Sherpa's Revenge

State Street is a groovy pedestrian-friendly boulevard down by the Wisconsin state capitol building. I'd been hearing great things about a Himalayan restaurant there, so this weekend I decided to venture to it. It seemed like a simple enough plan. I decided to save myself a two-mile walk by taking the bus. It's a well known fact that I have an enduring love of city buses and the people who ride them. Especially the people who ride them. Some passengers are merely passengers, riding the bus to get where they're going. Some passengers are bona fide Bus People, riding the bus as a mobile vector for their craziness -- they're my favorites. I once rode through downtown Tucson seated next to a middle-aged woman with three wigs securly tied onto her head with a Mickey Mouse necktie, her eyebrows accented with pink lipstick, and a sock on one hand that she used like a puppet to announce all of the upcoming bus stops. It was divine.

For my State Street trip, I waited at the designated bus stop for an hour. A homeless dude sat by me and sang the s...l...o...w...e...s...t version of Swing Low Sweet Chariot I've ever heard, pausing between verses to take drags on a suspiciously-scented cigarette. He wandered away. A college kid (who I came to internally refer to as Bobby the Flatulent) sat by me for a while, freely releasing his gastrointestinal pyrotechnics until the bus bench was uninhabitable, then he mercifully caught another bus. Alone at the bench, I got a little punchy, desperate for ways to entertain myself as I waited for my own bus.

My bus never came.

Busless, I walked to the capitol, passing this garishly blood-red brick castle of Medieval torture on the way. (I later read the sign and learned that it's a University of Wisconsin building. Cancel the torture. Bring on the boring administrative offices instead.)

The capitol is enormous. Madison city law actually stipulates that nothing can be built to stand taller than it does.

From the capitol, I went searching for the fabled Himalayan restaurant, toodling along looking at all the quaint store windows full of antiques and cashmere scarves and artisan cheeses and hand-carved sculptures and... creepy mutilated Halloween Barbies...? I don't know if you can see it in this little picture, but the Ken on the left has been skeletonized and the Barbie further to the right is redone as a Zombie holding a meat cleaver.

I also wandered through this nifty Zen seating area in a quiet little cove between two buildings. It was a tranquil place, except for me sprinting frantically from the camera to the stone in a desperate attempt to hit tree pose before the self-timer ran out while a random dude stared at me and cracked up. He probably thought I was a Bus Person.

Ultimately, I reached Himal Chuli and had the best Himalayan food of my life -- Roti, dal, samosa with fresh yogurt, and two peanut dumplings in a hot sweet sauce, all eaten slowly while eavesdropping on the hippies at the next table who were reading aloud to each other from a book about the five great mysteries. Life is good.