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Published: July 23rd 2013
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Today, Elysia was back volunteering at the hospital, and Mike spent the morning wandering a bit through Thamel and worked on the blog at a cool little coffee shop called Pumpernickel. It's a place full of ex-pats, so it is neat to hear a bunch of different accents.
Elysia wasn't at the hospital in the afternoon so together we walked down to the Durbar Square in Kathmandu. We explored the various temples without a guide and paid a visit to the Palace Museum. It's kind of a neat museum, but seems to be heavily slanted in a pro monarchy fashion; much of the commentary felt like reading propaganda.
After the museum, we paid a visit to the Kumari (or Living Goddess). This is a girl who is selected from the Shakya ethnic group to become the Living Goddess. Once selected, she lives in the temple and goes to a window twice a day, at 10 am and 4 pm, for people to see her. Once she has her first menstruation cycle, she is cast out and a new Goddess is selected. Apparently, it is a huge honour for the family of the girl. We understand that the family is also paid.
It was a
Mural Painted by the Volunteers
The Canadian student volunteers painted these murals in rooms in the children's hospital to help brighten the place up. pretty muggy day, so we decided to stop at a coffee shop for a drink. Fully refreshed, we set back out on the streets to explore some of the less touristy parts of Kathmandu on our way back to Thamel. All we did was to wander rather aimlessly through the streets. We saw lots of different types of shops: suit and clothier shops, jewellery shops, electronics shops, and so on. The neat thing is that we saw very few tourists and lots of locals. Eventually, we wandered upon a little hole in the wall spice shop and decided to take a look at what they had. The shopkeeper came over and we started chatting about the different spices. We spent about a half an hour talking to him and sampling and smelling his various different spices. We ended up buying a bunch of different things, ranging from Saffron to Dal Baht Spice, to Tibetan Black Salt. It was actually a lot of fun!
Because it is obvious that we are tourists, he offered to take us to his 'factory' and show us how he makes all the spices. His factory is really better described as a large shack, with huge sacks
Mural Painted by the Volunteers
The Canadian student volunteers painted these murals in rooms in the children's hospital to help brighten the place up. of spices strewn across the floor. By huge, I mean huge. 60 kg each. He has a large grinder in the centre of the room and he uses that to grind up the various raw ingredients. He then mixes them together according to his recipes. Finally, as a quality control measure, his wife cooks a meal with the spices. If they are good, then they can be sold. His wife does all of the individual packaging while the man we met tends to the shop.
This spice shop keeper actually makes the spices for a bunch of the shops in Thamel. He told us that he gets bulk orders from those shops who then package his spices themselves and sell it in their store. It was pretty cool talking to this guy. In the end, he gave us some incense as a little gift.
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