I toured the royal palace there, and many of the temples, which, for the most part, were fairly similar to the ones in Kathmandu.
Patan
But the Patan museum was definitely worth the visit. It’s housed in one the larger hollow rectangles, which make up the royal palace, and has three stories of well-displayed and comprehensively described exhibits. Most of it is brass work, either cast using the lost-wax method, or repoussee, a process by which metal is hammered over variously shaped anvils until the desired creation emerges. Repoussee in French means “pushed back.”
And while all of it was beautiful, it was also extremely helpful in sorting out the individual aspects of the panoply of Hindu gods. I mean, I’ve been reading about Krishna and Vishnu and Avalokiteshavra for months now. But until today I could barely have distinguished Shiva from Shinola. I mean, there are so many gods, and they often have more than one name. It’s like Tolstoy, only worse.
But when you get to see six different representations of Shiva, and six different Vishnus, and so on, you start to notice their individual characteristics. Plus, the descriptions alongside the exhibits did an excellent job of explaining just what it was there behind the glass pane, and why it’s really cool.
I left there with a much better appreciation of Hinduism and Nepali art and culture than I think I could have had I read a steamer trunk full of books.
Museums are neat!
Oh, and it wasn’t air-conditioned. But those wide roofs and wood panels on the walls aren’t just there for decoration. The deep overhangs keep the building in constant shade, and the wood panels are latticework, which allows breezes to waft through the interior of the building. Works quite nicely.
I left the museum and retired to one of the many rooftop restaurants nearby for some lunch. After two days I have pretty much exhausted the Nepali culinary repertoire. There’s only so much you can do with lentils and rice and curry. Oh, and some chicken or mutton if you’re feeling really frisky.
But my guidebook tells me that Kathmandu restaurant cooks have, over the years of catering to an eclectic group of visitors, developed an expertise in a wide range of stuff to eat, and apparently you can get good versions of almost anything you want here. Even Mexican food. So I might just broaden my choices for the next few days. After all, I don’t think the food on the trek is going to be much to email home about, and I’ve never really taken to lentils, to be perfectly honest.
Patan's Golden Temple
But I finished my lunch and went back down to the streets to visit the nearby Golden Temple, which is small but spectacularly gilded. There was a festival going on at the temple—festivals are an almost daily occurrence here—and while I waited outside two street urchins attached themselves to me and chatted me up. They did a pretty good job too, because before I knew it I was being steered into one of their “brothers” Thangka shops. A Thangka is a painting, usually on fine cotton, of a religious subject; a mandala, or the wheel of life, or the Buddha, or some Bodhisattva, and is usually very colorful and crammed with imagery.
Having seen just a few, I could tell that the ones I was being shown here were of high quality. The shop owner told me the artist sometimes works for a month or more on some of them, and I believed him. These were stunning, with subtle coloring, elaborate and intricate in detail, and I lusted after them.
But I left without buying any, and as I wandered back to the square I passed some shops selling lesser work; the difference was striking.
Stupa
Tomorrow I think I’m going to go visit a couple of the Buddhist stupas on the outskirts of town. They are huge domes with highly decorated spires, are centers of Buddhist worship, and they’re called stupas because the ceilings are really low.