Nepal

It's been a long time since I've put anything on this website, and there seems to be less of a point in doing so now that (a) I've been back home and (b) I'll be home again in two months, probably for a pretty long time. But, I'm in Dharamsala doing some shopping and running some errands so I figured I would make use of the fast internet and put up a few recent photos of Dzongsar Shedra.
First, news. I'm sure that I've already complained enough on this site about how the monastery and other random events have been screwing with my own personal decisions regarding how things should be unfolding over the next year. The long and short of it is that I'm coming home in January and won't be able to come back again after my sister's wedding, so with that in mind I've sent applications out for some graduate programs and will look for temporary employment when I get home, with the new master plan including my being accepted into school (and paid handsomely to go), working for six months or so to actually earn my own money through some sort of real labor, then moving off somewhere for two years of school -- hopefully with (subsidized) research abroad in my summers. I'm looking to focus mainly on Sanskrit but I'll hopefully do a lot of Tibetan too, and I'm definitely playing that up to help my chances of getting in.
Being back at the monastery is like one big exhale. The pace of life here really suits me. What doesn't suit me are the frigid nights, which get more frigid every time I go to sleep. The problem with making a building out of concrete is that the inside is as cold as, if not colder than, the outside. We have to make precious use of the midday sun to charge up for the nights.
The first two shots here are from the Dzongsar class photos. This was a very intense process that took most of a day. I am not in these class photos; I think that some of the monks felt bad that I wasn't going to be in any of the pictures because they dragged me into a bunch of staff photos afterwards, with the woman who milks the cows, the gatekeeper, and some other nice folk. I don't have any pictures of those. At any rate, here are most of the Dzongsar monks. The teachers are in the front second row, and seated below them on the floor are the teachers-in-training and other assorted reincarnated lamas.

Here is another shot from between pictures.

The next two photos are from a peculiar event that occurred just a few days ago. Tibetans and Tibetan Buddhism are in general very superstitious, and place a lot of worth by astrology and other assorted means of auspiciousness. When I lived with my family in Nepal there were certain days where, say, the father wouldn't be able to leave the house or do work because of some sort of alignment of the planets in accord with his birth sign, or something of that sort. We usually watched wrestling on days like that. Anyways, due to certain stars being in the sky on a Thursday, and specific constellations being present, and other signs which I can't explain because I didn't know the vocabulary when they told me, this last Thursday happened to be the absolute most auspicious day for starting new work, and one which comes only once every three or four years at that. So, if you had any big work to start, I hope you did so on Thursday. I myself joked that I would send in my graduate school applications, an idea which was taken with utmost seriousness. I was grilled at dinner to see if I had submitted them (I did three of four).
This was sort of a reverse-holiday because instead of having the day off we actually were supposed to do as much work as possible. The monks decided to take advantage of the event by filling the stupa which the monastery has been building for several years. Statues and stupas and items of that sort are built hollow, and stuffed with prayers, relics, and other items. A handful of monks here has been at work some six hours a day or more for years, rolling up long sheets with thousands of prayers into tubes, in anticipation of this day. All of the monks spent all morning bringing the truckloads of prayers into the monastery, where they did special ceremonies to call down the gods, appease the gods, consecrate the prayers, and much more which was not explained to me. One interesting thing was that the monks handling the prayers had to wear scarves over their mouths, because apparently speaking taints the purity of the prayers. Then, after lunch all of the monks came out and started loading the prayers into the stupa. This went on until about midnight.

Here is a close-up of some monks at the top of the assembly line:

Finally, this last picture is myself and one of the Khenpos with whom I've been spending a lot of time lately. Seeing how there isn't really any notion of privacy here, I've gotten used to Jampa Tenphel inviting himself into my room every night to dictate emails for me to translate into English, or have me sign him up for Facebook (not making this up), or just to talk. He's a good friend, though, and one of many people with whom I'll be keeping in touch after I leave.

