The Tibetans are coming, the Tibetans are coming!
Today is Day (1-2-3-4, yes) 4 of my physical and spiritual trip through the Buddhist heartland of Tibet. I am now seated next to smoking Tibetans playing various computer games at this fantastic Internet cafe in Lhasa, capital of Tibet. It has been a good few days. Where to begin? Well, how about at the beginning?
On Saturday Tina and I met at Hongqiao Airport in Shanghai to head to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, which borders Tibet, where we were to stay one night before flying straight into Lhasa the next day. It was at this point that Tina suddenly remembered that she had forgotten her jacket at home. I've always wondered how people could suddenly remember that they forgot something, but the solemn look on her face suggested that I not point this out now. For those of you who don't know Tina, she is basically constructed (at 5'0) to wear big Gore-tex puffy jackets, so to see her without one in the face of camping at base camp Everest was also too much for me to bear...so I let it all out in a hail of giggles.
In the end, I'm a nice guy, and when we arrived in Chengdu I rang up a friend of mine who was a Chengdu native, and was returning home for the National Chinese Labor Holiday. Her name is Han Ting, and she was nice enough to point us in the right direction: Pacific Mall, where Tina was fortunate enough to find a puffy Gore-tex jacket and win two ceramic mugs in a raffle. We finished the night with a foursome surrounding famous Sichuan hotpot. where I ate pig and duck liver and drank warm Sichuan beer. Then we returned to the hotel.
A note about the rest of the tour group: 4 Germans, 3 Turks, and one very sarcastic Brit. My experience at Intel working with Tolga Kuru (the Mad Turk of Materials) is that Turkish people are the coolest people on Earth, next to Hobbits and Outkast. These three were no exception to the rule, and immediately set the tone for the trip when they got out of the airport at Lhasa and lit up their cigarettes, declaring that smoking was the best weapon against altitude sickness. Who cares what their reasons were, it was a cool thing to see.
Our first day in Lhasa was supposed to be a rest period, a time for our bodies to adjust to the high altitude (3500 meters above sea level). The first person to truly suffer from this was a big-bellied forty-year old German named Rainer. We drove to the gate of the famous Potola Palace, winter home of the Dalai Lama. Rainer and I decided to walk the 4 or 5 kilometers back to the hotel, and it was around the 1st kilometer that I noticed that he was walking slower and slower and conversing less and less. I asked him in my broken German "Bist du gut?" and you replied that the week before, in preparation for the impending altitude sickness, he had visited some specialists in Chinese medicine, and also went to an acupuncturist for the first time. Perhaps, he remarked, he was feeling a little strange in reaction to the needlework.
That first day in Tibet was filled with napping and complaining, as more and more of the group began to feel the symptoms of altitude sickness. Strangely enough, perhaps due to the sheer massiveness of my head, I felt quite normal, although walking up stairs was (and still is) quite literally breath-taking.
Day 2 in Lhasa was filled with activity, starting with a morning trek to Drepung Monestary, a home for monks and destination for local worshippers. I had not read much about Tibet or Buddhism, and in fact I had not even read our own itinerary, so everything was a surprise to me, from the dirty beggar children to the stands selling Oreo cookies outside the chapel. The Monestary is indeed a holy place, each room filled with prayer books and statues of buddhas, teachers, and dalai lamas. Monks are stationed in every room, helping the piligrms with their prayers and making sure that no tourists are taking pictures unless they've paid the requisite fee. All the pilgrims are decked in traditional Tibetan robes, and most of them are old, since the only people who have time to pray at monestaries every day are those who have already retired. Many of them were carrying bags or tubs of a creamy white substance, which I was told was yak butter. Every chapel has a huge cauldron of burning candles, and the pilgrims scoop the butter into the cauldron of candles while chanting. Our tour guide told us that this was a tribute, part of their prayer ritual, with the ultimate goal being the attainment of enlightenment. I wanted to rush out and get the stuff myself, but at the point the altitude kicked in and I felt plenty enlightened. Plus, the yak butter really smelled quite awful, not stinky but heavy and pungent. Little did I know that I would be surrounded by the stuff every place that I would go in Lhasa.
Suddenly, Richard (the Brit), who had been chatting quietly with the tour guide, ran towards the rest of us and told us to hurry. When asked why, he responded in memorable fashion: "The Tibetans are coming, the Tibetans are coming!" The early morning had turned to late morning, and throngs of pilgrims were making their way into the chapel rooms, chanting and scooping yak butter wherever they could. The idea of being surrounded by waist-high yak-buttered chanters did not appeal to Richard, and though I was titillated by the thought of it, the Turks quickly came and dragged me away.
The night is getting late here and I have a 10 hour drive to look forward to tomorrow, but there is plenty more to write about in regards to days 3 and 4, but I'll leave it for when I next find an Internet Cafe, which I believe will be in Kathmandu at the base of the Himalayas. Wow, it's crazy that I just wrote that out.
