Good-byes

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It's such an amazingly strange feeling to be completely surrounded by American English speakers after so long with people who don't speak English or speak it as a second or other language. You almost get overwhelmed. It's a bit nutty.

Apparently the place I'm in now has a systematic way of walking since it's so big. It's the Drepung Monastery where the first Dalai Lama lived as the head of 10,000 people. I'm just writing down some notices that I've seen between the Indian and Tibetan Buddhas. Tibetan Buddhas are made with gold paint and often have large eyes - appaerently emblematic of the 5th Dalai Lama. They also have long ears. Along the walls are paintings, often times black with gold outlines and red parts of the figures. In the temple itself are colored pictures of Bodhisattvas and monks in their daily activities with bits of gold paint here and there. If the Buddha doesn't have big eyes they often have a 3rd eye or bindi. They are also always decorated wtih clothes. On the outside the windows have blue, yellow, red and white striped curtains at the very top of the window. The doors are big and wooden with a brass knob and handle in the middle of the door. I love these doors. The Buddha's hair is often blue and they are often wearing elaborate crowns and there is often some kind of arthi made of yak butter in front of the Buddha. Over the place where people sit during the "mass" (not sure what the word is here) are a bunch of long round wreaths that have different colored painted arrows on top of each other with pews to kneel on underneath. (Note that I am no art historian this is just my feeling.)

Yesterday someone came up to us to ask if a place was open or not - in Tibetan. He asked Mathieu and Mathieu had no way to understand but just after he went running off I figured out what he'd asked - surprisingly through my Hindi. Tibetan and Hindi are quite different but they are similar enough to have some of the same words and sound alike enough for me to infer - just like it looks almost as if I can read Tibetan from my Hindi.

There comes a point for me where the travelling is too much too fast. Where the monasteries all look the same in some way or another, shopping becomes dull with staring at the same things or things I know the next country will have cheaper, when my legs are weary and I'm perfectly content to sit inside next to a cute kitty curled up in a nap and sip my jasmine tea as I watch the little kids go by outside and a man and his wife sit making prayer knots by hand as the man smokes and the woman walks around. It's too early to eat dinner and yet I don't feel like going back to my hotel so for now I sit here alone with the cat.

Of course knowing me it's the time when I'm peacefully sitting with the cat that I meet someone. This time it's a strange British man by the name of Dave. He seems to be very Buddhist but yet he said he hates Buddhists. He's in Tibet giong to all the major monasteries as a kind of pilgrimage. He's been to Nepal and lived in Sarnath, a town outside of Varanasi that I used to go to a lot. In fact he lived at the Tibetan monastery in Sarnath that I used to go to. He said at one of the monasteries in Tibet he went to see a sacred tooth and when he asked the monk the monk refused to say anything so he ended up having to hire a guide to translate. With a lot of coaxing the monk said the Chinese government had taken it away and hid it in the monastery. They tried to ask where but the monks couldn't tell them as they would get in trouble with the government. What a crazy thing! I also asked him about the debates and he told me they used to have really big debate competitions in Sarnath. He told me that I was wrong - it's the monks seating that make the arguments and the ones standing who do the rebuttle and it's mostly about religious philosophy. Healso told me why you rarely see Tibetans meditate. I told him I thought the act of going through a monastery and chanting while giving money to the Buddhas was a bit touristy but I liked the chanting a lot because it helps me meditate. He said the chanting was to be like a warm-up for meditation which was to be done alone but that some chanted as a kind of meditation. He seemed somewhat stuck in between leader and follower. he was in the British army in the medic unit which had a really low rank but he wanted a higher rank. He was a journalist and he did these Buddhist pilgrimages but didn't like Buddhists. It seemed a bit strange. To top it all off we probably talked for about 5 hours and in the end he was walking me to my place. We approached the temple near my hotel and he told me how strange it was that you always had to go round it the same way. Then he shook my hand and left. No contact left and a very short unexplained bye. Later I realized he couldn't break the tradition and go around the temple the wrong way to my hotel but still it was a very strange thing to do.

Around 8pm Vincent and Ernest came by but they ended up just saying good-bye to me as one of the Koreans was too impatient to wait for me to go to the Potala with them and they didn't want to come back to have a drink. The two of them invited me to call them when I'm in Beijing or Korea.

So all in all a large number of strange good-byes that I'm sure will be followed by many more.

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