Himalayan Honeymoon: Friday, February 10

Molly has a hangover. I tried Nepali pancakes for breakfast, which were crepe-like and fine. When you order cornflakes, they come with warm/hot milk (since the milk isn’t pasteurized) and are already soggy. Jim Beam is $55 for a fifth and local whisky is $15. We had lunch at Gaia, which has good food and a nice setting. We walked to what we thought was the location of the City Museum (a contemporary art museum with a fairly decent website), which was on Yak & Yeti Road in a fairly fancy Western shopping street. We were able to find the building, however there was no mention of the museum outside, and we walked to the top of the stairwell and could find no mention of it inside. We asked several people on the street and no one had heard of the City Museum. So, Plan B: we walked up the road to the Narayanhith Palace Museum.

It was $5 to get in, and the palace was a very dated ‘70s pile of garbage. There was a bearskin rug at the entrance with mothballs sprinkled liberally over it, including one in its mouth. It used to be the residence of the king & queen, but had only been turned into a museum by the Maoists in 2008. There was a walking tour through the site of the 2001 Royal Massacre, where Prince Dipendra killed his parents and eight other royal family members. There is a large park behind the palace with benches, but guards don’t let you sit on them. It was thoroughly depressing overall. Then we walked back to the Kaiser Library, which had a broken-down car sitting on the volleyball court in its front yard.

We sat down for a moment to read the newspaper on benches under a tarp at the entrance, but the library closes at 3 p.m., so an employee gathered up the papers and shooed us off. We gave up and spent a couple of bucks to get into the Garden of Dreams. It was nice and relatively peaceful. Unfortunately, you have to pay to get into anywhere worth being in Kathmandu. Molly had a Negroni which made her very happy.

But they ran out of vermouth, os she had to do a Campari & soda for round two. Drinks were overpriced but it was a nice place to sit for a couple of hours.

We walked back to the hotel at about 5 p.m. I had the front desk call Gaia for pad thai takeaway. We ate that and watched Ocean’s Eleven. I wasn’t feeling well, so I turned in early.