Shop
for tanka (religious) paintings and Tibetan articles,
such as prayer wheels or tea bowls and jewelry. It's
officially forbidden to export precious stones, gold or
silver, but customs officials may not care about small pieces
of silver jewelry, especially if you are wearing them. (Items
in your luggage tend to get closer scrutiny, though wearing
purchased items is not 100% foolproof.)
Other goods include bronze and copper items, shoulder bags,
knives, wooden masks and statues, silk handbags, colorful
sweaters and jackets, used camping gear, bamboo flutes,
carpets (test to see if they are colorfast), papier-mache
masks, Nepalese caps, block prints on rice paper, Nepalese
violins and woven cloth. For Western-style clothes, cameras
and other electronic equipment head for New Road, the busy
street leading up to Kathmandu's Durbar Square. And remember,
bargaining never hurts. You can get cheap custom-made shirts,
skirts, etc., but the material is usually of very poor quality
and the colors will soon fade. Most stores are closed on
Saturday, not Sunday. In general, it's wise to carry, rather
than mail, packages home.
Shopping Hours: Sunday-Friday 10 am-7 pm.
Kathmandu
is the obvious place to do some serious shopping,especially if
its your last stop before leaving the country.
Traditional souvenirs and curios
If you are in the market for a khukuri knife, you won't
have to go far; street vendors and shops sell them wherever
there are tourists, there is a whole shop devoted to them next
to the Ram Doodle in Thamel.Brass sets of baghchal, Nepal's
own "tigers and goat" game are almost as common.
Stalls and shops between Indrachowk and Asan sell all manner
of household brassware.
A couple of small shops in Thamel and Khichapokhri
(south of New Road) are devoted to Nepalese musical
instruments, while hack minstrels peddle sarangi
(traditional fiddles) around Thamel and cheap bamboo flutes
in Durbar Square.
Vendors in Basantapur Square and Thamel flog vast arrays of
Tibetan-style curios. It's all attractive stuff, but
much of what is claimed to be silver, turquoise, coral or
ivory is fake, and virtually none of it is antique. Gold- and
silversmiths in the old city (mainly north and west of
Indrachowk) produce fine ethnic jewellery tourist
shops sell cheaper but perhaps more wearable ornaments,
usually made with white metal. Gem sellers are grouped
mainly at the east end of New Road. The pote pasal near
Indrachowk is the place to go for traditional glass beads.
Boxes and embroidered bags of Nepalese tea, sold in
many shops in the tourist areas, make good gifts.
Countless boutiques sell identical ranges of Kashmiri handicrafts,
predominantly silk carpets, chain-stitch tapestries,
and various items made out of papier mache, soapstone
and sandalwood.
Contemporary crafts
Nepali artisans are turning out an ever-expanding range of
contemporary crafts that adapt traditional materials or motifs
to foreign tastes unusual forms of dhaka and other textiles,
beautiful greeting cards of handmade paper, Maithili-style paintings
and papier mache items, toys, dolls in ethnic dress,
ready-made clothes, woollens, leather goods, batiks, scented
candles, and ingenious articles out of bamboo and pine
needles.
Clothing and fashion
Thamel and Freak Street are fun of shops selling wool
sweaters, jackets, mittens and socks, which are among
Nepal's best bargains -just steer clear of the cheap garments,
which fall apart at the seams.
Similarly inescapable around here are kit bags, caps
and other fashion items made from black felt with Tibetan
rainbow fringes. Hardly fashionable, though many people lap
them up, are T-shirts and ready-made clothes. Tailors,
usually found inside the same clothing shops, are skilled at
machine-embroidering designs on clothing.
Shawls and scarfs made of pashmina, the Nepali
equivalent of cashmere, are the cheapest at Indrachowk. Topi,
the caps that Nepali men wear in much the same way Westerners
wear ties, are sold around Ason Tol.
You will find sari material around Indrachowk.
Thangka and other fine art
It's hard to say where to look for bargains on Thangka
and paubha , since there are so many standard depictions and
levels of quality that any comparison of prices is often an
apples-and-oranges exercise. The biggest grouping of dealers
is in Makhan Tol, north of Durbar Square, but there are many
others along Tridevi Marg and else where in Thamel.
Books
Kathmandu has a great collection of English-language
bookshops, and browsing them is one of the city's main forms
of nightlife many stay open till l0 pm. Most are nameless
holes-in-the-wall.
Music
There's no lack of music around Kathmandu to keep your Walkman
humming. Several shops in Thamel sell cheap rock/pop
reissues and new agey East-West mood music on tape and CD,
as well as some traditional Nepali folk and classical
compilations on tape. Countless cassette stalls
throughout the city sell Nepali folk and pop, and Indian pop
and movie soundtracks at these stalls will be
less than half what the tourist places charge, but finding
what you're looking for will be harder if you don't speak (or
read) Nepali.
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