I'm in Dharamsala for the day running various errands and taking advantage of the lightning internet to put up some more pictures from Dzongsar shedra. I don't have a lot of everyday-life photos because I feel awkward carrying a camera around, but since we've been on one-week vacation I've been stealing a few shots. The summer retreat period has just ended, and with it the daily pujas and 7-day class routine. The end of the retreat was capped off with more pujas, of course, some debate showcases, and then five days of good food and intense soccer and cricket matches. My team was eliminated in our third game. I played like a real loser in the first game and I think my teammates were a bit disappointed, though in my defense I got hit in the eye and could only see out of one eye for half the game. I made up for it by heading in goal in the second game and converting a penalty kick in the third. The football tournament was a much bigger deal than I anticipated. We had team uniforms and almost the entire college showed up to watch the games and cheer on the teams. I won a lot of cred with the teachers thanks to my tactful passing abilities.
More importantly, I've been able to change my plane ticket to match the new monastery vacation, so I'll be home for the month of October. I'm looking forward to seeing the leaves change for the first time since I went to college. In November I'll come back to the monastery to teach and study. After December I may stay on at the monastery, and there is also a chance I might be able to work for a study abroad program in Dharamsala. I'm keeping my fingers crossed on that one.
Now, some pictures. The first two are of the main temple at night, decorated for the end-of-retreat debate festivities.

Here are two of my better friends striking their 'cool' poses outside of the monastery.

Now, some shots of the sports action. Here is our soccer field, or 'football pitch' as they say in India.

Some monks watching the game from outside their rooms:

These are all of the Khenpos, the top scholars and teachers of the monastery, camped out to catch the action:

I probably won't put anything up before I come back home. I'm going to try and get around as much of the Northeast as I can to see friends and family, so email me if you'll be in the vicinity.

Although I have email access at the monastery, the connection is too slow even to load this web page, so I can only write and put up pictures when I get a chance to go into town. Today it is going pretty fast in Bir so unless the power shorts out I should get some photos up. Soon I may have to go to Dharamsala, where they have high-speed internet, in which case I'll bring lots of pictures.
Life is moving along here, though as usual I've over-committed myself. In addition to my English teaching, I'm taking private lessons every day with one of the Khenpos and I've joined the monks' class 1. It feels like college because for every hour of instruction I have to spend at least three hours re-reading the text, cross-checking other commentaries, and translating it into English, which is not essential but good practice. Since we have class seven days a week I'm slowly falling behind.
Luckily the summer retreat ends in a few days and we'll have a week of vacation during which I'll be able to catch up. The monks on the other hand will spend the entire break playing football. Since my arrival I have been heavily recruited with high expectations and lots of hype. I'm going to play on the staff and teacher team, and they usually get overpowered by the lower classes which have a lot more monks to draw from. So, there's a lot riding on my shoulders.
I've also been helping out in the administrative office, which is a real headache. They are trying to document and register all of the monks, most of whom are refugees. On top of the general difficulty of getting five hundred people to do anything, most of the monks don't know their birthdays, and since Tibetans only use about thirty diffrent names there are lots of duplicates.
The way Tibetans name their children really baffles me, and I wonder how it hasn't ever been a problem before. Most children get two names; neither is linked in any way to the names of their parents, so we also have to keep track of their fathers' names to tell them apart. The names themselves are very interesting, and make combinations which can be very cool (Dawa Sherab = moon-wisdom; Tashi Tsering = auspicious long-life) and sometimes, in my opinion, not quite as cool (Tsultrim Gyatso = ocean of discipline).
Then there are the one-namers. Imagine the complications in America of obtaining a job, holding insurance, paying taxes, and so forth, if your name was John. Just John, nothing else. In fact, not only that, but the man living next door would also be named just John. This is what Tibetans are like.
Since the office was filling out everything by hand, I suggested we move it all onto computers, a great idea for everyone except me. Any time we need the monks themselves to give us information it is an adventure, since instead of waiting in line or coming in small groups at different times, they prefer the brute-force angry-mob-storming-the-castle approach.
We're also trying to set up a computer in our English office but are having some problems with bad electrical wiring which results in every non-plastic surface on the computer, monitor, and power supply becoming electrified whenever it is plugged in. So, in between my studies of dharma I have been spending my free time trying to root out the problem by subjecting myself to painful and repeated electric shocks.
The other big adventure is that the monastery decided on a whim to bump their winter vacation two months ahead in order to allow the monks to travel to Nepal to receive some important empowerments and teachings. This is also fine for everyone at the monastery except me, since I had already planned and booked my return trip home based on the knowledge that we would be having vacation in December. Now there is a chance I'll be stuck dawdling around the monastery for about a month with the twenty or so monks staying behind, and then missing all of my classes and shorting the monastery of an English teacher when I go home in December. I'm trying at the moment to get my ticket changed to October but it's still up in the air whether this will work or not.
I really mean it when I say life is good, though. I speak Tibetan all day, read texts, breathe clean air, watch Indian Idol, and get along well with everyone.
Here are some photos, not all taken by me.

