Kaleidoscope days...

Ten days and counting...

Still haven't dusted off the suitcases: grades to hand in by Monday: endless stream of text messages: week slowly filling with appointments: clothes spilling out of the machine: chased down the Xianjiang bread man for breakfast for the next few days: dreams of an ice machine and air conditioning: Michael Jackson dead: what do I need to pack again?: the unexplainable meaning of the following exam responses pootbool, grashing my tar, farthing my time: tibetan words replacing english ones followed by shame at my total lack of chinese: visions of a place where anonimity reigns supreme because everyone else is white too, and if they're not they don't care: are they really going to give me a car to the airport?: my worthless students trying to cheat making me wonder why I bother trying to teach: watching time and coming to the conclusion that it doesn't really exist: this message from another student, although you are only ours english teacher one year but in my mind in the one year myself very thanks your student know you have a kind heart to our student however you are good teacher thanks you, in the one year teach a lot of thing to our! this time you go home cannot see but inward miss you also wish you happy everyday: will my body ever maintain a comfortable temperature?: what I have learned this year? what haven't I learned: made a waitress/cook squeal with joy after taking a picture with her: what if home isn't what I remember? isn't what I need it to be?: feel out of shape, need to get back on that bike and bear the heat for a bit: having suffered He is able to understand suffering: my sister traveling to United Arab Emeriates: and what about tomorrow?

These days my mind is a kaleidoscope, only not beautiful colors and patterns in an ever changing and increasingly fascinating array. More like if the kaleidoscope was filled with garbage and specks of light and in the hands of a fussy five year old.

Oh transition. You are what happens when the world goes round, now if only my mind would stop going round with it.

The inexpressibles

Cowbells from the wary herd making their way down the dusty street outside my window sound like windchimes to me. Each erratic note interrupting another to create a melody that testifies to the slow movement of the beasts.

A group of girl students and I crouch around a filthy tea house table in the growing dim of the room sipping sweet tea and talking about what a good husband would be like. They've asked me the question before, and remember every word of my answer: He must love J, he must be tall... but the first is most important.

I announce the final class of the year and hold my breath in anticipation for the chorus of joy... only to be met with silence. The students stare and one girl mutters: it's sad.

I crack the door to the school's English exchange to which I have been invited as a guest speaker only to peer into the faces of my own students, who have to listen to me twice a week for four hours, and who have chosen to use their free time to come listen to me some more.

Around a slightly less disgusting tea house table a student who is not one of mine asks about my family. One of my own students shyly interrupts and says, "I can introduce Ms. Kelly's family to you..." and proceedes to describe to the whole table everything I have ever said in class about my family. She gets every detail correct minus their names.

At the end of class a boy wordlessly approaches and hands me a paper, at my questioning glance he informs me that it is a drawing for me. It is a pencil sketch of obvious time and effort of the Potala Palace with two birds flying overhead, one bearing a banner with my name in English and Tibetan.

In the hallway I am followed by two more students. I slow my stride for them to catch up and they stumble over each other to beseech, "do not forget us".

A girl student dashes from her place in the hot dog stand line to catch up to me and press for some free time. She wants to introduce me to her family and to show me around her house before I leave. I assure her of a time and blink hard in the sunlight as she disappears again into the shade.

Interactions with students making their way through lives of which I am only a speck sound like miracles to me. Each erratic instance interrupting another to create a melody that testifies to the praise of the Creator.

The flight of the cabinet... and tales of home improvement

One day I woke up, blinked a few times, and realized that my apartment was a. filthy and b. cluttered. For a girl whose grandmother carried bottles of liquid cleaner and rubber gloves around in the trunk of her car, this realization was simply unacceptable.

So measures had to be taken. Step one: break a window and duct tape up some screen to provide air flow throught the apartment: SUCCESS. Step two: rearrange and clean the four square feet of space that is your kitchen in order to have room to put food items in there too rather than having all of your m&m's, crackers, and jars of beans exposed to the world. After the tragic loss of a few dishes: SUCCESS. Step three: look at the bare spot where the "pantry" bookshelf used to be in wonder. Step four: Buy a cabinet to fill the void and hide all the random junk which has very overtly been collecting dust in various corners of your home.

Yesterday I just had a feeling about step four. There was something in the air and I knew it was time. So after lunch with one of my Tibetan friends, Droma, we decided to tackle the beast and walked to the used furniture market in Lhasa.

