Bhaktapur

Today we took a taxi to Bhaktapur, about 15 km from the city. It is a town that has chosen to limit the number of motorized vehicles. The result is wonderful. Rather than constantly dodging motorcycles and taxi’s in a rush to get to their next fare, there is time to relax and enjoy the beauty of the temple buildings and newari architecture without fearing for your life. It’s small with narrow cobblestone roads. It’s big enough to take a day to explore, not so big you would get lost. The only real negative of the place was all of the people asking if you needed a tour guide…after the 6th person asking if I needed a guide in less than that many minutes, I began to get a little short with them. Luckily once we got a bit past the entrance, the pestering ended.



Shanti was fascinated by all of the people and temples, and the Nepali people we passed in the street were equally fascinated with the two Caucasian people carrying a nepali baby. As soon as we got moving in our taxi, Shanti was asleep in less than a minute.cc

After Bhaktapur we went back to the Ministry of Foreign affairs to pick up our travel documents. We had scheduled an appointment for 4PM. This time we barely had to wait (less than 5 minutes) to get the official’s attention. It took another 45 minutes for him to make our children’s travel documents, but no problems, and he handed us Shanti’s Nepali travel document (still looks a lot like a passport, just is good for 1 year. One more document in hand!

After getting our travel documents we went back to the embassy doctor’s office. For some reason we spent over 90 minutes there for the doctor to fill out Shanti’s embassy physical. What exactly he was writing in the form is not clear considering his exam was less than 1 minute and he didn’t take any kind of history. I suppose I don’t really care as long as the US embassy is satisfied and we get to bring Shanti home.