TALK: The Green Mountain College Blog

It was a beautiful place—with plenty of great artwork and amazing examples of stupas, but we took so many notes due to the uniqueness of said artwork that my hands hurt.

Here's a picture of some of the stupas we saw.

The artwork was particularly detailed, and since absolutely everything in Tibetan Buddhist art has symbolism in it, there was a lot to learn. Oy the subtleties!

There was a rather large bell hanging from the doorway of part of the monastery that was really neat. Everyone who passed it rang it one or more times, which naturally inspired a few questions from our group. Evidently, people believe that by ringing the bell they are sending a message directly to Shakyamuni Buddha. As our professor Jim put it: “It’s sort of like an instant message to the original Buddha. By ringing it, people are saying: ‘Yo. Shakyamuni! I’m chilling down here and I’m hoping to get to where you are in another couple lifetimes! Send me some good vibes!’” I laughed out loud at this, considering the irony of comparing this bell to an instant message, when the monastery didn’t even have a flushing toilet. I had also completely forgotten about instant messaging at that point, and was almost in shock when he mentioned it. I guess spending just that short amount of time away from the technologies of America made thinking about said technologies an odd experience. It was just weird to think that at that moment, I probably had a handful of friends sending one another messages online while I was standing there in a monastery on the other side of the world, staring at a bell that was the Tibetan equivalent. Hahaha.

I think this was the first time that I realized my professor was going to be right about culture shock—it would come when I returned to the states and my former life. And I can say confidently right now that he was right. I still freeze for a moment before drinking tap water… before I realize it is safe to drink. I ordered a vegetarian sub the other day and almost freaked when I saw an uncooked and unpeeled vegetable in there. But then I realized I was in the states. And now, even using a computer seems like a grand privilege. The biggest culture shock, however, has certainly been the people. About 98% of the people in Tibet and even in parts of China will wave or smile at you if you’re passing by them, and they usually are the ones who initiate it. You are pretty much guaranteed a smile, a wave, and a friendly hello if you’re the one who breaks the ice. That’s definitely not how it is in the parts of America I’ve been to. Sometimes waving at a person will get him or her suspicious that you’re planning something! People are just so friendly over there… once I returned, I was still in the groove of waving and smiling at everyone I met, which I think weirded out a lot of people at the airport and the bus stations. But c’est la vie. I think that everyone should be able to wave and smile and be naturally good to one another. They say a smile is contagious, anyways, so I guess I won’t stop smiling at strangers in hope that maybe it makes them smile at someone themselves, and maybe eventually the whole world will be as friendly as Tibet. Or, at least a little more smile friendly.

This was also the monastery where one of the members of our group got into an arm wrestling competition with one of the monks. Now, this guy’s got some muscle on him, so it wasn’t like Scrawny McScrawny against Mr. Monk. And guess what? Mr. Monk won! THREE TIMES! Rob, the dude who initiated the first arm wrestling match, didn’t want to admit that he had lost against a monk in an arm wrestling competition, so he kept asking for one more, one more… and eventually bowed his head in defeat. Rob then decided that he would help the monk with the rest of his chores as a way to honor the fact that he had won, and went about mopping the stairs for him! This created quite a fuss for some of the monks in the monastery, as well as some of the visitors, so by the end of it, we had a rather large group laughing and smiling as Rob sweated in the hot, hot sun. It was great.

Something else curious happened, just as Rob was returning the mop to the monk. HE FLIPPED ROB OFF! Now, at this point, our tour guide was off getting us our permit to get to Mount Everest, and our professor was off trying to figure out why the permit was taking so long to get. Naturally, we didn’t know that this monk’s middle finger was a Tibetan gesture of respect, so the members of our group were either rolling on the monastery grounds laughing or slack-jawed and wide-eyed about the matter. Essentially, the monk was trying to show his respect to Rob because Rob had shown his own respect by mopping the stairs. Eventually Tenmpa explained this slight detail to us, which made it all that much funnier. Yikes. A monk flipping Rob off? That’s awesome.

Here's a picture of me hanging out at the monastery.

After we finished our tour of the monastery, we found a nice quiet little place to meditate for a while. It was a pretty amazing experience. I mean, not everyone gets the opportunity to chill out in a Buddhist monastery and meditate. Jim had us envision ourselves on infinite beaches with a perfectly calm ocean (a symbol of our minds… he told us that the emotional turmoil we face everyday is just the waves on the surface of our minds… if we can find the serenity below these surface disturbances… we can find peace). Either that, or he suggested envisioning a perfectly blue, clear sky. The clouds/our intense emotions, he said, simply obscure us from the deeper tranquility of us. It was all rather unreal and wonderful. And then, we were off to lunch.

Before we began our adventures, Jim told us that by the second week we would begin literally dreaming about food from home. I wasn’t necessarily dreaming at this point (although some of us were… Caitlin swore she saw a plate of nachos in the clouds in the sky…) but I was craving. I cannot express how grateful I was when I saw that Tenmpa had ordered french-fries and pizza. Now, I don’t even dig these two foods too much, but man, I was drooling over the sight of them and was more than happy to dig in. It wasn’t quite like the good-old-American food I was used to—the cheese on the pizza was yak cheese!!!—but despite the pungent taste, it was good.

