Just when I feel like I'm starting to understand things around here it's like life moons me and runs away laughing...
...and all of my best guesses about what's going on are so far off the mark it's like I showed up at target practice with a monopoly game instead of a bow.
And I realize that I've somehow gained admittance to this amusement park for the hilariously ridiculous... Today's ride: Folly's Ferris Wheel.
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The classroom full of students back from a semesters worth of practice teaching and two month holiday were all lined up ready to get on. They had come to the first day of class prepared with maybe a dozen sheets of paper and about three pens between the forty of them. I couldn't help but grin along with their innocent faces of dismay and their blundering attempts to remember what the meaning of school was along with where they had left all of their materials. On an assessment test a student wrote: He is skart. Folly gleefully collected tickets.
A break between classes was just enough time for my dear beggar friends to catch sight of me and shout out 'Hello hello how are you?' as though my name was 'Hello'. We went shopping for some snacks and I asked them about their family before meeting two colleages for a lunch of fried lettuce and the Sichuan equivalent of fatback. I found the thrill of the upward swing of the ferris wheel too compelling to take the nap that I wanted before my afternoon class. At the break a teacher from the neighboring classroom came over and sniffed me, asking me about my scent brand. The only thing I could smell was burnt oil from lunch. Folly, waving at us from below, had let my colleage into the same bench with me on today's ride.
After class I was dragged through the ferocious wind and freezing weather over to where the entire staff of Lhasa Teacher's College was planting very large, bare looking sticks they called trees. Nearing its climax, the ferris wheel swung wildly in the breeze. The leaders passed out shovels and shouted orders. I was given a tree that made me feel dangerous and my face chapped from the cold. Teachers pushed the great gusts of dusty wind around the mutant trees lying in shallow holes. We laughed, ate and bathed in the dirt, and two shovel fulls and a dozen pictures later I proclaimed my exhaustion and cold and headed in, begging a teacher just arriving to plant a tree in my honor. From the height of her great wheel, we could hear Folly's contagious laughter echo as she turned it. We, teased into amusement ourselves, caught our breath at its downward swing.
I returned a veritable dust monkey just in time to receive a bag of stale breads and hard cheese from a student who I insisted joing me for dinner. Over a bowl of noodles like the Tibetan cure for cold we made grand plans for things we must do together in this our last semester. We sipped tea and discussed Losar traditions, we leaned back into wooden benches covered with stained towels and she described her month long hospital stay, we zipped our jackets and pulled back the heavy door blanket to make our way back to campus. I saw the shadow of Folly urging guests off of her ride to make way for the legions of others crowding to get on.
A quick stop at a couple of colleagues' apartments not far from my own and our ferris wheel bench neared the ground. We laughed breathlessly at pictures from the afternoon's tree plant on a computer and talked about how filtly we were from it. I looked the impatient Folly imploringly in the eye and asked gently, hopefully, won't you let me go around just once more...
She, errupting into laughter, of course consented... You are a forienger in Lhasa, your ticket never expires... she merrily explained.
