Asian Sojourn 3: Living in Sacred Space – Kathmandu

My morning walks in Kathmandu (taken back in June 2025) had me thinking a lot about the ways in which spaces become sacred. Every fifth building seemed to be a temple or a stupa, and as I said before, my hotel window opened out onto the Atko Narayan Temple, and there was a ceremony there on Wednesday of my visit.

As a first-time visitor to Kathmandu, I would get up many a morning (yay, jetlag?) and walk around the Durbar Square complex, enjoying the sleepy pigeons and ringing of bells, or wander through the streets enjoying the mix of architecture, the bustle of cleaning and setting up for the day, and the visible and audible practice of faith. I peered through at many a Bahal courtyard, those monastic courtyards with small shrines, and went into a few if they weren’t a center of activity. I tried to remain unobtrusive, but also was drawn to the beauty and to the demonstrated care for this overlap of public space and private belief.

Offerings of flowers and food, the ringing of bells, the tidying of shrines, the singing in group or alone: all these activities seemed integrated into a day, suggesting a much more physically engaged religion than the more staid practices of my Christian Science grandparents or my Lutheran inlaws. Likewise, the intermixture of regular housing, active business, and spots inviting active devotion is compressed relative to urban landscapes I regularly inhabit. That meant that cooking and commerce rubbed elbows with sacred practices, reminding me how thin the boundary might be between ordinary routine and spiritual gesture. I wonder if medieval practices of faith, before the emergence of confessional concerns, might have been just as colorful, as sound-based, and as kinetic as what I experienced in Kathmandu. Was Bregenz like this, a mix of street cleaning, setting up stalls with vegetables from the farms uphill, bells and clatter and clamour all mixing in with the chants of the hours and the calls of hopeful merchants? It would have been lively, if so!

The infrastructure of Kathmandu also strikes a notable contrast with the more familiar streets of Nashville. Transport is, as the tourist guidebooks remind us, often done in human-powered vehicles, whether that’s of people or of packages. Overloaded bikes like the one below impressed the stuffing out of me; I’m hard put to bike myself up a hill let alone contemplate carrying a bunch of packages. Not shown is the time we saw two people on a bike, the one in front balancing what was clearly a flat screen TV in its box. Holy moly! And then there’s the wiring. Yes, we did experience power outages. With that wiring spaghetti, it’s a wonder that there was power at all! 

But one cannot subsist on the sacred alone, and I’d like to give a shout-out to Kathmandu’s food scene.

I mentioned the Ginger Cafe, but I also got my share of street food and momos. I never did find my way back to the best shop, but everywhere I stopped, I always found the food fresh and the stall-owners friendly, forgiving of my linguistic inabilities. Momos are the easiest food the first time out (not only my first meal but my most frequent!), but the fried breakfast breads – and especially the Jeri Swari – were a special treat. Jeri Swari is cool: the “Jeri” is a deep-fried, sugar-coated flour batter which is shaped into intricate loops or coils and fried until crispy, then soaked in saffron-infused syrup. The “Swari” part is a flatbread which is both a wrapper and the justification: “I’m an adult eating a real breakfast and not just chowing down on a honey-delivery system.”

Watching your food being made is a delicious way to start any day. It’s also a reminder that in Kathmandu, even everyday meals are carefully crafted. The generosity and care of the cooks are as much a part of the experience as are the flavors themselves.