more testing

testing, testing

This is a test. I'm having trouble posting pictures so I wondered if just text would work.

new meat

Today a bunch more people arrived, and the ones who had been staying at the Lotus Guesthouse (aka Little Britain) moved into the Valley Guesthouse with the rest of us. Here are some more pictures.

the crying girl

This is Lékyi and Métsal at the Nir Café, or the Toast Bakery, or the Nir Toast Bakery, or something. They have interesting bread that looks like Western bread but still tastes like incense or flowers combined with garlic. They also have a fab fresh fruit salad one can eat with impunity. It has pomegranate seeds in it, which indicates that labor is cheap here (which it is) or else we're in the Underworld.

The Nir Café is at the end of a dark alley or arcade. Several times, when coming or going from the restaurant we are accosted by a girl who looks about eight years old. She's crying and she will only stop crying after she has hugged and been hugged by all the women in our group and sometimes the men as well. Sometimes she starts crying again and everybody has to hug her again. She seems particularly obsessed with hugging round shaped women so I come in for a lot of this.



After a while a small Western woman with henna'd hair and a Tibetan jacket shows up and leads her away. But she usually starts crying again and has to hug everybody all over again. I can't figure out what nationality she is but she has very shiny, fine, curly hair and a round face. Indian maybe? I don't know. She seems stuck in some permanent misery. She gives these desperate but somehow perfunctory hugs. I don't have a picture of her because I find I don't want to initiate any interaction with her.

This is a group of people waiting for some other people to be ready to go to dinner.

catchup

I've missed a day of blogging so I'd better hop to it. Monday night Rang-rig and Felice arrived. In the picture you can see the necklaces of orange marigolds presented to newly arrived guests when they're met at the airport. In the background you can also see Ngak'chang Rinpoche's 'Happy Valley' calligraphy that was framed and presented to the former owners in 2007 (?). Felice and Rang-rig were taken to the Double Dorjee, fed tongba, then escorted back to the hotel and allowed to go to bed.



Another thing that happened on Monday is the extra mattresses ordered by the guest house for our visit arrived via bicycle and were unloaded in the lobby.



Tony arrived and hit the ground running, joining the next day's expedition to Nagi Gompa (up in the mountains, beautiful scenery, lots of climbing, nice nunnery). Next to him is Frankie, one of the early arrivals who's been here since the beginning of December.



Rin'dzin and Mé-sèl, waiting for the expedition to leave.



Bar-ché has arrived.



Canine fashionista.



They've put up a lot of flags lately for some reason.



We wondered if this fabric would be all right for ngakpa/ngakma sashes. It's actually a little brighter than it looks.

I have a cold so I'm somewhat short on words (head full of snot) but I can still take pictures. More later, including momos for Min'gyür.

faster than empires, and more slow

Last night I kept sleeping and waking up and not knowing which was which and there was all this color and elaborate forms like walking through a crowded sculpture garden where everything was made of multicolored bits of metal and wood in irregular complicated shapes. I would think or dream something like an ordinary scene and as I looked at it, it seemed to scintillate into all different small colorful irregular shapes like beads or shards of glass or flower petals, moving and changing, fast and slow, in infinitely variegated intricate patterns in every color, all night long.

Location:still occupying Bodha

requests . . . I've had a few . . .

If you want to see anything in particular, just tell me in the comments and I'll try to accommodate you. Here are a few pix in answer to requests.



These are (excellent) vegetable pokhoras or however you spell it at the Garden Kitchen restaurant, just a few steps from the Valley Guest House.


Fried spinach at the same place, sorry for out-of-focusness.


Bees in the jam pot at the Nir Toast Bakery where I had an actual fruit salad and lived to tell the tale. Also passable black coffee.



Lily's Hello Kitty bathrobe. I can't seem to rotate it to the correct orientation.



Maria's new friend.



Hello kitten.



Fantastic huge burl wood bowls from Bhutan. They were about 24" in diameter (well, Pema Zangmo says 32 and I say 18 so 24 is a compromise). Yours for $800.



More huge beautiful bowls of indeterminate but surprisingly large size.



Interesting conches. Conchs?



Pema Zangmo in the guest house courtyard.



Actually nobody requested some of these, I just felt like posting them. I'm sitting outside listening to the rumble of the hotel's generator (we're having another scheduled power cut) waiting for Rang-rig and Felice to arrive fresh (more likely somewhat wilted) from Brooklyn.

Bar-ché and Mé-sèl arrived yesterday and Bar-ché greeted some of the hotel staff by picking them up and carrying them around the lobby.

Sanjay, the shoeshine boy from several pilgrimages ago has now turned into a shoeshine young man and appeared to be in charge of several shoeshine boys. He sends his greetings to Art.

total eclipse

Yesterday there was a big police presence, which made it feel like a real Occupation. The Nepali police are generally small. They wear strange blue camouflage uniforms as if they're planning to be sneaking around underwater, and they were carrying big rifles and riot shields. It turns out it was the anniversary of the Dalai Lama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize and the authorities were worried about Tibetans demonstrating or protesting or something. Chö-ying, who spent the day at Kopan, said the monks and nuns were confined to the gompa for a time because of this.

Yesterday was also the full moon so there were tables of butter lamps all over the place as Pema Zangmo, Lékyi, Chö-ying, Jens and Scott walked to the Double Dorjee for dinner. We violated one of the precepts of the Double Dorjee (or rather, my rules for dealing with the Double Dorjee) which is 'No Groups Larger Than 4 People'. As a result of this violation it took over 2 hours for dinner to arrive for all of us. I had vegetable momos, excellent as always. Lékyi and Chö-ying had a noxious concoction of french fries with live chilis crawling all over them. Lékyi demonstrated her Darth Vader dust mask.


There was an eclipse of the moon which we thought we had missed,but when we walked out of the restaurant we could still see it looking like an orange ball with a crescent of white at the bottom edge. We stood and stared at it for a while, then went back to the guest house and fell into bed.

this and also this

As you can see, I am really here. The big smiling cake (aka chörten) still looks as happy as ever and its gold roof has been recently repainted. This morning I spent several hours with Martine, one of the owners of the hotel, sorting out everybody's arrivals and room arrangements, which turned out to be seriously complicated. I hope no one will be excessively horrified at the results.



Then I took a walk around the chörten with Pema Zangmo. It was much more crowded than usual but the piles of vegetables for sale looked even better than I remembered.

A huge digging project was going on in the circle, forcing us to walk in the inner ring where a tall monk wearing a blue dust mask started quizzing me. He asked where I came from and I said "New York" and asked where he came from. He said "Tibet" with a smug 'haha I win' kind of face and started quizzing me about what I practiced each day.


I decided I'd given him enough information (my teachers, lineage, school) and walked away. Then someone wanted to take my picture (I guess I am a sort of conspicuous figure) so I took his as well. That's him holding the green bag.

There were pails full of corn from which people were feeding the pigeons, there were many new buildings and shops, and the dogs looked less rabid than usual as they rested up in the sun for tonight's festival of barking.



The evil Ananda ran out of his new store to greet me and another shopkeeper shouted a demanding "Excuse me, Madame, excuse me!" but I'm not yet ready to shop in spite of wonders such as this at the Lumbini shop, where there seemed to be a concentration of Aro pilgrims.



And also this.