Namaste Saathihaaru! (Hello friends!)

We have safely landed in Kathmandu at 8am this morning and went to our accommodation in Boudha straight away, a small town just outside Kathmandu that is the center of Tibetan Buddhism outside Tibet. After a small nap (which we realised later we shouldn't have had) we explored the city which mainly consists of the  Stupa, a kind of Buddhist temple with Buddha relics. On the pictures you see the all-seeing eyes of Buddha looking over the country and the 13 steps that lead to the Nirvana - unfortunately we were not allowed to go there :-)

During  our first real Napali meal we met a fellow German girl travelling on a very similar schedule to our plans - she had the same guide book ;)

Together we made our way to Pashupatinath, Nepal's holiest place for Hindu pilgrims. There were a lot of smaller and bigger temples and shrines and along the river we saw the ghats where the Hindus burn their deads. On the way there we made our first local friend, a woman who went around the temples to pray and was talking to us in Nepali. We couldn't really understand her but she seemed to understand me - at least the twenty words of Nepali I know caused strong reactions: when I called her "keti-saathi" (friend) she started to hold my hands and hugged me :-) Then she put us the red colored rice on our foreheads like they do it on this Hindu holiday.

Tomorrow we're going to have a look at the old town of Kathmandu. So long: Raamro saangaa jannus!