This is a picture of most of the campus. The temple is on the right and the dining hall and teachers' rooms are in the center. To the left, off the camera, are all of the monks' dormitories.

Here are some of the monks debating. They only spend a few hours each day in the classroom, but much more time debating outside.

One of the English classes.

This is a picture of the monks taking their exams last year. There are no desks or chairs in the monastery.

In this picture, on the right you can see the monks assembled for evening prayers. I have been joining in since I arrived. We read a Perfection of Wisdom text by Maitreya, doing the first and second halves on alternating days. They read fast but I am getting better at keeping up.

Another shot of the temple with a nice auspicious rainbow.

Note: this is actually a week old but the internet died off before I could send it and this is the first time I've been back into a town since. Still too slow to upload pictures but I promise they are coming. Life is busy but I am well.

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So I've finally found an internet connection fast enough to get on this website. I'm in the town of Bir right now, which is actually about 20 mins or so uphill from where my monastery is. I can't get any photos to upload yet.
I got back from Thailand at the end of July and spent about a week in Boudha saying goodbye to friends, making last-minute preparations, and mainly just loafing around. The teacher from my 2005 study abroad program had just arrived in Nepal and we had a nice reunion.
To save some money in transport I took the bus to Delhi. The trip lasted about 40 hours; it was far from anything I'd call fun but luckily the weather was 'cool' compared to how hot it should have been, and we narrowly missed the rainstorms that flooded Uttar Pradesh a few days later.
I spent a few days in Delhi unwinding and then took an assortment of trains and buses up to Himachal Pradesh. It was pouring rain the last leg of the trip and my big bag, up on the roof of the bus, got completely soaked. Since I came up with my friend Mike who was on his way to Dharamsala, when we finally made it to the Dzongsar monastery they put us up in a guest room usually reserved for dignified visitors, which we immediately covered with all of our wet socks, underwear, etc., being careful to keep them off of the throne of course.
It took me a few days to get into the rhythym of the place and I still draw a lot of stares, especially from the younger monks, but at this point I'm more or less adjusted. The monastery currently has somewhere around 500 monks, most in the middle of a 10- or 11-year curriculum. Nearly all of the monks come from the same part of Eastern Tibet in the province of Kham. Their dialect is not quite the same as the Lhasa one I have been studying, and even though I can communicate myself well I sometimes have trouble understanding what they are saying. Kham-speak compared with Lhasa-speak is sort of like real American-style English next to high English-English. They never use honorifics and all of the vowels sound different too; for example, mi gsum (three people) sounds like "mee soom" in Lhasa-speak but is prounounced "muh som" here. I'm slowly getting the hang of it.
To compensate for the fact that I am getting free room and board, a small stipend (about $50/month), and can study in the monks' classes, I teach English class every day. Right now I only have one, but in about a week I'll have two. The monastery has a rule that only the students in class 8 and above are allowed to study English; I think some of the more old-school leaders don't really see the place for it in the monastic education. I tutor the abbot one-on-one in English three times a week, which is intense. It is easy to see how he ended up as the abbot. The lessons with him usually run about an hour and a half. I've also been helping two monks who are teaching a basic computer class, and am becoming the de facto computer technician; I've spent all weekend getting all the stupid Yahoo messenger viruses off of their computers and usb drives.
Other than that I'm pretty much on my own, so I've been trying to take advantage of the fact that I'm at a monastic college. Right now I'm getting private teachings every morning with the other English teacher on a Tibetan grammar text, and when that finishes I think we're going to try and request a longer teaching from one of the Khenpos. Every evening the monks gather in a big group outside and read through a text, and I've been joining in for the last week. They are expected to memorize all of the texts they study, and I think the group reading is to make sure they are keeping up. It's tough because they go along at a real clip, and if you lose a beat it can be hard to jump back on. In a few days I'm going to join one of the lower classes, since they are beginning a new text. It's one I've never studied before so I'll probably have to do a lot of prep work in order to keep up.
All in all, life is good. I could use a few meals that weren't rice, though. I've always considered the act of eating as something to enjoy in and of itself: eat slowly, enjoy your food, relax, talk, have some tea or a drink afterwards, and so on. For the monks here it is more like something to get out of the way as quickly as possible just to make sure you don't die while you are doing more important things. This might be because they have so little free time that it would be foolish to waste it eating, but it is going to take me a while to get used to. I don't know if you have ever seen four hundred monks assemble, eat, wash up and leave in five minutes flat, but it is incredible. One consequence of this which I have learned only too well is that if you show up a few minutes late, you're tough out of luck.
So, now that I've gotten all the talking out of the way, I promise pictures as soon as I figure out how to get them on the website. Here is the mailing address for the monastery:

