Day 2: Kathmandu

Today, we walked a total of five miles around Kathmandu, sharing the streets with cars, motor cycles, bikes, locals, and stray dogs without stop signs or traffic lights to guide traffic. The motored vehicles just honked and the pedestrians parted the way.

Early in the morning, we stopped at a few shops where Cai and Blake were able to find topis, traditional nepali hats that the men here wear. Then we headed off to a heavy tourist section of Kathmandu to see some temples. In this area, there were many vendors that would walk up to us and offer hats, bags, pins, bracelets, anything! It's culturally acceptable to just ignore them and keep walking if you don't want what they are offering. But if you show any interest, they will bug you till you give in. One in particular followed us most of the time that we were there Cai told him that Travis wanted a bracelet. He started at 1500 rupees for a bracelet and went all the way down to one rupee after we lost him through temples and he found us again for the third time! We ate lunch at a rooftop rrestaurant where we had a view of all the temples and even caught a glimpse of what we would call mountains in the distance. Here they would consider them hills in comparison to the true mountains we'll see later in the week!

Our next task was to pick up a die grinder we ordered. We finally found it after a good bit of running circles getting directions from several different people. As a part of the Nepali culture, they don't like telling people no or saying that they don't know something. So sometimes, instead of telling you they don't know where something is, they'll point you down some road and eventually you keep asking more people for directions until you find what you're looking for. After that adventure, we went back to the hotel and some of us squeezed in a short nap before dinner. Although the food gave us a little bit of energy, we all came back to the hotel and crashed pretty soon after that for a good night's rest.

Daily counts:

13 tea

3 cokes

1 guy taller than Travis

1 time Travis hit his head