Day 56, 57, 58, 59, 60

Some of my Tibetan experience, now. It's the morning of the twentieth, so I'm writing about stuff that happened four days ago...

What to say?

Lhasa is nice. The streets are busy - as the city is the centre of Tibetan Buddhism, there is a constant stream of visitors and pilgrims from the countryside. The town takes on a feeling of carnival, especially when a few thousands of tourists are thrown into that mix. I spent my time in the city with my three friends from Golmud - J and K, Americans (K a student of Chinese language studying in Beijing), and E (a Frenchwoman and consummate traveller). Those three people made such wonderful company.

J is a sarcastic guy. K is his girlfriend, a gentler soul, but very accommodating of her boyfriend. J tells really hilarious stories about being "just friends" with K for a whopping THREE YEARS. He's also got an impressive collection of stories detailing a plethora of romantic failures from his high school and college freshman years. His stuff is so wonderfully self-deprecating to be funny, but I can also identify with most of it. And while I play the self deprecation card with the driest of wit (I like my sarcasm to be undetectable), this dude is truly in love, and can diminish himself with a pleasant joie-de-vie. I hope to, someday, be able to tear myself down in such a way. K, meanwhile, endures J's sense of humor quite well, though since they've only been a couple for six months, maybe this is all new to her.

Wonderful stuff.

You (you?) have no idea how happy it makes me to see that goofy, NICE guy get his girl. THAT girl, specifically.

Wonderful stuff.

E, also, makes a superior companion. She's French, though to North American ears her accent sounds like something from Manchester, while Europeans usually place her somewhere in South Africa. She's a constant traveller, having visited all over, with a collection of fine stories to tell. She maintains a flat in Paris, and has promised me a few days tour when I pass through there next.

So...

The four of us visited some of Lhasa's sights, and ate some nice food together. With E, on the second day in Lhasa, I visited the Jokala, Lhasa's primary temple and the most important temple of Tibetan Buddhism. It's an odd place place - this sort of Buddhism is very intense when compared to Seon in Korea. There, temples are small places, sparsely furnished with visual intensity found only in the main temple halls which usually contain three rather subdued statues of the Buddha. The Jokala (and other temples), though, is a labyrinthine place with many random seeming furnishings and statues, with the smell of burning Yak butter permeating the place, with candles everywhere, with money stuck to every surface, with pilgrims circling the rooms, with beggars inside and out...

The bow here is more complete, we can say, than what is done in Korea; some of the devout have callouses on their foreheads from banging against the pavement outside the temple a few times too often.

Oh... there's also a pantheon of gods and deities and reincarnated monks and oracles. I'm not sure I'd be able to get behind a religion where the leader is a reincarnated god. Not sure at all. The fun thing about Seon Buddhism is that the most respected monks are those who are most intelligent and who can communicate ideas in the best way. These guys often live deep in the mountains away from civilization. Past Dalai Lama's, meanwhile, have lived Vatican style in a 1000 room palace in the capital.

Anyhow, yeah, the Jokala is a pretty intense place. More subdued was Same monastery, a quiet place located about five kilometres north of the city center. E and I reached that place by bicycle. The scene there is quieter, as I said, and more contemplative.

Two days after visiting Same, I got back to the big show of Tibetan Buddhism... that 1000 room palace. It's called Potala, and has been home to most of the incarnations of the Dalai Lama throughout history. It was pretty neat, but the admission ticket was steep (13 USD), for a self guided tour that included access to maybe 5o of those 1000 rooms. But hey, it included a peek at the Dalai Lama's bedroom....