The other day I looked up The Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies to answer a question about this photo - Are there monks in Ithaca?

Yes, there are! They have a very colourful house in downtown Ithaca, and it’s not that uncommon to see monks out and about. They have plans to build a much larger monastery here in the near future.

While doing a wee bit of Ithaca+Monks research I came across this article Kurt Cobain’s Final Tour from Esquire Magazine’s Feb 96 issue.

I suppose locals who were around in 1996 could tell us more tales about Courtney, who made a pilgrimage to the Namgyal Monastery with Kurt’s ashes:

Cobain was first brought to Ithaca in the summer by his widow, Courtney Love, and packed with her wedding dress in a small knapsack shaped like a teddy bear. He’d been dead for three months, and Courtney, the bear, the dress, and the ashes had traveled cross-country twice before landing at this little monastery in the middle of nowhere.

Wow, there’s lots of dish about Ms. Love’s 2-week stay here… as well as a humorous description of Ithaca:

It’s a tolerant place, a college town where PH.D.’s from Cornell bag your groceries and stage poetry slams, a place with one trouser leg caught in a charming time warp, where it’s always 1970.

Possibility is high that some of Kurt’s ashes were spread around these parts. An interesting read.

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