After lunch, we began our journey to Tingri, which would ultimately become the craziest ride of our lives. Everything started off normally enough. We all headed out in our caravan of seven different land cruisers, stopping occasionally for a “pee-pee break” or a photo opportunity. We stopped off at this one place that was absolutely fabulous! There were prayer flags EVERYWHERE, and a couple of tents that some people were living in who sold various little bracelets as well as prayer flags to people who stopped by. It was also quite a wonderful view, as we were at about 17,000 feet at this point.

Dark cloud were beginning to form as we arrived, and by the time the majority of us made it up to the small hill that was there to get an even better view, thunder had begun echoing across the landscape. Needless to say, we were a bit scared, so we headed back down to our vehicles and went off again.

Here's a picture of Max facing the storm.

As we made our way, lightening started crashing all around in rather fierce bolts. It was a fantastic experience, until the pouring rain began. Buckets and buckets of rain fell on us—our driver could hardly see out the window. And then… it started HAILING. And this hail wasn’t your average everyday sized hail, it was pretty large, about the size of a quarter or so, I’d say. Before we could freak out too much, however, it cleared up, and was suddenly rather sunny. And so we kept going—and eventually got to some crazy mountain passes. The roads were barely large enough for two vehicles, and the turns were so sharp, you normally had to veer into the other lane for a second while taking them, which quite clearly caused a few heart murmurs among the members of the group. When another vehicle was coming the other way, you just sort of prayed that you would pass them at a point in the road that was wide enough for the two of you. Our drivers were amazing, however, so all went well.

Somehow, our vehicle got way behind the rest of the vehicles, when suddenly this red light went on in the car and the engine started kicking weird. So our driver stopped the vehicle, looked under the hood, poked something, closed the hood, and we were off again. Things were fine for a little while… but then the red light returned, the engine started acting weird, and our driver repeated what he had done before. But this time… the engine didn’t start back up again. At this point, everyone in my vehicle started giggling nervously, perhaps because it was the only way we knew how to react. Caitlyn checked her phone for service to see if we could get in touch with Tenmpa, which it didn’t have, so we laughed even more hysterically. What else could we do? We were stuck on the only road for MILES and MILES and hadn’t seen very many other vehicles besides a handful for HOURS. To top it off, the red light didn’t have any writing next to it indicating what was wrong, and we couldn’t communicate with our driver because he didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak Tibetan, so we didn’t even know what was wrong with the vehicle. So we laughed. Which, though better than crying, was probably not the best of ideas because we were at a higher altitude anyways, so there was a lot less oxygen than we were used to, and since we were all taking very shallow breaths, we all became a little delirious by the end of it. Like DELIRIOUS—we were laughing until we were in tears, and our driver had no idea why. Then again, I guess we didn’t really know why either. Finally, the car decided to work, and we were on our way.

There was this one kid in the car—Ryan—who was quite the interesting character. I found out later that he actually goes to Castleton, which is neat, as I can hang out with him once school starts up again. At the beginning of our trip, he didn’t realize how much memory his camera’s card had, so he was being very picky about the pictures he was taking (we eventually found out he had 1GB…). For some reason, he really wanted a good, close picture of a yak. As we were going along on this particular drive, our driver noticed his concentrated, yet failed efforts at capturing these rather large animals on film, so our driver ended up stopping a bunch after that so he could actually take some pictures of the yaks that were hanging out in the fields by the sides of the road. As a result of his interests, and eventually Caitlyn and mine as well, our vehicle got the nickname YAK ATTACK!! It was pretty hilarious.

And so we were off again, when suddenly, it started DOWNPOURING. Man, crazy mountain weather, dudes. Caitlyn started freaking out because this time it was heavier than before and she’s been in 11 different car accidents in her life, only two of which were actually her fault. So I attempted to calm her down, when suddenly, we took a rather sharp turn, and the rain turned to SNOW for about five minutes. It was so unreal. There was literally a twenty-foot long patch of about an inch or so thick snow on the road… and then it was clear again. You could literally see the dividing line between where it was snowing and where it was raining. There was a single hill to our left that was also covered by snow (although the yaks grazing on this area seemingly failed to notice this…) And then… it was raining again. It was so frightening. And so cool. And then the rain died down a bit. And then we saw crazy lightening AGAIN! It was soo wild! In one DRIVE (it wasn’t even a full DAY! We started driving after lunch!) we saw hail, lightening, rain, sun, and snow. WEIRD.

And finally… we made it to Tingri. We hurriedly brought all of our belongings into the hotel, got drenched in the process, got changed in our hotel rooms, and then met up for a late dinner. Dinner was… interesting… we got our first opportunity to snack on some pig’s tongues and an odd-looking yak dish. I munched on a little bit of white rice and cauliflower while the more macho boys pretended the pig’s tongue actually tasted good. I did notice a lot of … chewing… involved. YUCK.

This hotel was perhaps the sketchiest hotel we stayed at the entire time. Due to the intense rain, a couple of people’s rooms got rather wet… Bud said that he actually had streams pouring down his walls at one point. Caitlyn was freaking out because she saw a bug in the bathroom, and my roommate Hali freaked out when she somehow broke the toilet. We also managed to lose power at some point and time during the night.

Our wake up call in the morning was pretty hilarious, too. Hali and I were abruptly awoken by a knock on the door and someone saying, “wake up call!” Hali sat up in bed quickly, looked at me, and said in a confused manner, “Wake up call? It’s not a call! We don’t even have a phone! We don’t even have a clock!” And then… it was the 11th of July. And we were all thankful we had survived thus far.