Whizzing by cars, people, dogs, and the wind inherent to autorickshaws, buffeting out skin, making a circus of our hair.  The driver points out hotels, tells us if they are cheap or expensive.  We aren’t looking for the hotels.  He discusses India and America. Asks us about race relations.

I don’t remember where we were, but the story is always the same.  He mentions that India is more free than America.  I consider this, and through the hum of the golf-cart-esque motor and find some truth in his words.  India indeed has more freedom than the land of the free.  We have given up some of our freedom.

For what?

Comfort and security are what I come up with.  One’s not better than the other.  They are just different ways to live.  You get used to either, given time.  I miss the freedom, manifested in informality.

Have I changed? Sure.  Not in some deep and sudden way though.  No instant enlightenment here. I have just added on perspective.  When you see something from a different angle for  while, it gets incorporated.  Less of a change, more of a shift.  Tilt your heel and slide two inches to the left.  A move of inclusion, a view previously un-experienced.

“A kind of vertigo overcomes me.  Words make no more sense.  Everything is a continuum.”

People ask me about how I am experiencing reverse culture shock.  I am not. Culture shock: nada. I am not overly surprised by the selection at the supermarket.  I do not balk at the over-use of water in the shower.  I do not shiver over the bodily frisson of being enveloped in another physical environment.  None of it makes an effect.  I am just home.

You’d think this might please me, but it doesn’t.  The other kids on my program, the other kids on ANY program, are have effects, even issues.  I got none of it.  I am left wondering at my lack of my experience with my environment.  Does it stem from a detachment to Nepal, or an attachment to DC, or a more general disengagement to the world or physical environment?  Either way, I feel like I’m missing out, like I should be feeling something.

But if I have to be missing something, at least it is leaving me happy.

“All you have to know is whether you’re lying of whether you’re trying to tell the truth, you can’t afford to make a mistake about the distinction any longer.”

 “The city of Geneve is as contradictory and enigmatic as a living person. I could fill in an identity card. Nationality: Neutral. Gender: Feminine. Age: (discretion intervenes) looks younger than she is. Civil status: separated. Distinguishing physical characteristic: slight stoop due to short-sightedness. General remarks: sexy and secretive. “

 Just as John Berger does, I could fill out an identity card for Kathmandu. Or a personal add. Or a facebook profile. Or a Craig’s List Missed Connection. It’s crasser than Beger’s work, but that is more of KTM’s style any way.

Settling on the latter, here we go.

You were the dusty woman of indeterminate age (she has recently undergone some surgeries, but more on a whim than out of self consciousness) in the garish dress. You sat oblivious to propriety and mud on a stoop surrounded by civil unrest and motor cycles. I was the naïve youth attempting to navigate your streets and dodge your ruble and garbage piles. You laughed at my stumbling progress, but in a good-natured way. My first impression was of claustrophobic grunge. But you laughed, you are used to being easily judged. We could meet in a dark hole in the wall. All the good restaurants are dark holes in the wall. Generally in the most literal sense. There will be a cloth hanging over the crooked door frame and buckets of dongpa on the table. The power will go out (one of your tricks) and we will be forced to confront our silence in the darkness.

Kathmandu is a city it takes a while to like. You might not get her sense of humor at first. Her jokes are not always in good humor, although when you get to know her, you will understand her comic genius. It starts with the ability to look on with amusement at any situation. It is a coping device she has developed, and it serves her well. Though there are times when you wish she could just cooperate. She is without pity, but that does not mean she is not compassionate. Her exterior is rough, as is necessary. Yet she is full of unexpected twists and turns, has lived through turmoil and keeps getting up when knocked down. These tricks she plays, they are tests to your character, and she watches your response casually, with a raised eyebrow. A challenge.

She waits patiently, wanting to see how it all plays out. She is prone to flashes of anger, but is more accustomed to uttering sarcastic comments from a corner, where she leans with a cigarette.  She always leans. She would have got along well with boys at school, always willing to climb the highest tree, or eat the grossest thing for the amusement of all.  She’s the girl you want to come to the party. Someone’s else’s party, that is. You wouldn’t want to have to deal with the mess she’ll leave behind, but god, you just want to watch her run wild. She has a sweet side, but she keeps it hidden most of the time. She has a self destructive side, and when is surfaces there is no stopping her. It is best to just leave her alone.

So we have left Kathmandu. Left the city to its own devices, amidst maoist strikes and postponed government meetings. Gone to shelter in her neighbor, Delhi, whom I know nothing about, except that he pretends to be English, having groan up around the Brits. But he is not. It surfaces in unexpected places, with a mixture of embarrassment and pride on his part.

We didn’t have to walk to the airport, as we thought me might. The strike was postponed in favor of a 3 day country wide one, involving torch carrying mobs 2 days later. The uncertainty was her last trick played on us. Well, that and the airport officials’ prolonged inspection of the statue my friend bought. It opens. To hold mantras. I didn’t think about how this might become the perfect vessel for carrying drugs. The airport staff, apparently, had thought of it.

So Brian and I sit in this unappealing hotel room. The foundation has more cracks than I have split ends (and after a semester without any hair implements, there are a few, believe me). We are lost in this sprawling city. With its sidewalks and regulated buses and municipal services. We haunt a single coffee shop and local restaurant, not wanting to venture far. When we do, it seems to go wrong. We tried to go to a temple that has a robot show, but it was closed. We tried to see a movie, but it was sold out. We went to one museum and were too tired afterwords to go to any others. So. Many. Bronze. Statues.

But Alexa comes tomorrow, and we go off to Rajashtan. We could be going to Afghanistan for all I care– that girl can make anything fun.

Although, I am pretty glad that we aren’t going to Afghanistan…

“I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling; looking for something, what can it be?  Oh I hate you some, I hate you some, I love you some

oh I love you when I forget about me; Oh I want to be strong, I want to laugh along, I want to belong to the living; alive, alive, I want to get up and drive; I want to wreck my stockings in some jute-box dive”

So, I learned to like Kathmandu. I learned to like the other kids on my program. This summer, when I started this blog as a way to amuse myself when I was lonely, because Bekah was gone off traveling, I wrote profiles of the expected characters to be encountered.  I was right for a lot of it, but not entirely.  We all got along.  All 14 of us.  Which may not sound like a colosal feat, but when you are the only people you see for 3 months, it really is.  There was no drama, no fighting.  I shared a bed in a cold room with  2 girls for more than 3 weeks and never got tired of them.  I will miss everyone.  They are all lovely people, and we have shared something that no one else can imagine. Don’t get me wrong, I plan on describing it and making all of you watch a slide show featuring about 1000 pictures, but if you weren’t on the mountain, you can’t imagine the trek through Mustang. If you weren’t climbing those 302 steps, you can’t imagine daily life in Dharamsala, if you didn’t squeeze into that microbus with 60 other people, you can’t know Kathmandu.

Too much happened to talk about here. But ask me, and I’ll tell you. About the time I chased that drunk boy around a hill top in the rain and dark; or when I went to the golden temple 20 minutes from the Pakistan border– getting there took 5 hours and 2 buses, getting back took 10 hours, 5 buses, a rickshaw, and a taxi; or drinking with our Tibetan teachers, or staying in the monastery and why we had to be back by 7:30; or Nate bargaining for taxis– or anything about Nate; or the King of Mustang serving us warm tang. I could go on and on. Believe me, you will soon be tired of my pretentious inserts in unrelated conversation: “that reminds me, this one time, when I was living in Nepal, the most outrageous thing happened……” I apologize in advance, because I will for some time be THAT guy.

People here have incredibly intimate conversations in incredibly public places. It is out of necessity, not desire. There is nowhere else with internet. But it brings a whole new element to the conversation. The element of performance. She has her talking points down. She’s practiced this one. As she trudged up those hills, you just know she played it over and over in her mind. Is it going how she planned? Is the person on the other computer in America asking the right questions, making the right concerned noises? I can hear her homesickness and I recognize it. But if she could be slightly less of a typical loud-ass American, we would all appreciate it. At least she is dressed as a human. The westerners here are very confused. They believe they have entered a realm of constant Halloween celebrations. They dress accordingly. Like Diego. Diego is Spanish, but not in a cute way. I don’t know if his appearance and attitude are vestiges of a previous and long-standing condition, or if they just sprouted up upon his arrival here. It appears that he hasn’t showered since his country controlled most of central america. His clothes are a mis-mash of a modern hippy and an 18^th century hobo with a peg leg and downs syndrome. Alright, he has neither of those, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he sported a peg leg as some kind of statement. He is a dirtier version of jack sparrow, with a psuedo spiritual twist. I will tolerate your beliefs unless their foundation is drug use and self-righteousness. Arrogance is not a religion.

“I’m Feelin rough I’m Feelin raw I’m in the prime of my life.
Let’s make some music make some money find some models for wives.
I’ll move to Paris, shoot some heroin and fuck with the stars.”

Dharamsala is not as cold as it seems. But it does seem so very cold. This unfortunate deception is due to insulation, or the lack there of. The outside is the exact same temperature as the inside. When you are outside, walking and in the sun, it is not cold. When you are inside, hidden from the sun’s rays, not moving, you are freezing. One of my roommates is in a sleeping bag. She has on long underwear, pants, wool socks, slippers, a jacket, a scarf, and a beanie. My nose is running and my feet are cold. Some nights, if you are eating something hot, you can see your breath inside. We hung one of those foil-esque emergency blankets on the wall, in the small hopes that it will draw in sunlight and make it warmer. Our room looks like a space ship.

I live at the bottom of about 18 million stairs. Seriously. I plan my activities around going up them the least amount possible. Sometimes long haired goats or giant shit covered cows are blocking them and you have to climb around. My ankles threaten to roll on the steep parts. I give them a stern talking to and keep them in line.

“I’ll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms.
I’ll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world.
I’ll miss my sister, miss my father, miss my dog and my home.
Yeah I’ll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone.”

Bekah told me to blog. I told her that all I have been doing is research, so unless she wanted me to blog about Gesar, the longest epic in the world…. she said she did. Be careful what you ask for, Dear.

Kinship in Tibet follows a complex and varied system. The marriage systems practiced among Tibetans combine monogamy (single partner marriage), polyandry (the marriage of one woman to two or more men), and polygyny (the marriage of one man to two or more women). This combination is rarely found elsewhere. The Tibetan marriage system is closely related to social structure and land tenure (Goldstein 1971:64). Members of certain social strata were tied to their land in the feudal land system of Tibet. Families with multiple sons risked dividing the land and labor force when those sons married. The general solution was fraternal polyandry (two or more brothers marrying one woman) (Goldstein 1971:68). Marriages with more than two brothers (tri- and quatri-fraternal polyandry) were not preferred, as it was believed that martial harmony would not be easily obtained. In the case of more than two brothers, one would often be sent either to a monastery or be given as a bridegroom to a family without a son (Goldstein 1971:69). Multi-generational polyandry also occurred. In this case, if a mother died the father and son(s) would marry one woman, again to avoid division of the land. The father would generally not take part in the marriage ceremony, but it would be agreed upon earlier that he would have sexual access to the bride. In this union, any resulting children would be considered the son’s (Goldstein 1971: 69). On rare occasions, if a family had multiple daughters and no sons, a polygynous matrilocal marriage (the male moving residences to the females’ home) would occur.

However, in a separate social strata, where families were not tied to the land, and individuals were free to roam to find work where they pleased, monogamy was the preferred marriage choice. In his twenty month field research, Goldstein (1971) recorded various marriages coinciding with his theories on marriage:

 “Turning now to an actual example, I recorded 62 primary marriages among the 23 tre-ba families of the village of Chimdro in Gyantse district. Of these, 24 (39%) were characterized by the presence of only one male of mar-riageable age and, thus, could be classed as monogamous marriages. Thirty-two (51%) occurred in families with more than one son and were all poly- androus. Of these 32, 20 were cases where there were only 2 siblings, whose marriages were all of the bi-fraternal polyandrous type. In the 8 cases of 3 sons, 6 were tri-fraternal polyandrous marriages and 2 were bi-fraternal (with one brother going to his wife’s family as bridegroom). There were 4 cases of families with 4 sons. In one of these, quatri-fraternal polyandrous marriage took place; in 2, bi-fraternal polyandry occurred; and in one, there was a tri-fraternal polyandrous marriage. In no instance with multiple sons was a joint family established. In the remaining 6 cases (10%) there were only daughters present, and in all of these bridegrooms were brought in. In 5 of the families with only one daughter, the monomarital pattern was not relevant. But the sixth family had two daughters. Here a matrilocal sororal polygynous marriage alternative, with both daughters bringing in husbands, was avoided by making the younger daughter a celibate nun while she was a youth (70).”

The epic of Gesar, however, does not exactly follow these statistics. While all three methods (monogamy, polygyny, and polyandry) are shown in the epic, they are not found in the scale one would expect. Polygyny appears to be the ideal system, and polyandry appears minimally. Gesar himself takes multiple wives. This is, however, not without resulting problems. This can be seen in the relationships between Gesar’s wives (and other multiple wives throughout the epic). For example, King Singlen of Gling wishes to marry Gongmo, but does not in order to avoid his wife’s fury. The king’s wife supplies the reason that she has given him a son, so he has no reason to marry another woman (David-Neel 1987:70). Other marriage practices are also seen in the epic. In Tibet, children born out of wedlock do not present the problem that they do in other societies (Levine 1987:279). This is the reason that Gesar’s miraculous birth is accepted by the community as a whole (although not the individuals who saw the gods issue from Gongmo’s body); Gesar is assumed to be the illegitimate child of Gongmo’s master, King Singlen (David-Neel 1987:137). Also, after Gesar kills the first Hor King his wife returns to Gling, but is told by Gesar to go back to Hor and marry the deceased King’s brothers (there are two of them, thus implying fraternal polyandry), demonstrating marriage after death to family members (David-Neel 1987:199).

Marriage between cross cousins is another important aspect of the Tibetan marriage system. Desideri, an eighteenth century explorer in Tibet, described kinship beliefs relating to cross cousins. He noted that relatives were divided into two categories, those of the same bone (Rupa-cik) and those of the same blood (Scia-cik). Those of the same bone were considered decedents of a distant common ancestor, while those of the same blood were related through marriage and birth. There was an incest taboo placed on members of the same bone, but not on members of the same blood. The bone is passed through the father’s side, and the blood through the mother’s (Benedict 1942:328). Other studies show that cross cousins through the mother’s side are eligible (or even preferred) for marriage, while cross cousins on the father’s side are not (Benedict 1942:328). “Bone” is also used by members of the Sherpa ethnicity as the term for their twenty-one patrilineal clans (Paul 1989:20). The term also involves ancestors in this context, as the clans have descended from four proto-clans centuries ago (Paul 1989:20). In some Tibetan marriages, the mother’s brother’s permission is needed to give away a daughter in marriage. This relates to cross cousin marriage (as the daughter may be marrying the uncle’s son), and a variation is seen in the Gesar epic. When Padmasambhava requests the Nagi as a gift after curing the Nagas of their illness, the father of the girl agrees but the uncle objects, and must be convinced. The matter is complicated here as both the uncle and the father share a wife– another example of polyandry (David-Neel 1987:63).

Social structure as mentioned in the Epic of Gesar also more or less coincides with what was found in Tibet, prior to 1950. Eastern Tibet (where, the general consensus states, Gesar originated) was home to pastoral nomads (Gelek 2002:2). While the epic does not describe in depth the subsistence patterns of characters, pastoralism is mentioned in the David-Neel version. Nomadism is not strictly mentioned, although abiding in tents is (however, it is also mentioned that Gesar builds a palace, and other kings have them as well). The political structure in Gling is described as multiple clans with chiefs, all united under a king. A system of two governors is also mentioned. David-Neel explains that this shows that this particular passage is of a recent addition, since the seventeenth century, when a law involving one religious and one secular governor was established (David-Neel 1987:230). This system was used up until very recent times among nomads in Eastern Tibet (Gelek 2002:12). The tribes of gLing are united under “phu-nu”. This concept was not translated into English or mentioned by David-Neel, but is described by Samten Karmay. Belonging to “phu-nu” is an indication of a certain social status, and gives one particular social claims. The literal meaning is “elder and younger brothers” (Karmay 1995:497). The term is, however, applied widely and indicates a relationship beyond actual brotherhood. The three paradigms of “phu-nu” are solidarity, commensality, and equality in status. It is a fraternal bond that is regulated through both moral and jural “social imperlatives” (Karmay 1995:497). The term appears similar to “tsha-shan”, a term that in an historical work is shown to mean “brother-in-law or son-in-law” but in the writings of Milarepa indicates a “spiritual brotherhood” (Benedict 1942:322). In fact, one of the bonding factors of “phu-nu” is the shared “bone” of the father (Karmay 1995:497). This implies not simply a blood relation, but a relation tracing back to a common ancestor, as mentioned previously. Factors in “phu-nu” are loyalty and honor, but it also can be married into (Karmay 1995:499). “Phu-nu” creates an alliance that has to do with more than consanguinity. In the David- Neel version, characters refer to each other as “uncle” and “nephew” where no relationship is present. David-Neel explains that these terms are used where no actual relationships exist, but are used to show respect. The epic demonstrates complex kinship structures, hinting at those found within Tibetan society.

Well…. there you go.

“An old woman with an umbrella was sitting very still on one of the park benches. She has the kind of stillness that draw attention to itself.”

“There’s a dead body on top of that car. There’s a dead body on top of that car. There’s a dead body on top of that car.”

She keeps repeating it, I don’t know why she keeps repeating it. Here it appears to be a game. A dangerous combination of leap frog and chicken. Pass as many cars as you can. My hair is wild, my skin buffeted by the wind, but I keep the window completely down. I want to feel it all. The smoky air stings my eyes and I can feel each and every one of my eyelashes press against my eyelids with the force of the air pushing against them, but I refuse to roll up the window, not even an inch. We are all buffeted and blown about by the sounds and the colors and the people and the presence and the pressure of it all. And then we aren’t. We are quietly floating away from waving children, clinging to the shore, demanding pens that we don’t even possess to give them. We recede from the bank like a wave, not present here. We aren’t present here. We float by flickering candles, perched precariously on the water. It appears haunted, this place. A dim cemetery world, where water dampens sound and feeling. But not the kind of haunting that occurs in movies, all secret and frightening. This haunting is comfortable, it is acknowledged. It is accepted for what it is. I am in Varanasi, the city of the dead. Only those lucky enough to have made it here to die with in it are allowed to be cremated on the shores. I am drifting on the Holy river Ganga, the last resting spot of those lucky bodies. The air is smoke and citrus. My mind is smoke and citrus.

We are on a roof top, doing yoga and passing around a bottle of rum from Mustang, or Kathmandu. Some place that has no footing here. I hate rum.  I acknowledge this city’s ghosts and greet them, along with the living, who are much more troubling. It is Halloween in Varanasi and I am glad to be here.

I stand on the same roof top the next morning and watch the 20 monkeys on the next roof over as they clean each other. Muslim prayers resonate grainily from loud speakers. Boats glide through the haze, as thick as the water. It is the morning of November first. In DC it is Halloween night. Friends are in costumes, drinking at parties. I can feel the bass of the music. I can sense the sudden fear, the tightening of drunken tendons, the beating of blood suddenly doubling in veins, when a knuckle comes down against the door. UPD? No, just another reveler. Fears dissipate in laughter. Come in, grab a cup. It is a situation and feeling I know so well and right now I am so far removed from it.

Sarnath

“Lisboa is a city which has a relationship with the visible world like no other city. It plays a game. Its squares and streets are paved with patterns of white and colored stones, as if, instead of being roads, they were ceilings.”

We take jeeps to Sarnath. I turn the iPod up to match the physical volume of the driving. I like to go fast, I like this game today. Gypsy punk roars into my ears as I watch women in Saris, side-saddle on motorcycles, passing rickshaws. Sarnath feels dusty. It is not that it necessarily is dusty, but it feels that way. Like the sunlight is filtered.

Today I walked around the Deer Park, where the Buddha gave his first sermon after reaching enlightenment. The crumbling stupas were decorated with marigold garlands and rose petals. Smelled so good, I wanted to drink the air. There were actually deer in the deer park. Go figure.

At night, we follow our Tibetan teachers and watch a Burmese parade, trying Betel nut. It is like chewing tobacco, but a nut. It is mixed with coconut, and paste, and tons of other stuff, and wrapped in a leaf. It turns your mouth red and causes you to spit every ten seconds. Everywhere in India, liquid red lines score walls from spitters of Betel nut. Julie puts the wadded leaf in her mouth and bites down. Her face contorts, immediately showing her feelings. She can’t hide anything, this girl. Now we are laughing, and she is laughing while still making faces, chewing in slow motion. In another 3 minutes she announces that she loves it, the sounds she makes are something resembling words, as her mouth is still full, and now slightly numb.

Bodhgaya

“When she wept, she tried to turn away from me.  This may have been to spare me, but it was also because her tears took her back to other times, before I had been thought of.  While she was crying, I waited, like you wait for a long train to pass at a level crossing.”

I am in Bihar, the poorest state in India. Ingoglia told me not to come here. It was uncharacteristic, him giving me travel advice, so it stuck in my mind. But here I am. For where else would the Buddha have obtained enlightenment, than under a tree in the poorest part of India? Alex spilled her tea all over me. I laughed so hard I almost cried. Too hard, too close to tears. We were never given a chance to cry. Not this time though. No, that would be too much. I was my pants off and climb back in the back of the car. I am on the edge, in the back, so my body sinks towards the middle. I have to balance on one ass cheek to avoid laying on the person in the middle. After four or six hours, my side aches from this maneuver.

Back in the cars. Music reminds me of books that remind me of life. I like that. I live in these realms of memories, of things I haven’t experienced, but know anyway. You can see how enlightenment could be attained here. It must have been lovely, once. It still is, in the park. But it is full of so many poor people, who follow us, won’t leave us alone, some how know where we are staying. The tree though. It is a great-great-great-great-etc grand daughter of that Buddha’s tree, and it exudes peaceful contemplation. Such a lovely, peaceful tree, surrounded by such poor, desperate people, who follow us for streets, clinging to our ankles in a disturbed crab crawl that does not belong to the human form, involving missing limbs and contorted features. Please, just stop talking to me, crawling towards me, sending me such destitution.

Rajgeer

“This is not a city, my boy, which fucks itself up.  That’s why I’m here.”

Okay, who slipped me the pills? This place is a mother fucking trip. It is known for its use of horse carts and its non-use of cars. These are not modern, somehow cool, horse carts. These are pieces of plywood held together with what appears to be betel nut juice and the anachronistic dreams of tourists. They dip and creak when you step on them. Much like the hotel beds. It is quite obvious that the sheets have never been washed. And either some murders or tantric blood letting rituals have gone down in the rooms. Nate swears the shit stain on the wall moved when he was asleep. Power surges cause our one florescent light to turn itself on and flicker through the night, as well as making the fan go into hyperspeed, threatening to fly off the ceiling. The mosquitos appear to have ingested some uranium that has made them giant and loud and super human. They buzz around our heads, making sleep impossible. The one road is lined with solar lights. Sounds cool. Wrong, my friend. This is the height of the acid-tacular experience. The lights line both sides and the middle of the mile and a half long road, surrounded on both sides with jungle, and absoultey no other lights. The lights are red. Bright red. They blink about every .5 seconds. Imagine that the only thing you can see is a mile and a half of blinking red lights. With the occasion horse cart coming out of fucking nowhere. After wandering in a daze through this psychedelic maze, we come to a tea shop where a man speaks to us in what he assumes in English. It most assuredly is not. We smile and nod, and suddenly salty boiled eggs are placed before us. No thanks. Then raisins. Sure, i’ll have a raisin. “Maggot in the raisins! Maggot in the raisins!” Ok, no more raisins. The waiter walks us all the way back to our hotel, speaking god knows what. He thinks he is coming in with us. How to ditch someone who doesn’t speak the same language? Conundrum. We get it across. He pees on the lawn and shakes our hands. Immediately. His hands are wet. Great. Let me go wash it in the bath room without a light, with the toilet without a flushing mechanism, in the mosquito swamp, next to the empty betel-nut stained elevator shaft. I turn on the tap in the morning and am surprised that blood doesn’t flow from it.

Kushinagar

“There is a man holding a megaphone, so he must have been the voice of God. Bystanders claimed they saw angels flying up and down the park. They must have been attached to wires, I saw one laying on the lawn with a broken arm. So I called 911. Well, that’s one less founded opinion, one more cause for a dispute, so the street filled like a basin up with cameras and their crews, and they washed away the rumors leaving just the concrete truth. It was a spectacle… no, I… I mean a miracle.”

We are on a train. Or we are in a zoo. We are the main attractions. In Nepal they look, in India they stare. There are 40 people crowded around us, staring blankly and taking pictures. We get a police escort. We are at the spot of the Parinirvana. Thai pilgrims tilt their heads while prostrating, making sure the camera gets their good side. They are lead in mass, by a monk with a megaphone. So much merit, so little time.  I have no right to judge them.  But I do anyway. 

Lumbini

“You said you’d let your hair down, you got enough to go around, said you’d let your hair down, but you’ve been telling me that since the day we met. She’s laughing like a choir girl, she’s laughing like a choir girl, when she doubles over, sounds like halleluiah.”

I ride on top of the bus, shaking out my hair, freeing it to the force of the wind. Do with me what you will. Every time we pass another buss with passengers on top, we all mutually, spontaneously scream. It is an ecstatic recognition of shared knowledge. We know the feeling of the wind in our hair, and bugs hitting our faces at high speeds. We share the knowledge of deep bruises on our asses and lower backs where the metal rods dig in. We know to duck when a low tree branch approaches. We know the songs of birds and the setting of the sun as no one else does. All this we scream to each other, reaching out our arms, although we know we will never touch.

We almost weren’t let back into Nepal. I was almost attacked by dogs in a hotel stupa. This is how it goes.

Kathmandu

“Sally was a 15 year old girl from Nebraska.  Gypsies were passing through her little town.  They dropped something on the road, she picked up.  Cultural revolution right away began.”

My host family didn’t know I was leaving. Somehow they conjured a present out of nowhere. Ama-la again tells me that it is good that my hair is past my shoulders. Her daughter, Tsechok, she is always cutting her hair. No good. Hair must be past your shoulders. This is the first time my hair has been past my shoulders in seven years. She tells me she feels like I am her daughter. So how can I not agree when they ask me to take some incense to America for her sister? Sure, just a little package of incense, no problem. Except it is like 80 packages of incense. And shoes. All wrapped carefully and sewn in to a bag. They tell me to put it into my suitcase and then give me a lock for it. I really hope I have not just been made a drug smuggler for a Tibetan family.

I am in Delhi, waiting for the night bus to Dharamsala. I love you all.

OM MANI PADME HUM

So, here’s an update:

On saturday we are going to India for a week.  We are haphazardly tracing the life of the Budha, filting across the map.  Varanasi, Sarnath, Bodhgaya, Rajgeer, Nalanda, Kushhinaga, and Lumbini- then back to kathmandu, all in 8 days.  2 days after we get back we leave again to go to Dharamsala for about a month. 

I haven’t discussed Grandpa.  He is an allusive figure, but he is my favorite character in this foreign film.  I see him more now, because I often get locked out.  The family is gone, but he lets me in.  He then locks the gate again and retreats to wherever the hell he lives.  I don’t have the key to my room.  This essentially locks me in the stairwell.  He tlaks to me in Nepali and Tibetan, despite my blank stare.  He is often shirtless, his skin hanging off his body like a loose coat.  His voice is nasal and often at strange volumes.  Shouting prayers or whispering questions.  His face resembles a crab apple.  After fighting to close the gate together I feel like we are secret accomplises.  I wonder what he does with his days.  He gets up at 4:30 AM, I see the hall light go on.  After that, I don’t know.  He is like the demonic dogs on the roof.  Some how associated with the family, but never discussed.  Unlike the dogs, he has never attempted to eat my face.  Fucking rat dogs. 

A cat ran out from under my bed the other day.  I had just come home and unlocked the door.  I have no idea how long it was there.  We don’t have a cat. One of the other kids woke up to a dog on top of her.  She doesn’t have a dog.  All of the doors were closed and locked.  Oh, Nepal…. where random animals appear in your room and you get locked in a stairwell cause your family forgets about you.

Tonight I walked home with the dusk, in the dust.   

Each foot fall kicked up a cloud, calling the darkness to come, come, come out now. 

I shuffled along with the Ipod set to shuffle, singing, ‘cause, hey, if they’re gonna watch, might as well make them stare.

I sidle through memories and side step all too present shit in the street.   It’s a dance I’ve become familiar with.  

For once this walk can’t last long enough.  

The power may be out, but my power is on. 

Just flick the switch, it might be faint and flickering at first, but I swear, just give it a minute, its fluorescent. 

I breathe in deep and the exhaust fumes can’t touch me,

 Make sure not to step on a razor blade, that all too real hyperbole of how life shouldn’t be.  It’s a joke, but it’s not. 

The hairless dog looks warily at me and I cringe.

It is the opposite of cute, it is no one’s best friend. 

But I like it, in its gross strangeness, my cringe becomes a smile,

And isn’t that just Kathmandu for you? 

That pants-less child cries, but there are no tears in his eyes. 

His plea is met, music is turned on, and the hypnotizing rhythms of stricken lovers screech like car wheels on the street. 

I trip over a speed bump in the dark, jumping from a fire work’s spark. 

The kids scream and return to their game, it continues always despite the crash and clash of fire crackers and the lack of any pretense of sight anymore,

It’s infringements are so very slight. 

With Their darting eyes and dirty limbs, they are untouchable, they belong to the night. 

And so do I, right now, with the stars glinting brighter than my eyes ever could,

they stretch wide, taking in the sight, A  black out’s better than a dessert of sand for this,

It’s out of my hands and off my feet. 

What’s that smell, who is that staring at me, is that woman peeing? 

A million questions, I let go, they float up to rest comfortably in the embrace of the sky as another firework races by. 

I smile and laugh, it’s all over my head, and through my bones, and down my lungs,

The darkness has beat me home and I am alone,  

But in that good way.

So I open the gate and step inside,

My eyes open and my heart tired, but stretched    open      wide. 

The fireworks are less like fireworks and more like low grade explosives.  It looks like Christmas and sounds like WWI.  Trench warfare under multicolored lighted bulbs.  The streets are painted, the dogs run by, multicolored streaks across their flea bitten fur.  Kathmandu during a festival is a child’s dream and a PTSD victim’s nightmare.  I am neither. 

Here’s some pictures from Mustang.  Just a few, I don’t want to overwhelm anyone.  I hope this works, I haven’t used Picasa before.

http://picasaweb.google.com/melaniegmoore/SelectedMustang?feat=directlink

The following is an attempt to organize three weeks of scribbled notes and things left unscribbled into a semi-coherent mound expressing some of my experiences in Mustang.  I will begin on the day before I left and end the day I came back.  Some of it I will summarize, some I will copy directly from my journal.  I would copy it all from my journal, but I am pretty sure no one wants to read a ten page tirade on how much my feet hurt.  Which is pretty much all my journal contains.

So, the short of it: We took an 8 hour (It was supposed to be 5 hour- welcome to Nepal) buss to Pokhara where we stayed the night.  The next morning we took a tiny plane to Jommsom, which took about 15 minutes.  Then we walked to Lo Monthang, where we stayed for 4 days, then walked back to Jommsom.  The whole thing took 18 days.  Remember when I said I would be walking for 5 days? Ha.  Try 16.  Walking was the main part of my day for more than 2 weeks.  I probably enjoyed about 5-8% of the walking.  We walked for 3-8 hours per day.  For you kids playing along at home, that’s a shit ton of walking that I did not enjoy.  We nicknamed it, not so fondly, SIT Fat Camp.  However, it was beautiful.  The most beautiful, vast, breath taking (and not just because of the altitude) place I have ever been.  I am glad that I did it, but I only did it because I did not have a choice.  If it was explained to me in detail, I would not go.  No way. Thanks, I’ll stay on the bus.  But, lacking human capacity to assert will power, I am very happy that it happened.  I over used the word “epic” a infuriating amount while there, but I have never seen a place to so inspire and embody the word.

So, the long of it:

My host sister avidly watches the Nepali version of Judge Judy.  I can’t understand the words, no, but it is exactly the same as the American version.  Same livid woman having a fit, lots of pointing and huffing.  Same bitchy, androgynous judge with masculine hair and glasses.  Same overly buttoned man shaking his head in furious disagreement.

I am watching an English language show that teaches people to speak Korean, on a Nepali channel, with a Tibetan family.  Whoa.

“Injee” they call me.  Foreigner.  Westerner.  The equivalent of “gringo”, but they don’t mean it with the negative connotation.  That is what we all get called, as if they don’t know our names. Ama-la smiles and nods whenever she catches my eyes.  The two gold teeth flash.  It is a moment of mutual acknowledgement.  She acknowledges that I am Injeee, and amusing.  I agree.  We continue.  Me reading, her bringing me unnecessary food.  She looks at me and speaks.  I turn to my host sister to translate.  “She wants you to eat a banana.  Please, please eat the banana.”  Ok….

I mentioned staring at candle flames and my penchant for it.  I reiterate.  The power was out.  It was dark and quiet and I was letting the language wash over me and staring at a candle flame.  And I thought- besides these blackouts, when was the last time I looked at a candle?  I was expecting to reassert how foreign this experience is.  But it is not.  The image of a flickering candle flame is so familiar.  I am stared at so many.  They draw my eyes and thoughts.  They have burned themselves into my memory.

So, my journey to Not-Tibet.  The pre-emptive title of my blog rears its head in an anti-climactic fashion.  Slight headache, light headedness, ect.  I wasn’t excited until we got on the tiny plane.  Roaring down the runway, watching the propellers, I just started smiling.  We flew through the deepest gorge on earth.  We would be high above everything, barely able to make out the roofs of villages fare below.  Then we enter a cloud.  When we move beyond it, suddenly there are mountains on either side, rising high above the plane.  It was mind blowing.  I stepped off the plane and just breathed in the mountain air, snowy Nilgiri rising in the background.

Then we start walking.

I started off day 2 thinking- I am a BAMF.  Ended it with- I am a wimp.  Confirmation from day 3: I’m a little bitch.  A fucking lame ass totally out of shape little bitch.  Oh my god, I almost effing died.  Hopefully this is the hardest day.  Cause I can’t keep doing this.  6 hours, 700 feet up.

I have such a crush on one of the guides, Ketom.  He plays the drum and sings and carried my bag when I was being the aforementioned little bitch.  He calls us “sister” and sprints down mountain sides.

Bear Grylls ain’t got shit on me.  Okay, that is a lie.  I have never drunk my own urine from a snake that I have killed and worn around my neck as a scarf in the mean time.  I do, however, have  blisters.  I feel like I should name them before I demolish them all, but I am too tired to come up with 9 fucking names.  I am in Gemi, watching a line of 8 children sit on each other in the dirt.  I met 4 of them earlier.  They followed us up a hill.  I showed them pictures in my book.  They snorted snot up their noses.  Their cheeks are red and cracked from the wind.  They have noticed me.  It is hard to write with 8 children on top of you.  Literally, on top of you.  They are dirty, these children.  But then, so am I.  We are camping, so my only shower has been the public water tap.  I shake them off and leave. I give my last band aid to a girl who shows me the cut on her finger.  Damn, I needed the band aid for my 18 million fucking blisters. We walk over rocks and through trees and  in wind and observe a turquoise river and mountains.  It was so beautiful I wanted to cry.  But you know me and crying.  We just don’t get along.

Yesterday afternoon we came to a place on top of the mountain, finally the very top.  It was exhilarating.  Amazing.  I sat on the edge of the cliff and watched the Himalayas continue the slow growth they have maintained for millions or billions of years.  I sat and thought “Who am I, here?”  The answer came to my mind immediately.   “No One.”     Absolutely no one.  It was a freeing thought and it made me laugh.

“I’m happy just because I’ve found out I am really no one.”

I’ll be back here, to Gemi, I thought, with its wind and its poplars and its silence.  Now I am not so sure and I am aware of the hyperbole of my above statement, but I hold on to the feeling.

I got 99 problems but a bitch ain’t 1.  My 9 blisters, on the other hand… I did not start the day off well.  Walking was agony.  I actually longed for my mommy. The people on the program could sympathize and they did.  But no one feels your pain like your mom.  She would tell me to take a break.  She would tell me to stop, because I shouldn’t do anything that hurts this much.  I bit back tears.  But I bucked up.  The end was actually fun.  Julie and Brian improved a song.  We went to a monastery.  Women greeted us with a traditional welcoming dance.  Tibetan religious art and décor is almost gaudy in its intricacy, but it possesses a humble, home-made feeling that is its saving grace.

“Into the caverns of tomorrow with just our flash light and our love, we must plunge, we must plunge, we must plunge.  And then we’ll get down there, way down to the very bottom of everything, and then we’ll see it, we’ll see it, we’ll see it”

Angnima-la, our Sherpa guide, is awesome.  He has a deep, gruff voice.  The Tibetans have nicknamed him The Tibetan Mastiff.  He has been to Everst twice.  He wears ridiculous turquoise pants, with flannel shirts and a backwards fanny pack.

In the Gompa, young monks chant and play music.  It is the same music that wakes me up daily in Kathmandu.  It makes me miss the room I sleep in.  Ah, a bed….

I want frozen yogurt and mango and granola.

There are goats roaming the chortens.  Ben and Brian juggle clubs.  Others play Frisbee with the porters.  There is an audience of young monks, not daring to join.  The Frisbee goes wide, up the hill.  A monk runs after it.  The ice is broken, the monks join in, the game is on.

We reach Lo Monthang.  The last 2 hours I am forcing myself to not break down into tears and fall onto the ground.  My feet hurt so bad.  No one wanted to be my roommate.  Mher.  In her blog, Bekah talks about her roommates.  She talks about how she is not 18 or she is less socially awkward than she thought, because making friends, getting along with people isn’t a problem anymore.  Well.  I am pretty fucking sure that I’m not 18, so I guess that says something about my social skills.  I am tired of trying to make friends.  Considering there are months left, I don’t know if that is a good thing.  It’s not awful or anything, really.  I just don’t belong to either or the distinct groups of friends.  I am tolerated, but not desired.  It is a position I have maintained before, and one I can live with.  But it is not ideal.

The King of Mustang served me warm tang….

Today we raced horses through the Himalayas in the restricted region of Mustang.  Fuck. Yeah.  Images of Alexa’s inner Mongolia experience mixed with bad trail rides flash through my head.  But today was probably the best day of the semester.  We explored caves used 2,500 years ago to protect villagers from Tibetan Terrorists.  My horse ran and I held on, having to pee because of bumps and the wooden saddle, and just laughed into the wind.

My feet are doing strange things.  I fear a mutiny.  I almost burst into tears multiple times yesterday.  There seems to be a pattern here.  The peaks just wouldn’t end.  You would turn a corner and see the top and think “okay, it can’t possibly be farther than that.  That is the top.”   Then you would get there and turn the corner and another peak loomed ahead.  We are so close to Jommsom.  But we aren’t going.  We are going up to Muktinath.  Up.  Fuck this.  I rode a horse for 5 minutes due to a misunderstanding.  I was the only student to do so.  The horse was a fucking bitch.  She tried to kick me as I got on.  She would stop and refuse to move.  Cool, ‘cause I don’t feel alienated enough.  Let’s make me the only one to not walk.  Awesome.  And everyone can watch?  Even better.  I keep imagining DC and even G-ville.  American conveniences.  Starbucks.  Bekah’s chilli.  Dad’s cookies.  Nice things.  Not the disturbing ripples in my toes or the wounds on my heels.  This is what you do when you walk for hours at a time.  Well, this is what I do.  See, I can’t hike and talk at the same time.  If I am going up, I can’t breathe.  If I am going down, I am concentrating on not falling.  I am the worst hiking-conversation-partner ever.  This just adds to my popularity.

We are in Muktinath.  I took the bitch way to get here, obviously.  This involved the quick n’ easy 4 hour hike to Kagbeni, then the hour jeep ride.  The back door to the jeep was held on with a luggage lock.  Isabelle just said “cuchi cuchi injee kin.”  I imagine this is Nepali, but still, WTF?  She tried to read during the jeep ride up the mountain.  The driver was the rural Nepali equivalent of a hipster.  He had a bandana, racing gloves, and a camo jacket.   There was porn tucked into the visor.  Angnima-la was hilarious, of course.  As soon as the jeep started to move he threw himself on me like a bomb was going to go off.  He would tap people’s shoulders and make faces at them.  He would bounce around like a small child.

Ketom left last night.  We had a dance party with all the porters and staff and scared away some Euro tourists.  Angnima stole the show with his dancing.  They asked us to sing.  All we could come up with was “My Girl” and “Alstar”, by smashmouth.  We don’t know the entire lyrics to any song.  I kicked ass at a Nepali card game.  There are two rival rap groups: Yak Attack and Lama Rama.  We have only seen the performance of one group, but it was hilarious.  Angnima-la gave us “mustang coffee” and “mustang punch”.  The punch was neon orange, with white chunks.

It is raining.  Everything is wet.  All my clothes, my sleeping bag.  Audrey droned on for hours about Mac n’ Cheese. Seriously, shut the fuck up.  There is nowhere to escape when you are on the side of a mountain.  I may have considered throwing her off said mountain side (why wouldn’t anyone want to be my roommate, I can’t imagine).  I feel like my feet are presenting their own version of the biblical plagues, informing me of their ever increasing displeasure.  No more possible area for blisters, eh?  Well take this.  Now my toes feel like I am walking on a cheese-grater, there are wrinkled as if I have been standing in water for hours.  My heels are scored with red lines, they do not bleed but are somehow constant open wounds.  We are leaving Muktinath.  We are staying in Muktinath.  We are blown about on the biting wind like the dust that stings my eyes.  It is cold and grey.  My mind is cold and grey.  I am tired.

“I’m not sure what the trouble was that started all of this; the reasons all have run away, but the feeling still exists; it’s not something I would recommend, but it is one way to live, ‘cause what is simple in the moonlight, by the morning never is.”

I remember winter in Nevada.  Getting home and smelling the fire, the warm cookies baking.  Dad coming in with newly chopped kindling.  His breath would rise in puffs of white air as he would stomp the snow from his boots.  What I wouldn’t do for that warmth and comfort.  Of home-made chocolate chip cookies on a couch with warm dogs and a crackling fire.  Or Bekah’s chili and some good bread. Or Thanksgiving dinner, things that just carry the feeling of warmth with them inherently.  Oh. My. God.  peppermint mocha from starbucks.  All of the good feelings associated with Christmas found in one cup.  Holy fucking shit. Mmmm…..

“I miss my old friends, I miss my old face, I miss my old mind, fuck this time and place”

The title of Pablo Neruda’s “Walking Around” has never seemed more applicable.  I know I am being over dramatic.  But seriously, the walking….  I prey to  my memories of comfort.  I think this may be home sickness.  It is the first time I have experienced its ilk.  It isn’t that bad, I don’t know what everyone complains about.  Lovely memories course through my mind like blood in my veins.

“And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance.  Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make.  It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.”

