Some time during the night (dawn, I think is what you call it) one dog apparently won the argument conclusively, but a couple of roosters were quick to offer their perspective. The birds in turn surrendered to a chaos of bells, radios playing unreasonably loud music, chanting voices, shouting voices, laughing voices, and motorbikes. My alarm clock was absurdly irrelevant.

Mina ji might have been impressed when I greeted her in Nepali this morning, had I not totally mispronounced the expression. Then again, she works hard to run this bed and breakfast, and needs a bit of comic relief every once in a while. So I’m to be the class clown of this little group of outsiders, though Erin Cusack — A Texan grad student — deserves honorable mention. Our MVP at this point is Jay Tekwani, a University of Richmond student who can converse with Mina ji in fluent Hindi. Let him. Before long, I’ll be speaking Nepali like a native, and he will find his translations obsolete. Then his honeyed words will curdle and spoil in his mouth.

After our morning tea, we all set out for the Lalitpur (present day Patan) Durbar Square. Once upon a time in medieval Nepal, the three city states of Kathmandu, Lalitpur, and Bhaktapur competed for control over the valley. Kathmandu won, but from the remnants of each city’s central palace it seems that the others put up a good fight. The Lalitpur square sports temples and shrines devoted to a fraction of the roughly 330 million (no sarcasm here) Hindu gods of creation, destruction, and everything in between, and to the one-and-only Buddha, who also gets a lot of credit.

Elsewhere in Patan we stumbled on a another pair of god icons housed in two-story-tall shrines woven out of twined wood. The base of each shrine is a large cart that allows devotees to relocate the gods during festivals. As I stood thinking over the number of people (they don’t use engines or animals for this) required to move these behemoths, a young boy offered to anoint my forehead with ceremonial dye. Our guide dissuaded me from accepting, saying that the symbol had little religious significance in that context, and would only mark me as a tourist. We both agreed that, all things considered, this would be thoroughly unnecessary.