Guten Nacht, mein Freunden! (those four years of German in school are beginning to pay off, and you'll find out why in the next entry).
On Saturday Tina and I met at Hongqiao Airport in Shanghai to head to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, which borders Tibet, where we were to stay one night before flying straight into Lhasa the next day. It was at this point that Tina suddenly remembered that she had forgotten her jacket at home. I've always wondered how people could suddenly remember that they forgot something, but the solemn look on her face suggested that I not point this out now. For those of you who don't know Tina, she is basically constructed (at 5'0) to wear big Gore-tex puffy jackets, so to see her without one in the face of camping at base camp Everest was also too much for me to bear...so I let it all out in a hail of giggles.
In the end, I'm a nice guy, and when we arrived in Chengdu I rang up a friend of mine who was a Chengdu native, and was returning home for the National Chinese Labor Holiday. Her name is Han Ting, and she was nice enough to point us in the right direction: Pacific Mall, where Tina was fortunate enough to find a puffy Gore-tex jacket and win two ceramic mugs in a raffle. We finished the night with a foursome surrounding famous Sichuan hotpot. where I ate pig and duck liver and drank warm Sichuan beer. Then we returned to the hotel.
A note about the rest of the tour group: 4 Germans, 3 Turks, and one very sarcastic Brit. My experience at Intel working with Tolga Kuru (the Mad Turk of Materials) is that Turkish people are the coolest people on Earth, next to Hobbits and Outkast. These three were no exception to the rule, and immediately set the tone for the trip when they got out of the airport at Lhasa and lit up their cigarettes, declaring that smoking was the best weapon against altitude sickness. Who cares what their reasons were, it was a cool thing to see.
Our first day in Lhasa was supposed to be a rest period, a time for our bodies to adjust to the high altitude (3500 meters above sea level). The first person to truly suffer from this was a big-bellied forty-year old German named Rainer. We drove to the gate of the famous Potola Palace, winter home of the Dalai Lama. Rainer and I decided to walk the 4 or 5 kilometers back to the hotel, and it was around the 1st kilometer that I noticed that he was walking slower and slower and conversing less and less. I asked him in my broken German "Bist du gut?" and you replied that the week before, in preparation for the impending altitude sickness, he had visited some specialists in Chinese medicine, and also went to an acupuncturist for the first time. Perhaps, he remarked, he was feeling a little strange in reaction to the needlework.
That first day in Tibet was filled with napping and complaining, as more and more of the group began to feel the symptoms of altitude sickness. Strangely enough, perhaps due to the sheer massiveness of my head, I felt quite normal, although walking up stairs was (and still is) quite literally breath-taking.
Day 2 in Lhasa was filled with activity, starting with a morning trek to Drepung Monestary, a home for monks and destination for local worshippers. I had not read much about Tibet or Buddhism, and in fact I had not even read our own itinerary, so everything was a surprise to me, from the dirty beggar children to the stands selling Oreo cookies outside the chapel. The Monestary is indeed a holy place, each room filled with prayer books and statues of buddhas, teachers, and dalai lamas. Monks are stationed in every room, helping the piligrms with their prayers and making sure that no tourists are taking pictures unless they've paid the requisite fee. All the pilgrims are decked in traditional Tibetan robes, and most of them are old, since the only people who have time to pray at monestaries every day are those who have already retired. Many of them were carrying bags or tubs of a creamy white substance, which I was told was yak butter. Every chapel has a huge cauldron of burning candles, and the pilgrims scoop the butter into the cauldron of candles while chanting. Our tour guide told us that this was a tribute, part of their prayer ritual, with the ultimate goal being the attainment of enlightenment. I wanted to rush out and get the stuff myself, but at the point the altitude kicked in and I felt plenty enlightened. Plus, the yak butter really smelled quite awful, not stinky but heavy and pungent. Little did I know that I would be surrounded by the stuff every place that I would go in Lhasa.
Suddenly, Richard (the Brit), who had been chatting quietly with the tour guide, ran towards the rest of us and told us to hurry. When asked why, he responded in memorable fashion: "The Tibetans are coming, the Tibetans are coming!" The early morning had turned to late morning, and throngs of pilgrims were making their way into the chapel rooms, chanting and scooping yak butter wherever they could. The idea of being surrounded by waist-high yak-buttered chanters did not appeal to Richard, and though I was titillated by the thought of it, the Turks quickly came and dragged me away.
The night is getting late here and I have a 10 hour drive to look forward to tomorrow, but there is plenty more to write about in regards to days 3 and 4, but I'll leave it for when I next find an Internet Cafe, which I believe will be in Kathmandu at the base of the Himalayas. Wow, it's crazy that I just wrote that out.
Guten Nacht, mein Freunden! (those four years of German in school are beginning to pay off, and you'll find out why in the next entry).
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