We had lunch at the Cosmo Café (Nepali plate for me, tomato grilled cheese and curried veggies for my blushing bride), then meandered our way back to the hotel. Random thoughts: there are no sidewalks, no street signs, no traffic lights, and no one directing traffic except at the most major intersections, and there are 1.5 million people in the city, so it works about as well as you’d expect. Molly: “This is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so you want to stop and notice this beautiful temple, There were many moments where I wanted to stop, but there’s nowhere to stop. Everywhere there’s a storefront or a fast-approaching scooter, so there’s no calm. You want to stop and look at this beautiful temple, but you can’t because there are two stray dogs, six guys trying to grift you or sell you weed, three beggars, a couple of Coca-Cola signs, and the building next door is falling down.” Nothing is sacred. Babe, would you describe this as more of a shithole or a hellhole? We decided on shithole because it’s not outwardly violent, but it’s depressing, dusty, polluted, and there’s garbage everywhere. Wearing a surgical mask at least helped placebo-wise today. Sitting on a rooftop and gazing down on the chaos was fairly pleasant.
I took a lot of photos of people carrying oppressively heavy or awkward objects.
I saw a woman carrying a back basket that men were shoveling crushed limestone rock into, but didn’t get photo. We saw a woman in a plastic lawnchair in her wheelchair, but that was too depressing to photograph. We saw more Chelsea gear in Bhutan, but Nepal seems more like a Man U and Arsenal country. We stumbled back to the hotel at 4:15, thoroughly defeated. Molly was not feeling so hot, so I went out and got Tibetan takeaway. We had two soups and a tofu stirfry and watched Inception on the iPad, which was good and most unsexy.
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