Lhasa, settling in

Our second guesthouse doesn’t take too much finding, and I love it. I want to stay there, if not forever, then for months. It’s - yes - cheap, and the location is perfect. Our room is big, light and on the second floor of a 3 storeyed building which is wrapped around a sky lighted courtyard set in the tangle of laneways behind the road, just minutes from Jokhang Si (temple) . There are sheets and pillow cases on the twin beds. And not only that, they’re clean. Verandahs long enough to run along run outside the rooms and we feel comfortable leaving our door open to let the breeze and incense flow through. The boys who bring boiled water and empty the bins, occasionally duck their friendly, smiley heads in to see if all is well and maybe take a quick peak at the foreigner.
There’s a public shower down the laneway at the hairdresser’s, ( I get and inch cut off) and a toilet on the next level below along with a wash area, beneath a vast one-person-high, two-person-long mirror (and that’s a foreign, not a Chinese-person).

The manager is from Qinghai where Bing hails from, and as I’ve witnessed many times before, this common province of origin thing seems to carry a lot of weight. They behave like blood brothers.
A striking middle-aged Tibetan woman is in charge of the daily running. In the mornings she chants at the mirror while braiding her hair amongst the bustle of mostly Tibetan guests washing and chattering. Children stand on chairs to see themselves in the mirror; a little boy earnestly pats down his hair with water. The elderly are helped in and out of the toilet by younger relatives. They all turn to look at me, but quickly disguise their surprise and continue with their ablutions, sometimes stopping to ask where I was from.

The tables below in the courtyard soon fill with people, eating, joking and praying. The noise is soothing. I look longingly at their impossibly gorgeous clothes and the women's long snakey plaits tied together at the back. Am I being vacuous? Do I have to ask? I love those deep red woollen robes edged in bright multi-coloured, woven braid, and held together by belts studded in silver disks.

From the window opposite ours a small school-room delivers sounds of a Tibetan taught English class. I get all nostalgic to be back at work and voice dedicated intentions to wow them with a visit, but somehow don’t get around to it. And Bing doesn’t hear me anyway, he’s been fed with 3 bright yellow Chinese medicine headache pills and is fast asleep.

I wander, quickly getting lost in stall-lined alleys, and then caught up in the rabble following a clockwise rotation around the temple. They swing copper prayer wheels, finger prayer beads, and chant or talk. All along the path, people are buying and selling. Soon I’m at the main entrance to the temple. Smoke and incense beltch out of fires as they are fed juniper branches and barley seeds. I close my eyes to inhale the smell and absorb the sound of small hand-sized squares of cardboard or rubber sliding back and foward over the concrete as rows of people prostrate their bodies over and over, some bearing the grey stigmata circle on their foreheads caused by touching the ground an endless number of times.

They sell vegetables and spices outside the courtyard beneath our guesthouse. In the evening Bing buys grated carrot, zuccini and chopped mushrooms which he delivers, along with the olive oil, to our eating-place. He's starting to feel better.

The next day we circumnavigate the outside wall of the Potola deciding that at Y100 a ticket, it'll be more fun than filing around inside shoulder to shoulder with the stream of Chinese tourists and getting caught in their photo flashes. Bing notes that many of the long rows of the copper prayer wheels which were set along the wall last time he was here, have since been pulled up. Hopefully they have been put somewhere safe and will be replaced after some work has been completed. I stop to watch a chain gang of workers throwing stones onto the back of a truck and singing in time to the rythme of their bodies.
We make it most of the way round until we come to a high, plywood barrier blocking off the path. After climbing its supporting scaffold from opposite ends and poking our heads over the top, we see there's nothing on which to rest our feet going down side. The path at this point is sealed off on both sides, so we try the side opposite the monastery wall, rather than turn around. We end up on a roof and drop down onto some's wood pile in their backyard, appologising profusely as they come out to look at us. From there, we're able to eventually get back on track and complete the circle.

The day after, we circumnavigate the outside wall of another monastery out of town. I forget the name. From the cliff above and behind we get a birds eye view of all the tooings and frowings within, as if looking down on a doll's house with no roof.
Mostly our time in Lhasa is spent just wandering around the lanes, congratulating ourselves on the amazing weather and how wonderful our guest house is. I buy two silver bangles for friends and a pendant for myself. I find a western cafe I like and a few mornings go there to drink nescafe and read my book and just burrow into a corner. On my way out I chat with the owner's brother, who escaped Tibet as a child, was adopted by a British couple in India, then ended up settling in California. In a few years, when fully retired, he hopes to be back in Lhasa permanently and help with his niece's school. Bing is happy to stay at home and do washing or fluff around with all the noisy plastic bags which fill his pack.

Once after using the internet at an expensive hotel, I glance at the notice board in the foyer filled with requests for one or two extra people needed to complete group trips bound for places like Kang Rimpoche (Kailash), Nangze tso lake or Qomalangma feng (Everest). I feel a little wistful but I know Bing could never afford it, and my finances would be stretched to their limit. And anyway, we'd spend most of the time sitting in a jeep I tell myself. It's interesting just being here. I don't mind. Maybe next time... Our last day is spent trying to find a bus to Deqin. Each long-distance bus station has no idea what the other bus station is doing - but are sure they do. They either tell us there's no bus to Deqin, or direct us to the wrong bus station. We go to all four, or was it five? and the one we want is the last one.

On our final evening, we wander into a big Thanka shop aimed at the rich tourist on a buying spree. We move past rows of glass cases filled with artifacts to the back of the shop where rooms are lined with intricate floor to ceiling paintings of serene buddhas encircled by galaxies of heavenly beings and karmic stages far beyond my comprehension. An unusually discreet shop assistant mentions that they are painted by the monks. We don't speak; she backs off quickly, summing us up as not the buying types. The atmosphere is palpable. My feet tread small steps over the carpet. I'm awed by the skill and patience evident in the zillions of tiny figures, all acting out their own unique dramas against a patterned background of identical swirls. I'm glad that someone has had a wealth of time, and such an alternative approach to it, to spend it on such an activity.

I wish I could have seen such works back when I was a pathalogically shy graphic design student at Wellington Polytechnic. My parents thought they'd cleverly steered my disturbing artistic inclinations into a practical career. But I was quite out of step with the criteria required by advertising execs who directed the subjects, and who favoured bold slabs of shape and colour that could be quickly assimilated by the eye from far away. Realism and detail were considered fussy and archaic. Three years later I'd lost my way.
But the mass of line and pattern celebrated in those symetried, statuesque portraits, allowed me to feel like maybe I could find it again.

Then I notice it - the presence in the room. As well as the buddhas, there's silence; how long has it been since I've experienced it? Far back from the hustle of the lane...utterly quiet.

Can you say that silence is mystical? An academic friend recommended I read a book called Virtual Tibet which critiques and dismantles the 'mysticism' Westerners imbue Tibet with. I will, but I also found myself wondering if he were coming from a starting point where mysticism is automatically assumed to be implicitly and inherently a manufactured entity, without even acknowledging the assumption. There would then be no attitiude of inquiry, no sorting fake from true.