So there we were at the entrance of our first ever Tibetan Buddhist monastery. I'm not really sure what kinds of preconceptions any of us had about it, and the culture of the area. It's one of those topics, you know, the sort of thing everyone has heard of, but most people know nothing about, and are nevertheless attracted to it because of this discrepancy. I tried to keep my mind clean of it all, and just accept whatever was inside.
Once we were inside, it was immediately a beautiful place, and we all immediately wanted to flaunt the rules in regards to photography. I snuck into some backrooms, and got a few shots, shown here, as well as a couple shots around the corner of the doorframes of the central main room:
We all did our best to take pictures of a few things in the facilities, and were all ultimately told to quit doing so. A few of us, myself included, were even given monk supervisors to follow us into every room we went into, making sure we didn’t take any photos of anything. What this meant for myself was that I could no longer pay attention to what I was looking at, and apparently I missed some starkly eerie rooms, containing photos of suicides and immolations, amongst other horrific images. I’m not sure whether it’s a bad thing that I ended up missing on these things, but in any event, here’s a couple of the photos I took before having been assigned a monitor:
After we accidentally made a full loop around the town, I ended up conversing with one monk in particular at length, a guy that made me think of a sort of Charlie Brown meets Tibetan Buddhism. I asked him politely if he’d take a picture with me, and he gave me his consent, so Christine did the honors, and here we are:
I could see my other friends filing out of the monastery from where we were, so we headed on over there, and all started heading up the hill to where we first had entered the area of this monastery town, and our drivers were nowhere to be found.
Panic was on the verge of setting in, when we were told that for whatever reason, our drivers were actually hanging out further up the road, so we just had to climb further up the rather steep incline to find them. Sure enough, another pee break and smoke break was ensuing when we found them. Randomly, before we got in again, a Tibetan Buddhist monk ripped past us all on a Harley Davidson Roadster sort of motorcycle, which we were all in unanimous agreement was one of the coolest things that could possibly be conceived of in our world.
Monks Without a Cause aside, we got back in and got ready to go back “home”. On the way back, which was decidedly more sleepy, we were taken to a couple more scenic spots, including one place where the Yangtze river and another river converge, resulting in a visually stunning melting of blue and brown, and a couple photos were taken there as well, as seen here:
The scenic spots might sound like they were action packed, but they really weren’t. We were at each one for less than ten minutes, so, because of this, I was feeling a little antsy, as though we hadn’t really gotten our full money’s worth out of this endeavor, so while consulting my Lonely Planet Southwest China guidebook, I made the decision to ask our drivers to stop by at a village that was on the road back anyhow, that was apparently famous for its pottery.
We did exactly that, and we happened to show up when this village’s master potter was at work on yet more pottery, which is probably a far more common occurrence than it sounds at first, as their entire livelihood is made off of this pottery; he’s thus probably at work pretty much 24/7. It sure seemed cool to me, though, and after getting a decent glimpse of this, I walked around the village a bit seeing if I could find some small portable mugs that I could take back home with me. They had pots and tea pots and jars and everything else you could imagine, BUT NO FRICKING TEA CUPS! That annoyed me, but what can you do? The pottery certainly had a distinctive smile, and it would have made a nice souvenir, but life goes on.
The sun had just completely set by this point, and we had one last stop to make before heading back to Shangri-la proper, and that was the house of the driver of my van, a supposedly standard Tibetan house.
It was pretty close by to that last village we had stopped at, and it was really big. The stairs leading into it were as high as a lot of houses I’ve seen (minus their roves, but basically one story of stairs). Mean sounding dogs from somewhere in the darkness of this guy’s lot barked out at us in a not particularly friendly way, causing us to hurry up the steps a bit quicker than we might have gone otherwise. Inside, we were treated to a variety of traditional foods from the area, particularly their bread, yak cheese, and yak butter tea.
Yak butter tea is almost exactly what it sounds like. Its tea, with a huge lump of butter mixed in for good measure. It tastes nothing like tea, and everything like drinking melted butter. For a person with taste buds as limited as my own are to get through a cup of this is no small task, but I felt at the mercy of the language barrier to be as polite as possible and make every effort I could to actually imbibe the stuff. The cheese was actually pretty tasty, as long as you ate some with sugar on top. Otherwise, it too was almost inedible, sour like you can only imagine. With the sugar, though, and a strip of the flat bread, it made for a good snack. I wish I had taken some photos of the food, but after the driver made me put some flour into my yak butter tea, and use my fingers to swirl it around til it all became a paste not unlike the taste of regular Cheerios, I felt I should probably keep my fingers as far from my camera equipment as possible. Here’s a few photos I managed to shoot off before getting Tibetan Cheerio paste all over my hands:
After the erstwhile feast, we played dress up. Or rather, three of us did, and the rest of us stood around pretending to be amused as best as we could manage. Sarah, Julie, and John were suited up by the driver, his wife, and other family members in all sorts of traditional Tibetan regalia, and many photos were taken, though not by me, as I was finally becoming rather weary, and my attitude towards the driver had shifted as the day carried on.