We reach Jommsom.  My first shower in two and a half weeks.  My hand tingles as I reach for the faucet.  It tingles, and then vibrates again.  I must be more tired than I thought.  I reach for the pipe.  Electrical shivers run through my hand.  Okay, it is not me.  It is the pipes.  What the fuck is happening.  Maybe the light is interfering.  I turn it off and reach for the handle again. Bbbbzzzzzzzzzzz.  My hand is shot through with electrical current.  I am naked and covered in soap.  What. The. Fuck.

On our one free day we are instructed that we must be up at 8 for breakfast.  We will then go on a hike.  Are you kidding me?  Nope.  We are told this while drunk at 9 the night before. Whilst on this hike we must cross a bridge.  It is covered with goats that also must cross.  They do not want to.  They are entirely blocking the bridge and yelling.  Thupten, our language teacher, picks one up and walks across, carrying its screaming body the whole way.  It stops trying to escape and just lets him carry it.  We cross and look back.  The goat herd is tossing goats on to the bridge.  I would be offended if it weren’t so hysterical.

Back in Kathmandu.  We have missed the Dashai festival, famous for many ancient rituals, the most prevalent of which is the robbing of unsuspecting tourists.  Second is goat sacrifices.  Leaving Kathmandu, we had seen the tops of busses covered in goats, moving in to the city.  They street children have procured firecrackers, which they let off with shrieks every five minutes.  I ask Julie what she thinks would happen if I yelled at one of the hobos that regularly tries to get our money.  She says I would probably get in a fist fight… unless they didn’t have any fists.  Most of the hobos are missing limbs.  I find this hilarious. I laugh for five minutes.  She feels bad, but honestly, if they could stop thrusting their deformed extremities in my face it would be great.  I can’t buy you a new hand.  I argue with a cab driver in the middle of a street, while dogs have sex against the tire.  There are razor blades in the street, and a buffalo is eating a sacred offering.  Dinner:  black porous tubes that smell like ass.  Bitter gourd or meat.  Either option is horrifying.  Answer: goat lung.  This is Kathmandu.  It sounds awful, but I am honestly amused.  At least it has personality.  Like getting punched in the face by a hobo, it is not necessarily something pleasant at the time, or something you would long for, but it is fucking awesome afterwards.

Conclusions:  So much is chance, and with or without choice, you must continue.  You can’t know what will happen, and you can’t know how you will feel about it when it does.  Breathe in and take things as they come, with a shrug of your shoulders or a blink of your eyes.  It continues.  It always continues.

“My soul wandered, happy, sad, unending.”

OM MANI PADME HUM

“So this is strange.  The dawning realization that all has gone wrong”

Pa-la broke out the English I didn’t know he had. “Chinese… no good.” I’m with you Pa-la, I’m with you.

I think perhaps I will blame Isabelle, even though it is not her fault.  Her and her fucking pinkies.

I choose to see this as a harsh Buddhist lesson in impermanence and the lack of inherent nature.  The truth is:  I will live.  It sucks but I will live.

All, however, is not lost.  On Wednesday we go to Mustang until the  10th.  We fly to Pokara, drive to Jomssom, and than WALK for FIVE DAYS to Mustang.  I hope someone is willing to carry me, cause that is what is going to end up happening.

SO, talk to you later.  If we do, in fact, go.

OM MANI PADME HUM

Lesson in Impermanance like whoa.

“I go so far as to think that you own the universe.  I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.  I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees”

“You don’t eat much.”  My host sister peers over her pancake to tell me, after scrutinizing my awkward attempts to eat soup with a fork.  Are you fucking kidding me?? I eat my body weight, and that of an average sized dog, every day.  I got served a conundrum for dinner tonight.  Ramen-esque noodles.  Cool, that is dinner food: check.  ….And a pancake.  Not bread that was like a pancake.  A legit effing pancake.  With nothing on it.  What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?

The nutrition facts on the Fanta bottle that is used to hold water list the amount of carbohydrates, protein, fat, and energy.  What the hell goes in to Asian Fanta?

I have a cup.  The same one, all the time.  It is an orange coffee (or coppee, as Ama-la calls it) with a cartoon elephant wearing a cap with and upside down “e” on it.  It says SUPER JUMBO.  I wonder if there is some hidden meaning.  If there is something in me, the strange foreign girl who only eats 18 pounds of food a day, that reminds them of a heroic and childish cartoon elephant.  …probably not. 

Apparently we have dogs.  News to me.  The family didn’t even tell me, my language teacher did.  He asked me “Any problem with the dogs?”  What dogs?  “The ones on the roof.”  No, those aren’t…. OH. Wait…. Those are ours?

He laughed.  Yep, apparently we have dogs.  I have never seen them, only heard them.  I have never seen anyone on the stairs to go up to feed them. 

“My mind is disconnected but my heart is wild.”

These kids from the program wrote acronym poems about Tibet and Nepal.  Here is a slice:

“T is for Tibet.  We are going to Tibet.” And “N is for Nepal.  Nepal is not America.  E is for extraordinary.  America is extraordinary.  P is for purple.  The Nepalese flag is red.”  One kid wrote his entire response paper to the book In Exile From the Land of Snows as an acronym.  His first sentence starts with an E, the next an X, ect.  He didn’t explain to the teacher what he was doing, or mention it in the paper. Hilarious. 

Kathmandu is host to wonderful cloud formations.  I am a sucker for a good cloud formation.  I don’t know why, but I completely dig particular forms created by moisture rising, holding, falling.  And Nepal has some fantastic clouds.  I am blessed by this kind of thing.  Nevada gets cool ones, DC too.  Maybe everywhere does.

We had to write a strange paper about various unrelated things.  One of the criteria was to relate a quote someone said about you studying abroad and relate it to traveling and relate it to a quote from the book we read about the Chinese occupation of Tibet.  I think I may have made it a bit too intense.  I am going to put a chunk of it here.  Warning: the quote I use from the book is pretty fucking disgustingly graphic.  Feel free to skip this bit. 

Question: do I put quotes around things I myself have written? I dunno.  Sure, why not?

“…The most common response was generally along the lines of “Oh, I hear it’s beautiful! … You are going to get sick.”  The statements came together often, and were always stated as fact — simple declarations about aesthetics of the local and physical determents sure to be encountered.  Both of these supposed facts depend on perspective.  Surely, the visual elements of geography are open to interpretation and beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  I don’t believe that anyone looking at National Geographic images of Nepal and Tibet would argue that they are not beautiful places.  Yet there is more to see than mountain peaks and pristine valleys.  What meets the eye in shiny magazine pages can be entirely different than the ripe images of poverty that accost your sight when stepping out of the airport.  Beauty can be found in the face of a malnourished child as well as field of wild flowers.  Sickness may seem less open to interpretation.  However, I feel that is not necessarily the case.  What sickness am I, and my fellow travelers whose experiences these comments are derived from, apt to experience?  From the perspective of those at home, comfy in their arm-chairs, the sickness may seem horrifying.  To other travelers, an unpleasant reality that must be dealt with, later to be turned into a heroic story of survival.  To people who have gone through worse travails than travel, what does altitude sickness mean?  What foul memories will afflict me?  I doubt they will be entirely related to physical sickness.  From my perspective, the afflictions that will torment me may be more mental, and related to knowledge, or the lack of it.  I know that anything I experience will pale in comparison to the collective and individual experiences of the people I am here to study. Of the many dire situations described by John Avedon in In Exile From the Land of Snows, one small anecdote has burrowed into my mind, finding residence and refusing to dissipate.

“One day Dr. Choedrak saw a Chinese inmate holding a long red worm in his cup.  Through a fellow Tibetan who spoke Chinese he asked where he had found it.  The man replied that he had defecated the worm in his stool.  Careful not to be caught by the guards, he had picked it out, washed it and brought it back from the toilet to eat- which he did that day mixed in with his other food.” 

What is traveler’s diarrhea or altitude sickness, or any of the other usual ailments, in comparison with this?  What is the sickness obtained from traveling, filled with whimsy and for my own pleasure, when you know sickness such as this exists?  When people tell me I am going to be sick, they are thinking of temporary physical discomfort.  They are not thinking of starvation in prison camps.  They are not thinking of the oppression and torment of many people.  They are not thinking of the effect on my mind of the knowledge of and personal contact with people who truly know what it is to be sick.  What makes me sick will not be tainted water, but tainted knowledge….. People think in terms of beauty and pain.  The comments I received are sure to prove correct.  I am certain that I will experience both in majestic quantities, although not necessarily solely in the manner in which the comment suggests.  Beauty and pain may be what I end up with at the end of this journey as.  A Tibetan folk tale documented by Sudhin N. Ghose states that “wisdom is a greater prize than all the riches of the earth, for wisdom sustains the universe.”  I would happily settle for returning with a slight measure of wisdom, opposed to suitcases full of souvenirs.”  I went slightly overboard, I know.

I am going to Tibet.  I would like to say something profound about it.  I got nothing.  I look at the sheet I am sitting on and stare at the printed blue flowers, searching for inspiration.  Nothing. 

Fucking. Blue. Flowers.  They haunt me.  I don’t get the connection between Tibet, blue flowers, and my frustrations, but there is a pretty big fucking correlation.

So, to Tibetan: adding a silent prefix can slightly change the pronunciation of a word.  Certain prefixes make the word higher and more nasal.  The easiest way to accomplish this is to concentrate on pronouncing the word in a more annoying manner.  Instead of “ngee” it is “slightly more annoying ngee!”  There are literally sounds that correspond with the Monty Pithon “knights that say NEE”.  A shrubbery?  What kind of shrubbery?  Ok, I’m done. 

Language, and sickness, and beauty.  That is the frame in which my thoughts are gathering.  A lama talked to us about conventional truth and ultimate truth.  These are different ways of seeing the world.  These things have meaning beyond the conventional sense.  Conventionally, the Buddha gave a sermon in Deer Park about the four noble truths.  Ultimately, there is no Buddha.  Coincidentally, there is no spoon…

As I have said (or typed, as the case may be) before, it is all about perspective.  It is all about timing.  Sickness, and beauty, and language fit into these.  Their definitions change, based on these.  They flicker like the electrical currents of Kathmandu, creating a moving, shifting light to be emitted from the bulbs.  Beauty is this, no this, no this.  It is perspective.  It is timing.  The currents have shifted again.  The power has gone out.  I don’t mean this as a metaphor.  I mean I am currently sitting in the dark.

I wander up to the living room and Ama-la gives me a light.  She lights a candle with the flashlight/ lighter that I almost lit myself on fire with yesterday.  She grabs the prayer beads and clinks each prayer away.  Om Mani Padme Hum.  How many times is this prayer uttered a day?  By this woman, Pasang, with her two gold teeth, who feeds me constantly, and utters “chu sabo shea” (drink your hot water… it is actually tea, but that is not what she says) like a mantra.  How many times is the prayer uttered at the stupa, by how many voices?  Thousands a day, if not more.  Thousands or millions of garbled syllables, released grudgingly from the throat, escaping the lips, floating up to tangle with the prayer flags, and continuing, dissipating, settling like dust.  Clink, clink.  The prayer beads move along their string and compassion is released like an in-drawn breath in to the incense heavy air.  Talk about beauty.  Talk about language.  Ha- talk about language.  You know, the ability to do just that is one of the things that defines us as humans.  It is called metalanguage.  There’s an anthropological tid-bit for ya.  You’re welcome. 

“Chu sabo shea. Chu sabo.”  I nod.  It is still scalding.  I pretend to sip and watch the steam rise from the cup, crossing the beam of the flash light. 

So: perspective and timing.  Will they be on my side in Tibet, or against it?  Hubet-la told us stories.  Of course.  The man is a walking volume of “well, once…” or “actually, I remember when…”.  What I gathered was a tag-line for our destination- Tibet:  Where shit goes wrong.  Perspective and timing will certainly play a role, whether they are mine, or our guide’s, or the Chinese government’s, or whether they belong to the universe at large, I don’t know.  Who can say?

“Ice age heat wave, can’t complain.  If the world’s at large, why should I remain?”

Clink. The prayer beads shift.  You can hear the space between each parcel of compassion and the next. What does Ama-la think as she moves the beads?  I will probably never know.  And that is okay.

“Words just on the far side of her skin, about to fall out. “

I haven’t mentioned my beloved paper cranes.  I still stand by my whimsical metaphor here.  It is just that there are so many of them.  They could fill the room and drown me, giving me paper cuts with their sharp beaks on the way down.  Culture shock is a giant paper crane.  Swoop.  It beats its wings with visible pressure and grace.   

Culture shock.  Oh dear.  That and the S curve are all GW gave us for study abroad.  And SIT too.  They provided a helpful list of symptoms:  If you don’t eat: culture shock.  If you eat too much: culture shock.  If you don’t sleep, if you sleep too much, if you have a headache, if you are irritable, if you are happy.

If you are in a foreign country and not in a coma, you are apparently suffering from culture shock.   Although, the coma, too, may be a result of culture shock.  Someone lost their pen.  I hope they have a full recovery from the bout of culture shock they are experiencing. 

“Chu sabo shea! Chu sabo.”  Yes, Ama-la.  I oblige and only scald my tongue a little.  Only swallow a few leaves. 

Today our academic director wears a ridiculous scrunchie.  As if a scrunchie is not bad enough, it is festooned with what can only be described as multi-colored “dingle-balls”.  That and her pinkie nails.  How am I supposed to take her seriously with something so silly attached to her head?

I sit in darkness and silence.  I am good at silence. I can sink into it, emit it from my shadow.  Silence is a whole other language.  It is slow.  It seeps.  It wallows.  It behaves like deep water.

What does all this mean?  Nothing.  It means that I am sitting in a dark, humid, smoke filled room, with a single light bulb and a singed tongue and the clinking noise of compassion. 

“Chu sabo shea.”  Okay, Ama-la.

I seem to be someone who stares at candle flames quite a bit.

I am surprised at the response to my last post.  Thank you, to all of you who say nice things about me and the way I write.  It is really very nice.  But it is not deserved.  This is not some great literary work.  I quoted Donnie Darko, for Fuck’s sake.  I think, perhaps, that I wrote something that people think of peripherally.  I just dragged it up front, and people recognized it as something true for them too.  That feeling of recognition is nice.  It makes you feel not alone.  Which I guess is nice if you are reading something about being alone. 

So:  Tibet on Monday.  “Around him the air was always fraught with possibilities.  ‘I like fraught air’.” 

I will collect flowers and fraught air and kisses and good thoughts for you all. 

OM MANI PADME HUM