When In Rome

"You smoke ? You buy hashish ?" every five meters as I walked through Thamel, to me it seemed like an unreasonable amount of street peddling. It turns out that there was a massive hindu festival on and it was the one day of the year where you can smoke hashish, and 300 000 people converge on a shrine downtown. The holy men get naked and cover themselves in snakes and everyone has a massive session. I missed out the most of the festivities because I was in transit from side of the town to the other but all the employees and guests at the hostel I stayed at were well into the spirit of the day. The first person I talked to was from from Scarborough and the third was someone starting a PhD in lasers, which is quite bizzaro. Today the tour starts and I'm waiting the around the hostel eying people off and sometimes hoping they will be part of the tour and sometimes hoping they won't.