The guy was personable to a fault, and after being plied all day by Sarah, he was even more forward than he might have been otherwise, with some joking attempts made at having her become his third or fourth wife. Aside from Sarah, the guy also really liked talking to me in particular, perhaps for the novelty of having a blond guy to speak in Mandarin with, I don’t know. His straightforward jovial manner was winning at first, and it was hard to not laugh when he was dancing along to some Tibetan pop while driving.
But his escapades with Sarah in particular had really gotten under my skin. Interestingly enough, prior to this day in particular, I had a decent opinion of Sarah as a person, but events transpired in such a way that I could never look at her in the same way again. At the monastery that we had visited earlier in the day, apparently, she had flirted with a monk, and even exchanged phone numbers. She exchanges phone numbers with guys all the time, in a flailing attempt to assert her sexual appeal, probably due to a lack of self confidence, so normally it’s something to be expected and ignored, but this was crossing a line, as, despite the lack of regard all of us had for the rules on photography, when we were breaking rules, we were doing it out of a desire to be able to carry a piece of this culture with us beyond those moments to respect and cherish.
However, the text messages sent back and forth between this monk went to a whole unbelievable level of inappropriateness, and I just couldn’t handle it. So her traipsing around in Tibetan female dress, talking about going horseback riding the next day with the driver, just kind pushed me into a bit of a funk, which I tried to beat out with more consumption of cheese and bread and Tibetan Cheerio paste. My stomach had still not totally settled from the overnight bus ride, so I also braved the outdoors, with the theoretically chained up dogs barking from the shadows, and relieved myself in an open field with cars passing by not all that far off, though far off enough that they certainly wouldn’t be able to see me, no matter how white I might be.
Finally, it was 9:30pm, and we still wanted to get back to town to enjoy the core of Shangri-la at least a little, so I made the decision to start rounding people up, and to thank the driver for his hospitality, but really, we should be going now. We each rounded up a bit of cash, and gave the household about 200RMB to compensate them for the things they had shared with us, and were on our way. The plan was to get back to Shangri-la, get a real solid meal, and then maybe see some music or something, as that guy back at Barley had informed us that there would be some good music in a studio-cum-café nearby. When we actually got there, we were told that we really kind of had to go to that studio first, as it was already getting a bit late. So we walked down some random back alleyways of Shangri-la’s old town, with him showing the way, wondering if we were being led to some untimely demise. Here are some photos of that:
Not too surprisingly, he didn’t lead us to a shallow watery grave, but instead an actual music studio/café, and we sat down at a long table, had some Shangri-la red wine, a couple of beers, some popcorn, and were treated to an intimate musical performance by a man who had spent some time crafting his own natural microphone/instrument, something that looked a bit like a way oversized ping pong paddle, that he held against the side of his face to help project his voice while singing musical interpretations of Buddhist scripture, and occasionally beating it as a drum. His voice was absolutely beautiful, and gave me a sensation that I had only ever felt once before at a music performance, when I saw the musician Ani Difranco in San Diego at Copley Theatre. It was a feeling of transcendence, and for a time, we were in another world, or, at least, I certainly was. It seemed as though even the wild dogs of the area (and there were a lot of dogs roaming the streets of Shangri-la’s old town) stopped barking to listen to his song.
After a time, he was joined by a woman who came down unexpected from some stairs holding a small candle aloft, gracing us with her own song as well. Hers didn’t have quite the same feeling his did, but that’s not to be considered a fault, as she still certainly had a lovely voice, and when the two of them inevitably joined in a duet, it was all that you could ever ask for in a song, and I was truly moved.
When they finished their collaborative melody, the performance was over, seemingly as soon as it had started, but to little fanfare. It came to pass twenty minutes later that I finally found out that we had heard all that we would hear, though the male singer had picked up a djembe, and started doing a bit of hand drumming with another fellow. The mood at this moment, to me, was almost like Cheers in Tibet, and I was true and relaxed. Here’s a photo of the venue, if you could call it that:
The ending point of our drum circle came, and it was clear enough that we had finished, and we received applause from everyone. I got a comment or two from my group of friends, but not nearly so much as I imagined I might, in my moment of self-centricity. Nevertheless, I felt fabulous, despite the fact that my hands felt as though they had been tenderized like chicken breasts.
