Wednesday 1 May 2013
The Stupa
Wednesday 1st May
36 today and no breeze and as it was a national holiday, the children, all 34 of them were at home. I took the mid age range and we played hangman in English, noughts and crosses with English words to guess at, with prizes, and then I photographed them in twos and swapped their faces on Face Juggler. I have rarely heard children laugh so much for so long. They loved it. On the way down for lunch, bread and jam, Anita said to me" Such fun today miss, thank you". They are so happy with so little. We bought some ice cream for everyone which was a real treat and I went to take some up to the babies and found Rahul, howling on the floor while the didi was tying a piece of old material round his waist and tucking the rest between his legs. No nappies, I hadn't even considered it. I wondered then about the older girls and asked them what they used and they said, if they had no towels, the just stuffed old clothes in their pants. Right, Barbara and I were off to the pharmacy, which is nothing like ours , and came back with a bag full of dusty packets of towels and nappies, which we had to hide as the admin lady says they can only have one a day.
When we got back to the hotel, we were heat exhausted but after a shower and a rest, we decided to visit the Stupa at Bodnath which is a 20 min drive from Kathmandu. A stupa is a bell shaped white building with a four sided platform near the top. The Buddha's eyes are painted on each side to represent his all seeingness. This is the biggest stupa in Nepal and it is situated on a kind of island surrounded by a public walkway and then by a ring of shops and temples. Everyone walks round it in a clockwise direction and similarly all the prayer wheels, including the huge ones, are spun in a clockwise direction. The stupa was built originally to hold the Buddha's remains but most stupas are actually empty. Of the hundreds of people walking round the stupa, many were monks and lots were monkesses. Hard to tell at first with their shaved heads but easy when they spoke. There were monks with their mums, Mr and Mrs Monk, old and new monks but all were carrying prayer beads and doing the walk. Half way round the walk, was a temple which had a viewing platform on the second floor, an inside room where the monks sat and prayed, I think, and an offertory with little tea lights. There were also a lot of women in traditional Tibetan costume, hence the name of the area, Little Tibet.
The taxi ride there was a scream in every sense. We went down unmade roads with huge piles of rubble in the middle which the driver half drove over so the car lurched dangerously to one side. Through markets, packed with evening shoppers, beeping non stop. We saw a man with a sofa strapped to his back and his mate was carrying the matching armchair, beep getouttatheway, a bike with a family of five on it, beep again, and an old man with a long staff and his old wife strapped to his back, beep beep. We had to stop briefly because there was a big pipe across the road. Everyone was beeping like mad but the pipe was not impressed and just lay there. Nobody did anything, except beep furiously, of course, until a policeman arrived and manhandled it out of the way all by himself while dozens of head waggling onlookers offered advice.
Back at the hotel, yet another group of French have arrived. They seem to stay only for a couple of days, which from our point of view is great, as part of a subcontinent trip. Tonight one of the desserts was English bread and butter pudding and they scoffed it like billio.
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