Dzongsar Choekyi Lodro College
P.O. Chauntra, 176125
Distt. Mandi
H.P. India

This goes to the nearest post office and then theoretically someone brings it down to the monastery. I don't know how it would work with larger items but if you feel like sending me a letter I promise I'll right back.

This time it really is my last entry in Nepal. My visa extension runs out on July 31st so I have to be on a bus to Delhi with enough time to get to the border before August. I bought the final Harry Potter book on my way out of Thailand with the intent of saving it for this marathon bus journey. This was real wishful thinking on my part and the only thing that kept me from finishing it in the first five hours I had it was the fact that I lent it to a friend to read first.

Since I have no better place to put it, here is a photo of the Tibetan family with whom I lived for my last three months in Nepal. This is Tsewang Dekyi on the left, me, and Gyurme Wangyal on the right, in the eating/television/sleeping room. This was a real lifestyle change but one I'm glad I made, and I couldn't have asked for a nicer Tibetan family.

I've just returned from a three-week vacation in Thailand, planned around a one-week reunion with my good friend and one-time roommate Steve and his girlfriend Lynh, both of whom were at Rice with me. Seeing how I wasn't doing much in Kathmandu, I decided to get the most of my airfare and extended my stay in Thailand to include a further two weeks by myself prior to their arrival. My past experience travelling alone in India reminded me that even though these trips seem cool in remembrance, actaully being on your own can get a bit lonely, as there is a lot more dead time to fill each day, not to mention lots of solo meals.

I did a better job on this trip and didn't really start to tweak out until the last few days before the cavalry arrived. I started out with a couple days in Bangkok, visiting the more famous temples and museums and the king's palace, though I have to admit it was the sanitation, transportation, and buildings over three stories which impressed me the most. I spent much of the first day sampling the boats, subways and skytrains, and marveling at the ordered flow of traffic and actual metropolitan skyline -- none of which really feature in cosier, dirtier, and more chaotic Kathmandu.

Here is a good sampling of some of the temples and other whatnot I visited these few days. This one is the ordination room in an old Bangkok temple. Some of these shots might seem kind of repetetive, but after looking at Tibetan Buddhist art for a year it was very interesting for me to see such different styles of design.

This is the outside of an old temple called Pho Wat, which is famous for housing a giant "reclining Buddha" (see below). I think -- but I may be making this up -- that traditional Thai massage might also have had its origins here.

Standing inside the wat in one of the few shots I have including myself in the picture.

This is the reclining Buddha up close. Before Thailand I'd never seen a Buddha in this sort of pose, or this scale, for that matter.

Another lengthwise shot gives a bit more perspective on how massive this dude is.

Here are some colorful little stupas inside the temple complex. In most of these places there didn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to how things were laid out, so there were often multiple buildings, shrine rooms, stupas, etc. spaced randomly around the area.

This is just a little Buddha which I found very interesting. It reminds me of some Jain designs I have seen in India.

Next is the Royal Palace and Emerald Buddha temple, which are lumped together in one big area. Again, I'm not really sure how or why this place ended up looking like this, but there were quite a variety of stupas and other buildings of very different styles and even a miniature stone replica of Angkor Wat from Cambodia. This gold stupa on the left is actually made up of thousands of little gold mosaic tiles, and the one next to it of metal and colored glass.

Another picture near where the "Emerald Buddha" is housed. This is a famous statue (actually made of jade) which is one of the prize pieces of Buddhist Thailand. No photographs were permitted inside.

A smaller golden stupa with lots of funny little bird-men holding it up.

The next picture is Arun Wat, possibly the most well-known and picturesque piece of architecture in Bangkok, perched right on the banks of the river that runs through the city. I climbed about halfway up. The stairs were precarious.

This is the view from atop Arun Wat, where you can see the ferry boats moving down the river and a small piece of the skyline.

After a couple days in Bangkok I booked a ticket on a train to Chiang Mai, which might be the second largest or at least the second most important Thai city. It is about 14 hours north of Bangkok. I personally preferred Chiang Mai over the much busier and noisier Bangkok and had a very relaxing week here. The old city is surrounded by a moat and easy to walk around, so I explored this for a few days. I took a cooking class one day, got lots of massages, finally got to see the Transformers movie, and had my teeth cleaned. There was a time when the notion of voluntarily visiting the dentist while on vacation would have seemed ludicrous, but after a year and a half of no service and a bill cheaper than any copay in the states, it was one of the highlights of my stay.
This is a very old and partially destroyed temple in the heart of Chiang Mai.

I also spent one night watching seven bouts of Thai kickboxing. Unfortunately most of the fighters hovered around the 110 lb. level, so it was not as much of a heavyweight event as I had anticipated, though I have to admit my expectations were based entirely on the movies Kickboxer, Kickboxer 2, and Bloodsport. Still, it was a lot of fun to watch these kids duke it out.

Here is another shot of the title match

After a few days I started getting tired of the inner city, but was still reluctant to get suckered in to one of the tourist 'trek' packages, so I opted instead to rent a motorbike and get out on my own. This was the best decision I made in my two weeks alone. Here is a shot of my first hog, the roaring 125cc 4-speed Honda Dream. I don't think I got much above 50 kph, and yes, I wore a helmet, even though no-one else did.

The first day I had the scooter I went to the Chiang Mai zoo, where the main event is two pandas on loan from China.

Then I went to Chiang Mai's most famous temple, Doi Suthep, which sits way up on a hill overlooking the city about 20km away. I happened to visit on the same day that all 10,000 or so Chiang Mai University freshmen are taken to pay homage, so there was a real backup to get up the road to the temple. The cool thing about this university was that the students of each academic field had to wear matching department uniforms. My guess is that the students designed their own outfits. It was really easy to tell the art students from the math majors.
Here I am walking up the last 300 steps to the temple, with the biology group on the left and computer science on the right.

There is this legend about the stupa at Doi Suthep which says that since they couldn't decide where to build the temple, they placed a miniature stupa on an elephant's back and just followed him around until he stopped. We do not see this sort of thing much in America.

