Coming soon...

Just a quick update before I leave China and head off to Thailand in a few hours....

Animals ridden: 3

Cities visited: 8

Friends met: 24

I can't wait to show you the pictures, tell you the jokes, relate to you the shock and diversity of this amazing country... 

Maybe when I get to Thailand I'll have a chance... if not only a few more weeks till I'm back in Lhasa and you'll get the whole deal. The whole deal. So get ready... set aside a few days... I'm going to need that at least to debrief myself. 

LOVE

-Kelly

What lies ahead?

Preparing to go on approximately two months of travel around South Asia with nothing but a borrowed backpack full of semi-dirty clothes leaves me with only one sentiment:

here we go again.

8 cities, 3 countries, 2 months... insane.

Honestly, despite the fact that I know it will be fun and I know it will be a chance of a lifetime to visit so many interesting places with friends, I'm dreading it. Can I please be settled for longer than three months? Can I please be settled at all? How much more culture shock can my body handle? Is it really wise to go from unfamiliar to extremely unfamiliar?

Tomorrow morning at 11am when the first train of many pulls away from the platform I guess I'll find out... sigh. Learning to trust is so difficult.

**************************************************

On another note: here are some great quotes from the past few days, I can't resist putting them up...

"We give you Tibetan name 'Dan Zeng Sang Mo" meaning girl with a good heart."
-Students from class 4

"I know nothing about cow gestation."
-Christiane

"If it is my birthday will you say 'Merry Soba-mas'?"
-Soba

How many monks does it take to put up a shelf and other questions...

How many monks does it take to put up a shelf?
Well, considering that wall shelves are almost unheard of (due to the fact that all the walls here are concrete) and considering the fact that your average Tibetan does not have enough stuff to need additional shelves anyway... it takes two monks, one meteorologist, and about half a dozen day laborers... and one white girl with an odd request.

How many butter lamps does it take to honor the death of the founder of the Yellow Sect of Buddhism?
More than I could count, not that I had a chance to count last night in the midst of great crowds of all manner of humanity shuffling around the Jokhang Temple to the low, haunting blasts of Buddhist temple horns and through clouds of incense smoke thick enough to block out the sky and choke the careless breather.

How many times must we come face to face with the movement of Him who is invisible before we stop being amazed?
???

How you know you're clueless or living in another country part 2...

"How to cause a scene" A play of yesterdays's adventures in two acts....

Act One: "How to cause a scene" in a tea house.
Set: Enter a somewhat dingy, smoky tea house. In a corner next to some yak hair curtains sit some uncomfortable wooden benches covered in only slightly more comfortable fabric and animal fur. Surrounded by the benches is a square table painted every color of the rainbow except orange.

Scene 1:

Me: sip some warm sweet milk tea from an orange cup that has just been poured from an orange thermos. "How do you say 'orange' in Tibetan?"
Drolker: "orange color?" exchange some unintelligible conversation with Wangmo. "We need look in dictionary."

Scene 2:

Wangmo: removes from bag an impossibly large and tattered dictionary, searches through entries. "Orange color is not here, only orange food."
Drolker: "I ask this nun." points at a lady not too far away.

Scene 3:

Drolker: Walks over to nun. Some heated discussion, shaking of head, and finger pointing. Waitresses, and various bystanders join in... more shaking of heads, more finger pointing, the whole crowd turns to stare at the foreigner who asked the question... Drolker walks back to table, whole tea house involved now... "They don't know."
Me: stunned silence

Act 2: "How to cause a scene" in your apartment building
Set: Enter the front of an old concrete apartment building on the edge of campus. Crumbly stairs, dirty smell wafting in from the bathroom building nearby, bike rattling crazily over the tore up pavement. Home.

Scene 1:

Me: breathing heavily from the long bike ride back up the hill...
A dozen or more of my students: appear out of nowhere "Ms Kelly, we have waiting for you a long time!"
Me: Why?
A dozen or more of my students: "To celebrate with you Christmas!"
Me: mildly confused
ADOMOMS: "We have gift for you! We come to your home!"

Scene 2:
Set: Inside my tiny apartment littered with tests to grade, half finished projects, cups etc. And now a dozen or more of my students crammed onto the sparse furniture.

ADOMOMS: Get up one at a time to wrap my neck with the traditional honorary Tibetan white scarves called Kadas... each one saying as they do it "Mary Kisstmas"
Me: sweating under a pile of scarves, inwardly stunned and outwardly breathless "Thank you! thank you!"
ADOMOMS: "And Ms. Kelly, we have this gift..." open large bag that mysteriously appeared out of nowhere, place in my lap and on table two faux yaks. "This one boy yak, this one girl yak."
Me: totally confused but ecstatic "I LOVE THEM!"

Things that just blow the mind...

No, friends it's not just the fact that today I walked by a man blow torching a dozen legs of some large beast as they rested in the muck and mire of the street. Remind me not to eat there.

And it's not just the phenomenon that I can look out my window at what appears to be a tropical paradise for the intensity of the sunlight, only to open my door to the blistering cold.

Or how about the way that an old women peeing on the corner of a busy intersection attracts zero attention but the white girl who almost trips over her cannot seem to get out of the spotlight.

And it's not even the incident after giving the final exam to some students in class two where myself and two boys (one of whom was the class monitor) were locked in the classroom on the second floor of a building which was basically deserted at that time in the evening and which the only window looked down a frightening two stories to remnants of some long forgotten construction project and shards of glass. Of course not a single one of the other thrity-eight students in the class would answer their phones and every single one of the teachers (aside from me of course) was in a very important meeting and would call me back later. A hair-raising 20 minutes later the benevolence of some stranger, who heard our shouts from the window, freed us to continue our lives. If I ever find out who locked us in...

Nor is it the reality that twists of fate prompt deeper relationships almost within a heartbeat. Today after the exam there was a meeting in the teacher's lounge, no rest for a foreign teacher there, so having nothing to do I headed towards my home past the football field where, low and behold, half of the students that I teach were resting. They, sheepishly, called me to come and sit with them, which I gladly did and had an extremely interesting conversation with about a dozen of my students who I have not had the opportunity to speak to much. Opportunities here seem to lie in wait around every corner, but don't blink or you'll miss them.

It's no single one of those things that blow my mind... it's the combination. And what a combination it is.

Classroom Christmas Carols... you should hear this