I love this place; it's like a dream for the crazy, near busted, used to be something we can no longer tell what that was enthusiast. I often go to this street just to putter around and imagine where all that stuff came from. The stories that are scratched into the wooden tables, the memories that are stained onto a mattress, the history displayed in the cockeyed chair legs that defy gravity... all these things are just compelling to me. There is no other place in Lhasa where I would buy a cabinet, and probably no other place where I could afford a cabinet.

Knowing vaguely what I wanted, it didn't take Droma and I very long to find the piece of furniture which is now resting in my home. Allow me to describe this item to you: It's big, with a base coat of red, peeling paint. Four doors on which are painted some very obscure variety of flowers, fruit, and something that might be a mushroom cloud. Along the sides are small lime green frames with pink flowers arranged on it and the whole deal shows evidence of someone going to town with some puff paint and a bedazzaler for wood. In short: it looks like a trailer park at Christmas. I love it.

After some brief bargaining with the Uigher lady who's husband owned the shop we get it for a reasonable price of about 40 dollars. She assures us that it's not too big to fit on one of the bike trolleys and goes to fetch a slim little chinese man with a straw hat and a t-shirt tucked into his sweatpants that are pulled up past his waist who will cart it to my home for 2 dollars. He repeatedly assures Droma that he knows where my school is, we agree to walk and meet him there as my school is literally only a 15 minute walk away, like a 7 minute bike ride.

So picture this cabinet tied precariously to the back of a bike trolley being driven by a man less than half the size of the thing in the blazing Lhasa sun. As we walk behind the cabinet Droma says to me "Look at your furniture Kelly!" with an air of satisfaction to which I could only reply... "where is it going?" Picture my cabinet going in the clear opposite direction from the school.

"Oh your furniture!" and we take off in sprints after it, Droma with umbrella flailing, me with bag slapping against my back... we get to the intersection where it turned and Droma lets out a yell that put a stop to the man and our cabinet despite the fact that it was easily more than ten yards down the wrong street. A Tibetan girl and a white girl stand in the intersection motioning towards the correct street. A man with a cabinet motioning the other way. Two girls stomping in the intersection and making a show of anger than can clearly be seen from even that distance. A man with a cabinet turning around to catch up with us.

We put him going in the right direction and resume walking ourselves. Ten minutes later we arrive at the school. Thirty minutes later my cabinet does not. Forty-five minutes later it does not. "Oh furniture lagsha (lost)" we moan. Hot, sweaty, with other things to do than wait for this man to bike less than half a mile down the street Droma decides to continue to wait at the school while I, with another Tibetan friend on the back of my bike, go back to the furniture place to see if he just got lost. We arrive at the same lady's shop and she acts like she's never seen me before. A phone call to Droma who takes a taxi to meet us there changes all that.

As I rest on a used mattress playing games with two small Uigher girls and teaching them to write my name in English, Droma lays into this woman with the full force of angry Chinese: "where is the furniture? Call that man! You don't have his number? You told us to use this man, maybe you are just trying to take our money. How about you give us our money back and when he comes we'll pay you." At that suggesstion the lady calls the man.

She calls the man who, get this, has been sitting at the wrong school gate for now well over an hour. By the time that we have said our goodbyes to the Uigher children and arrived back at my school we find the man and our cabinet parked in the shade reading a paper. Fifteen minutes later it's inside my house.

Total time elapsed for the completion of step four: three and a half hours. Three of those hours was spent on a joy ride for my cabinet.

Life is exciting isn't it? Now year round I can enjoy the flash of a trailer park at Christmas and ruminate on the furtherance of my home improvement plans...

It's not the end...

But it's close people.

Here are signs that you know you're nearing the end of the semester (I think some of these are universal):
-Your students begin to sigh heavily as you ask them to turn to a requisite page in the book.
-You seriously contemplate instituting a mid class mandatory "nap" time.
-You start joking that you will beat anyone who uses present continuious when we are ONLY working on simple present.
-Your students start to say "chicken" instead of "kitchen" because they know it will make your eye twitch.
-You have threatened to fail an entire class, and even though you probably will end up doing that, it won't matter because the school will pass them anyway.
-Noodles become a great option for lunch and dinner... and hey, why not for breakfast?
-You take two and half hour naps on a regular basis, despite the fact that you really don't have that much time to spare and you slept for a full ten hours the night before.
-Your students begin to tell you how much they will miss you this summer: so so much.
-You have to pause for breath after the third AND fourth flights of stairs.
-You get excited by the marked improvement that your students' english is showing across the board and fall into borderline depression at the students who seem to somehow have regressed.
-It begins to strike you as maddness that flip flops are considered slippers and therefore unacceptable to wear in public.
-In fact, just about everything begins to strike you as maddness...

