Patan or Lalitpur is a city adjoining Kathmandu. The river Bagmati sets them apart. We went there with our new brother Promod and his cousin as our guides. Till now we had gotten everywhere for free by showing our volunteer cards, but the guards of Patan's Durbar Square wouldn't let us in. They asked for a paper of the local municipality office stating that we are volunteers, so there we went to get the paper. However, the bureaucracy of Nepal is not much different from the one everywhere else in the world and we ended up floating from one office to the next until at last we found out that the guy we needed was out and nobody knew when he was coming back.
Thus we ended our pursuit for the official paper and returned to the Durbar Square in the hopes of bargaining with the guards. It turned out that Promod's cousin knows the main person responsible for the gate-keeping, who in the end let us in for free. Thus we learned that the power here is in the connections.
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