Bones, and a Photoshoot

Wednesday June 27, 2012

A few days ago while on my walk back from class, I met a Tibetan, Tenzin, on the road who speaks rather good English as well as the Lhasa dialect, which is the Tibetan I know. We talked for a few minutes and it was so nice to speak to another person in English. You don't come across English speakers so often here! He has been living in India for the past 10 years, but came back to visit and is now staying with his friend, the doctor in town. After lunch that day, I visited the doctor's Tibetan medicine shop which was quite interesting. Mostly just rows of glass jars with all sorts of medicine in them, probably made from all those plants I learned about and lots of patients. I've read about how Tibetan doctors often diagnose patients by checking their pulse, and now I see that's really how it's done.

In the afternoon after my last class, I joined the school in their activity time before dinner, which is a lot of the time playing outside on the grass field next to the school, and that抯 what we did today. 

 There were lots of soccer games going on and dancing and singing, although I decided to join in some strange game of throwing animal bones. I still don抰 understand exactly how it works, but each four sides the pieces can possibly land on each represent an animal: horse, sheep, ram (if I heard correctly) and something else that I don抰 remember. The closest game I know that it resembles is the pig toss game, where each way the toy pigs land is worth a certain amount of points, although the bone game involves trying to hit other bones and stealing them and other rules I didn't understand. All the sides of the bones looked the same to me upon first glance, but the other players were so fast in figuring out which animal side it was.

My friend Gonbotashi left yesterday to go to Shanghai for some teacher training I believe, and since I won't see him before I leave, he got me some nice Tibetan clothes. I'll have to have someone dress me since I'm not sure I can get the look right, but it's really beautiful.

Yesterday Tenzin's friends asked to take photos with me. I thought it was going to be like all the others, just a quick shot, but they all went home to get their fanciest clothes and we all dressed up and went to a beautiful field of yellow flowers. I didn't know it existed, but it's just behind all the buildings at the bottom of the hill. It was quite fun. One of their wives dressed me up in men's clothes so I didn't have to go get mine, but I'm pretty sure you can't tell the difference.