Yes ladies and gentlemen, the end of the semester, or at least my sanity, is nigh...

How to smell like a temple:

The short answer: walk down the street.

This month is Tibetan Sacadawa. The month where anything good you do earns one million times the normal merit, and anything bad earns one million times the normal demerit. The month where people avoid eating meat because killing an animal causes too much demerit. The month where the incense fires are lit round the clock and smoke blots out the sky. The month where most people are dizzy for all the circles they've walked clockwise around some building. The month where they celebrate the birth, death, and buddhahood of buddha himself.

The slightly longer answer: agree to go with some friends to the Jokhang Temple the day before the most auspicious day of the month.

The Jokhang Temple is perhaps the most important temple in all of Tibet because of the buddha statue that it houses given from the Chinese wife of their most famous king. Year round it gets pilgrims from all stretches of the Tibetan peopled world. On the day that I went, half the population of Lhasa also decided to go.

The outer courtyard was deceptively quiet, because once past the gate it was a buzz of motion and activity. Masses of people, pushing, edging, chanting, even prostrating their way around the temple up to the main altar. Monks shoving the filthy hoards through the lines, endless pouring of butter into the lamps lighting the musty darkness, the choking sting of incense, the grabbing of anything that might steady one on the butter slick floor. Room after room of idols.

Enter one white girl into such throb of humanity, squeezing between the devoted and a pillar decorated with human teeth.

Dodging the blessing of one monk, only to be offered a kada by another, only to be handed a bag contaning some barley that had been offered to the buddha statue, only to refuse all of the above to the sincere bafflement of everyone present. Small children cling to mother's skirts as a drowing person in a flood. Wrinkled clawed hands reach out for help up from the floor after a few crowded prostrations. The six syllabal chant becoming the metronome of life within as even the temple walls seem to thump in its rythym.

A distinct metalic rattling of chains sends chills like blades of ice through ones bones. My imagination? No. Surrounding every door to every room of idols are literal chains, curtians of heavy iron chains.

He brought them out of darkness and gloom and broke their chains apart.

And yet they remain in darkness and gloom surrounded by chains.
I'm still washing the smell out of my hair.

The wheels on the bus go round and round...

The buses in Lhasa have got to be unique worldwide.

They are typically beige or royal blue rudimentary affairs with sliding windows and seats for maybe a dozen passengers but often contain far more squeezed into every crevice. Each one is decorated with pictures of protector deities and tinsel (popular year round in Asia) and blares some mildly desirable Tibetan pop tunes. There are two bus staff: one a sweaty and disgruntled driver and the other a bored school child who opens the door, shouts the name of the destination out the window at wary passerby, and collects the requisite two kuai per passenger. Basically if you can spray paint some numbers on a bus and drive on the known (but not necessarily posted) routes then you too can be in business.

I have come to know and love the buses, particularly after having cracked the code on how to stop them: mutter a “di gik carona” and point your lips at the desired spot. So I have stopped really being intrigued by them.

Until today friends. I get on the fairly deserted bus as usual. I silently berate myself for picking the first empty seat (empty because it was in the blazing sun). I notice with mild interest that the music on this bus happens to be in English, rare but, unfortunately, totally unsavory. The school age girl collecting money puts two and two together and realizes that a.) this music is in English, and b) this girl (me)speaks English and so begins to chatter on to me in loud and clear Tibetan (a blessing for any language learner) because even though she can recognize English she can’t speak a word.

Somehow she knew that I was a teacher at the Teacher’s College and a few exchanges later comes to know the extent of my Tibetan language understanding: not much. Yet somehow as we near the school she begins to insist something to the effect of: go around another time. I was confused and before I knew it I was sitting between her and the driver she was jumping off to buy me a bottle of water and for the next hour I rode with them the entire bus route.

I got to yell the destination out the window at passerby. I got to laugh at the children who would get on and turn the place into a jungle gym. I got to shake my head viscously at the other suicidal drivers and mutter ‘nyoombarisha!’(crazy). I got to sing along to Chinese, Tibetan, and yes even English pop songs with the driver. I got to wave and taunt other bus drivers as we passed them in the street. I got to talk to this girl about the weather, her job, her family, and where she was from. I got to exchange my phone number with my first total non English speaker. I got to ride for free.

When the second time to get off came around I almost missed it… because they didn’t want to let me off. I had to meh meh (no no) and guchi guchi (please please) until they laughed so hard the driver couldn’t help but stop.

So long story short, this afternoon I lived the dream people. I was part of the bus driving world, and, let me just tell you, the bus riding world will never be the same.