Here are some students circumnambulating the golden stupa.

The next day I drove about 50km out into the countryside (beautiful, when it wasn't raining) to track down this hot springs.

The water was so hot (around 100 degrees F.) that most people only put their legs in. Boiling eggs in the springs was also popular.

Here is some little girl whining about how hot it was.

Another big buddha from somewhere outside Chiang Mai.

After Chiang Mai I took the train back down and then another train about 4 hours south of Bangkok, since I still had a little under a week before Steve and Lynh arrived and wanted to see some sand. Without much planning I picked a town called Hua Hin which was purportedly less developed and tourist-oriented than the other beaches in the Bangkok vicinity. Unfortunately this was wrong. I kept out of the McDonald's and mainly stayed in the water, except for the days when it rained. This was probably the low point of my trip. The town reminded me a lot of Galveston in Texas, with bigger hotels. I stayed in a real closet of a room and spent the rainy days lounging around restaurants eating noodles and beating all the word games in the Bangkok Post. This got old real fast. In the end, I started renting motorbikes again and went exploring for better beaches. I finally found one about an hour away and camped out there my last two days. Then, back to Bangkok to meet my friends. For some reason I didn't take any pictures of Hua Hin, but this is fine because it wasn't that great of a place, and the beaches which the three of us visited together were much better.

Here are Steve and Lynh at the Royal Palace in Bangkok

This is Steve on the ferry to Koh Chang, the island where we spent most of our trip, finally consenting to try my moonshine brandy from Nepal which tastes like peach-flavored acetone.

This is the white sands beach where we stayed on Koh Chang island

Here are Lynh and myself on the beach

Playing in the sand

Here is a funny little bridge down to one of the quiet beaches on Koh Chang.

Surveying the carnage from one of our lighter feasts. The seafood was fantastic and I will miss it for a very long time, most immediately when I switch to the monastery diet next month.

This is the beach directly in front of our hotel.

More beach

Steve and Lynh standing in front of our hotel, with the jungle hills behind us.

This is a shot of the Bangkok street where we ate dinner our last night in Thailand.

Now, with only a few days remaining, my last word on Nepal. All in all I've spent two weeks short of a year here, almost entirely in Boudhanath or the surrounding area in the Kathmandu Valley. As you are all aware, over this past year I have found quite a bit to complain about, and I maintain that many of these points are quite valid. It really is a dirty, poorly run and in many ways very frustrating place, with a government of crooks held together by paper and string, and sadly I suspect that much of the beauty and charm which keeps the older generation of foreigners coming back time and again had been worn thin by years of civil war, modernisation and overcrowding long before I arrived.
Getting that out of the way, there are still many endearing qualities to this place which even a mere three weeks away have made me realize I will miss. This is not to mention all of the friends I lived with here, who in my opinion shape the experience more than anything else. It's impossible to convey all of the minute details and memories which build up over a year, and all the little day-to-day items which are so unlike anything else in America even though at this point I hardly take any notice any more -- watching the Boudhanath stupa at afternoon korwa, or riding into the city in one of the minivan-taxis that lurch through the streets with thirty people inside and another five hanging out the door and someone else's baby on my lap, or all the smells on my walk home, or the cows sleeping in the road, the thieving monkeys in Swayambhu and Pashupati, that ancient little shrine in Hadigaon with the tree growing out of the roof, playing cards all night and getting up at dawn to teach my class, etc. etc.
So, as a short and sweet elegy to Ian's Year in Kathmandu, here is my Top Ten list. You will notice that I've left off any of the tourist destinations or the stuff Kathmandu is really known for, and some of these items might seem a bit pedestrian, but in all my months here, living as a non-tourist (in my own head, at the very least) these were the ones I kept coming back to, for better or for worse. In no particular order:

1) Full-moon concerts at Kiruteshwor Ashram
Of course if I were to put these in order, this would probably be my number one. Every month on the full moon, after a beautiful walk through the villages down to Pashupatinath and up the stone steps to this ashram, you sit under the moonlight, watch the monkeys playing in the treetops, and listen to four or five hours of beautiful classical music -- tabla, sitar, flute, singing, and so on -- for free.

