Hanuman Dhoka

Today we had yet another excursion day. Apparently the younger kids felt slighted after they heard about the Kaiser Library trip and how they missed out on the world's second best scavenger hunt ever created by me. So Asoke Sir threw together a field trip and less than 18 hours after its conception, we were on a bus headed to Kathmandu Durbar Square (Palace Square) with 55 first through fourth graders.

After a little hike from the bus stop we were at Hanuman Dhoka, a long line of wiggling and excitement. Hanuman is the Hindu god that is half monkey and "dhoka" is Nepali for "door." A statue of Hanuman with tikka paste covering his face and a red umbrella over his head stands by a door to the entrance of the museum.

Although, Anzi's face would be a much cuter welcome for the museum

There is a really cool stone to the left of ugly Hanuman. It is about 4m long and has an inscription using 15 different languages. It is said (on wikipedia) that if one can read the entire polylingual rock, milk will pour out of the spout in the middle of it. I tried my best. Now, I'm no polyglot, but I think the stone tells of humans' hardest hardships and how we as a species endure even when life throws us the toughest of challenges.

Of course, my interpretation is based solely from the fact that "NE Winter" is written in the bottom left corner there...

Still, I think I'm right.

Inside the museum they were confiscating cameras. Obviously I snuck my camera in. But there were a lot of workers in all the rooms watching us, presumably because of people like me and because of kids like Ansab who wanted everything there ("Ooh, Sir, I want that gold stick so bad!" "Alex Sir guess what, I touched that big gun in there, it was sooo nice." Yikes.) Each floor of the museum took us through the life of one of the kings of Nepal. We walked through the lives of Kings Tribhuvan, Machendra, and Birendra. In brief, they were all stuck-up, super upper-class kings who liked hunting, guns, gold things, gold guns, and posing for portraits and pictures. I did manage to take a couple pictures from the top of the nine story temple for some nice views of the city, though.

To the east you can see two hills, one a seat for Swayambunath,
and the further one holding up the beautiful White Monestary

It was a fun excursion, but in my opinion you can either spend the whole day in that museum or 30 minutes, tops. After an hour we were just skimming history as a fidgety congo line of hungry rambunctious kids. Finally we got to eat snacks and play in Nasal Chowk (a courtyard at the museum) for an hour:

This provided time for Sayuri to fact-
check this so called "9-Story Palace"

...When all Sayuri had to do was count Aahana and
Khavya's fingers

They even turned it into a Nasal Tennis Courtyard

What a smile

And what silliness

As we lined up to go (remember this takes several tens of minutes), the Stephens students must have felt like rock stars. Kathmandu Durbar Square draws many tourists, or Kuirey (stupid foreigners), armed with high-powered lenses and overpowering desires to capture anything "authentic". Cute Nepali kids and historic Nepali buildings? The white and chinese travelers couldn't even handle it. Students very willingly posed for pictures, striking their go-to peace fingers pose. I couldn't help but smile, feeling like a privileged median between the two worlds. Later, on the bus, my seat-mate asked me why my eyes were blue and if i was wearing contacts to make them that way and I fell back on the other side of that median. But it felt nice in that moment.

Of course, they must know me as the chief kuirey cameraman

All in all it was a pleasant day discovering some Kathmandu history and ogling some kings' collections. But really, I think these excursions benefit the kids most by giving them time to socialize together out in their city, as a class outside the school gates. And what good are centuries and centuries of history unless they bring people together in the present?