I sat back down, and had another glass of wine, and we laughed into the next hours of the night, with Jill at some point getting up and dancing some strange mixture of Tango, mystic, and impromptu with the same man I had just drummed with, and after we all clapped along for a while to create a beat, it was clear that too had come to a natural end, and we all knew it was time to finally get a decent meal in our bellies.
(Jill dancing in the dim light)
So that same guy with the quixotic relationship with the Barley Hostel took us over to a pretty standard kind of single dish Chinese restaurant, where I finally get to have a yak meat meal, which I had been looking forward to this whole time. I’m not very adventurous with food in general, and this was as adventurous as it was going to get for me, most likely, and I was thrilled. So I ordered some yak fried rice, and much to my horror, it was crap. The yak meat came in small little strips that were salted all to hell, and had basically no taste worth mentioning. I asked for a couple of skewers of barbequed yak, hoping that they’d taste better, and in fact they did, making up for my disappointment a bit. The meals for everyone else were mostly what they expected, though John had the same problem I did, and in the moment of his disappointment, his frustrations of the day unraveled a bit, as he related to me the experience he had had of resting his head just below Sarah’s stinky feet, with the Chinese family just behind him with their stinky tofu, being utterly unable to sleep, and then having a bit of a funky day throughout other parts of the day as well. I did my best to disarm his frustration a bit, as I myself was still on a high from the musical experience, and I felt it went well enough, though I never really fully know what’s going on inside that guy’s head.
We finished our meal, and were ready to hit the sack, when Sarah suddenly tells me that she doesn’t feel comfortable having the drivers take us home, as they had been drinking while we had been eating, and she was concerned about their ability to drive functionally. To her credit, she’s had a bad experience in the past related to this, and I told her that that was fine, though I was still going to go with the drivers, as I didn’t know how to communicate tactfully what she wanted in Chinese to them, and we were in fact going to rely upon them for a ride the next day.
Another half day of fun the next day, as at some point in the day, while everyone was having oodles of fun, it was decided that we wouldn’t leave Shangri-la early in the morning, but rather later in the afternoon, so we could get some horseback riding on the Tibetan Plateau under our belts as well, so I wanted to stay on good terms with them. I also felt, personally, that little could go wrong in the dead silent streets of Shangri-la, even at their drunkest. So I wished Sarah good luck, and my roommate Lauren accompanied her, while the rest of us staggered into those minivans one last time for the day, and headed home.
Shortly after getting into the vans again and driving off, we end up seeing a taxi on the side of the road, with Sarah outside of the car, as well as another one of the girls, and something clearly wrong. I was squished into the wrong side of the van to get out and see what was going on, and it was a bit hectic to figure out what was going on. It didn’t look good, and I thought for a second that maybe they were going to get in our vans after all, but I guess that really wasn’t an option in their mind, so whatever went down, we started driving off again.
It was a short ride from there to the hostel we were actually staying in. I was a bit worried after seeing what had happened with Sarah and the other girl, so I waited at the gate to make sure they got back safely. Everyone else retired to their rooms, and a few minutes passed by. Jill came out at some point to wait with me. Sarah and the other girl showed up after this, and Sarah stormed past me without a word, and I was absolutely baffled. Jill went after Sarah. The other girl comes up to me, and I try to ask her to try and keep Sarah from being too loud, as it seemed like she was drunk herself, and this particular hostel was not really loud-person-friendly.
That other girl, however, took me completely off guard. She was utterly displeased with me, and, the long and the short of it is that she thought I had been basically a jackass. She said a variety of things I don’t care to repeat, but basically at that moment it wasn’t clear that we were friends anymore, and I was extremely unnerved by this situation. Tossed in for good measure, she told me that Sarah accused me of touching her in some vague inappropriate way, which baffled me even more.
I wasn’t prepared for that at all, and I stood speechless as Lauren waited momentarily to see if I had a response, before walking away to go try and get some sleep too. I was shellshocked, and stony in my response.
I didn’t dare go back in to the hostel at that moment, as I didn’t feel there was anything good that I could encounter. Instead, I sat on a random piece of detritus beside the gate. After just a few minutes, Jill emerged from inside, and gave me a long hug that was pretty well-timed. She spent the next fifteen minutes with me outside of here, in the bristling cold, before I was calm enough to go back inside the hostel and try to sleep. All the while, Sarah called and text messaged me repeatedly, saying she needed to talk to me. However, I felt that nothing good would come out of this either, and so I ignored it for the time being. Inside the courtyard one of my other friends let me know Sarah was looking for me, as if I wasn’t already well aware of that fact. I went into my room anyhow, pretty much straight to my bed, and tried to pretend that it would all go away when I woke up.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment