Landing to K-town Nepal was far from stressless. We had prepared to customs by bringing passport photos, Indian rupees and filling out immigration forms. As we queued up to immigration officers we found out that we cannot pay the visa-fee with Indian rupees and there is no ATM inside the airport, but one outside. So we just walked out through all checkups and taxi touts to the ATM and started raising money. The ATM gave us only 10000 rupees while we needed 15000. So we tried to raise money three times only receiving it once. Luckily I had my second bank card with me so we were in the end able to raise the whole amount. And back we went to immigration officers but this time we found out that only euros and dollars are accepted - we need to go again away for money exchange. On our third attempt we were able to buy the required visas. (Later we discovered that the ATM had billed our account three times from the one transaction...)
As most tourist we also ended up into tourist district Thamel. We found a nice cheapie hotel "Holyland Guest House" for 300 rupees/day. The surrounding area is full of Nepalian shops selling hippie clothing, trekking equiptment and souvenirs. The whole Kathmandu seems to be full of pirated clothes and it is quite easy to find for example authentetic looking copies of Dr Martens shoes for around 20€ or fleece jackets from famous sportsbrands for 10€. (I got myself "The North Face" hiking shoes for 15€). Furthermore like any touristtown there are supermarkets, bars and restaurants offering all western products.
Oldtown meets new city
Flower and veggiemarket
Compared to India Kathmandu is colder, food and alcohol is more expensive and air is more polluted (breathing might be harder also due to altitude difference). Also electricity is a lot more unstable with powercuts up to 14h/day (We really need candles here!).
Durbar square
To control pollution taxirickshaws are forbidden - all the taxis are mini Suzukis. This however seems quite useless as due to constant electricity shortage everyone (who can afford it) has a small diesel generator pushing out sweet fumes...
Foodwise Kathmandu seems to be pretty awesome with good collection of more expensive western and cheaper Indian/Chinese/Nepali food. The most popular snack seems to be momos (Tibetian version of ravioli) that you can get steamed, grilled, deepfried or even as a soup from almost any streetcorner. Another culinary speciality is Tongba, a hot millet-seed beer served in a mini brewing barrel. It tastes quite much like finnish "kotikalja" heated up (for non-finnish readers: think about warm, healthy, unfiltered beer tea...).
Nice hot cup of Tongba
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