2) Royal Hana Garden
The food wasn't exactly to die for at this Japanese restaurant in Lazimpat, but the outdoor hot baths beforehand were close. This was especially true during those freezing winter nights where I could see my breath inside and had to heat the bathing water on the stove. I recommend finding some Scandinavian girls to accompany you. Sorry about that Neema and Maeba.

3) Keshar Library
I found this place way too late in the year. The private collection of one of the old Ranas, now converted into a free public library across the street from the King's palace and stocked with hundreds of century-old histories, biographies, travel diaries, and the like. The last book I browsed through was the 1906 diary of an English orchid-hunter battling pythons in trees with Pygmies and chasing away cannibals with dynamite. There was also a healthy selection of good old Victorian-era pseudo-academic orientalist garbage, with titles like "The Savage Indian" and, the worst I found, "White Woman, Colored Man." If you are into old books this place is the coolest.

4) The American Club
Okay, okay. Lame, you say. Go all the way to Nepal just to hang out at the American club. I am not ashamed. I didn't go all that often, and this place has free wireless, a gorgeous swimming pool, the greenest grass and best frisbee-field in Kathmandu, clean toilets, hot showers, and the clincher, bottles of Dos Equis for sale. Plus, with my Fulbright-issue U.S. Embassy I.D. badge, none of the guards ever knew that I was getting in scot-free the whole time.

5) Hide and Seek Cookies
The world's best moulded chocolate-chip cracker. What more is there to say?

6) Tashi Delek Zakang
One of my favorite haunts during the cold season. This grubby little restaurant made some of the best Tanthuk around, and their Tibetan spirits -- tongba (fermented millet and boiling water sipped through a straw from a toilet-bucket) and chang (barley- or rice-beer) -- were grade-A homebrew.

7) Jazz Upstairs
Life became a little nicer when I found out there was live jazz in Kathmandu. The band was a little heavy on the John Scofield covers, but this bar was cooler than some I used to frequent back in America.

8) Mike's Breakfast
Breakfast is of course the best meal of the day, and this place not only serves coffee that is not made from instant powder, which eliminates 90% of the restaurants in Kathmandu right off, but is also the only place where they keep refilling your cup for free. Sorry, New Orleans Cafe and Himalayan Java: stop charging for refills, lower your prices a tad, and get the smooth jazz and New-Age swill off the CD-changer, and maybe next time around you'll crack the top ten.

9) Cheryl's House
I don't even know if we were ever given real permission to be lounging around here in the owner's absence while a friend who will remain unnamed was cat-sitting, but in January in Kathmandu, who can turn down 24-hr. hot showers (!), a microwave (!!), a washing-machine (!!!) and a location close to everything? You try shivering in absence of all luxuries for a few months and then tell me that you wouldn't have camped out all day here re-heating pizza, watching movies, and washing your socks. (Thank you, Cheryl).

10) The Stall
Many have been known to get sick at this little greasy-spoon food stall (does it even have a name?) and I will not mention some of the sanitary impractices I have observed on various occasions. Still, this was one of the best places to come for a quick breakfast, for Tibetan momos (dumplings) at lunch, or just to chat and drink butter tea at night. The decorations include a Dream Team '92 poster with the whole squad: Magic, Smits et al. Plus, the girls who work there are cute, which I suspect is why a lot of other people eat here too.

So, there it is. After a few months of sitting around and reminiscing about this city and all the people and places I knew, I might feel like altering this list a bit, but you get the basic idea. Runners-up include: Ramu Hair "Saloon," that Thakali place with the really good Dalbaat in Thamel, Jai Nepal Cinema, and the 99-rupee store.
Right now I'm definitely itching for change and ready to move on to something new, but I think I'll miss you, Nepal.