime sufferer of people adding an H to the end of my name (it’s not a palindrome, people), I appreciated this tidbit.<\/p>\n

The Nepal Flag is a unique proposition — it’s two triangles.\u00a0 One represents the Hinduism faith and the other represents Everest.\u00a0 Or so I was told.\u00a0 The colors have meaning, as do the sun and moon symbols.\u00a0 Nepal has never been colonized, never been conquered.\u00a0 So the blue fringe is a symbol of peace while the red field means if people did attack the country, Nepal would win.<\/p>\n

Our first stop of the day was at the Swayambhunath.\u00a0 Nicknamed the Monkey Temple, this is mainly shorthand for the large number of monkeys that roam the area.\u00a0 It is NOT a temple to the Monkey God.\u00a0 One stairwell to the top is 365 steps and if you walk up them you’re supposedly blessed for a full year.\u00a0 We took a shorter one, Arry telling us it was 144 steps or roughly our next year would be 40% blessed.\u00a0 The guy’s a tour guide, a physicist student, and an archaeological studies major.\u00a0 He’s a fascinating dude.<\/p>\n

From there we visited Dunbar Square.\u00a0 Most of the structures here were severely damaged or straight up destroyed by the 2015 earthquake.\u00a0 Arry lived through it — he said it happened just before noon and the 8.5 magnitude quake lasted 1 minute and 13 seconds.\u00a0 There was a brief break and then another 40-something aftershock.\u00a0 It felt understandably much, much longer.\u00a0 Intriguingly, though I kept asking about the phone and cable lines strewn into massive post-Christmas tree light entanglements, the government was able to restore the majority of power by 2 PM that same day and to virtually everywhere within 2-3 days.\u00a0 The main cell phone company gave all residents free calling for a month to ensure people could be in touch with relatives here and abroad (the country never lost cell service apparently).\u00a0 When comparing the devastation and restoration of basic utilities it makes the ongoing Puerto Rico crisis that much more embarrassing for America.\u00a0 Nonetheless, the square is replete with damaged and destroyed ruins of what once stood for centuries.\u00a0 Less tan five minutes and that history was wiped out.\u00a0 Restoration efforts continue and in the silver lining viewpoint, archeologists were finally able to excavate some of the destroyed sights to gain new insights to the past.\u00a0 That’s a very Buddhist attitude, the notion of reincarnation and the circle of life, where death and endings are merely rebirths and new beginnings.<\/p>\n

A leisurely lunch at a rooftop cafe (a VERY leisurely lunch as for some reason it took an hour to just get our food), led into the final stop of the day, The Boudhanath.\u00a0 I think Arry said this was the second largest Stupa in the world, with the largest being in Myanmar.\u00a0 I’m pretty sure at the Bagan Temple Run of 2017 I may have seen the biggest… if not THE biggest, I certainly saw my share of stupas there.<\/p>\n

There’s a lot of history and perspectives I could include here but I didn’t scribble down as much as I normally do on trips.\u00a0 That’s mainly because I’m still feeling a bit jetlagged and out of it and just thought by embracing the Buddhist mentality maybe just going with the flow is preferable at the moment.\u00a0 We did visit a few art schools to see three main types of painted Buddhist works (Thangkas) — the Life of Buddha, the Wheel of Time, and the Mandala (a depiction of the entire universe and a flat representation of the stupa design to boot).<\/p>\n

The one thing I will include here before posting a bunch of photos from the day is the order of the Buddhist prayer flags.\u00a0 You see these strung up all over the place here and the color scheme is Yellow – Green – Red – White – Blue.\u00a0 They represent in order the five elements of the universe:<\/p>\n