hello from Kathmandu!

I'm in an internet cafe in Kathmandu. We're staying at the Northside Hotel in the part of town known as Thamel, which is a tourist part of town, but it's very different than anywhere in the US! The streets are insanely narrow, and on them at all hours of the day and night are cars and motorcycles beeping their horns constantly and spewing out polluting stinky stuff and also tons of people walking both travelers and Nepalis. There are no sidewaalks but the storefronts come right down to the street, and they sell clothes and Nepal-made crafts, and incense and lots of Buddhist and Hindu statues and things like that.

Today in the morning Brian, Mickey and I (Brian heads the Red Panda Project and Mickey is his friend who is coming on the trek) walked to the Monkey temple which had these really steep steps up to the top, and lot sof monkeys (macaques) and Tibetan prayer flags streaming from the top of the temple. It's a Buddhist temple but there was a Hindu prayer service going on. It's really a hybrid area culturally and religiously. They use marigolds to offer up their prayers and people who have been blessed by the priest have red ink on their foreheads. Then we walked down so the guys could get a shave. They Indian barber shops not only shave with a razer blade they massage the head and the back for a really cheap price! Then we walked to the place where the film crew is staying (we met them last night and they're all really cool) and Mei-Ling said that Tim was violently ill last night!! So they were taking it easy, and we're supposed to meet them for dinner at an Indian restaurant tonight so hopefully he has recovered. We had a great breakfast there and then we took a cab back to the hotel, and after a bit Mickey and I got a cab to another area of Kathmandu which was totally cool called Patan. The architecture there was just amazing (google it!) I bought some things for Christmas gifts and just poked around. We got this awesome lemongrass/green tea at the Patan Museum. Well I need to get back to the hotel because we need to go to dinner!

We head tomorrow by plane to Badrapur (sp?) and then will trek in eastern Nepal for 2 weeks before flying back to Kathmandu. sorry about the typos! Hugs!!