The Mao who stole Christmas

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Listening to Pandora's Christmas radio station, polishing off some Christmas Eve tacos, and looking forward to teaching tomorrow. Happy Holidays to everyone at home and abroad!

Yushu, redux

Back home, grateful for showers and toilets and bagels with cream cheese, but cursing the end of the semester and the many, many ways the Internet enables even the laziest of cheaters.

Yaks, goats and dogs that look like bears

What is it about Yushu that makes me want to forgive the distressing absence of toilets and showers, the bone-chilling cold, the lack of running water or any plumbing whatsoever?

It might be the mangy mobs of goats that wander the streets, rooting through the ample supply of roadside garbage and ducking into your yard whenever you forget to shut the gate, refusing to allow angry and horn-happy drivers to disrupt a casual afternoon stroll down the center of the street.

It could be the slow-witted yaks who lumber around town, and graze at the school next door. (I know, I know: What is this inexplicable fascination with yaks, you ask?)


Maybe it's the monks on motorcycles, the hive-drone of the Buddhist chants that are broadcast over loudspeakers twice a day, or the fresh yak yogurt sold in plastic buckets by robed women in Yak Square or served in restaurants with a side order of sugar and tiny sweet potatoes. Might be the fact that the world's most expensive dog -- one of the fierce, bear-like Tibetan mastiffs that are in every yard here -- hails from Yushu.

It could even be the students here, who are oddly enthusiastic, a little boisterous and more than a little punk rock (if largely unconcerned with regular bathing), and shout "Hello Teacher!" without discernible irony when I walk in the room.

Even the accomodations have improved significantly, ever since I found the showers downtown, and a six-fingered man showed up to "fix" the electricity (which as far as I can tell meant rigging up some wires to steal from the orphanage next door), so I could terminate my tumultuous relationship with the yak stove once and for all.

It's the little things.

Cold and dirty, but alive in Yushu

Arrived in Yushu on Saturday morning, after 15 of the longest hours of my life on an overnight bus. You would think that packing us in like steamed dumplings (there are three rows of bunk 'beds,' tiny platforms about one-and-a-half feet wide, and the head area inclines, so the next person's lower legs slide underneath you) would keep the ride warm, but when I finally crawled out from under six blankets in the morning, the windows were iced over from the inside. I'm told the scenery is beautiful, though.

I was not destined to warm up any time soon. Turns out the electricity at Brendan's house, where I'm staying, is broken. That means no heat, except for a tiny yak stove that I am not currently getting along with (although I no longer mind the human-high pile of yak dung in the corner of one of the rooms), and no light past 6:30 or so. So I sleep in my down jacket, long underwear, jeans, gloves and a scarf under three blankets, a sleeping bag, some kind of fur thing and a pile of my sweaters. The school says its on their radar, but the electrician is 'busy.' So one of my students came over to play with some live wires and see what he could do. At last he shrugged and announced that he believes there is a "serious problem."

Not that I was expecting the Ritz. I knew there was no running water, I just didn't quite realize what that would mean at 7 a.m. when you want to wash your face. And I knew that Brendan had an outhouse, I just didn't realize that meant two boards a foot off the ground in a corner of the yard. On the bright side, I haven't missed showering as much as I thought I would, since showering would require undressing, and I don't even like to take off my fur boots when I go to sleep at night. The Tibetans are not big bathers, and I now have no problem understanding why.

And despite all this, I am in love with Yushu.

More on that later.

Into the wild

By this time tomorrow, I'll be in Yushu.

I'm boarding an overnight bus in a few hours that will hopefully deposit me in the tiny Tibetan village sometime tomorrow morning. The altitude is almost 13,000 feet, and, I'm told, it's a bit chilly this time of year.

When the Shem girls heard I was going to Yushu, they looked at my knee-length quilted down jacket with the fur hood doubtfully, and said I would need to find some warm clothes to bring. I pointed to my jacket. They laughed.

One of my students stopped by yesterday and gave me a package of something that might be roots, and might be dried bits of yak dung. Make a tea and drink this, she said. It will help with the vomiting.

Er, what?

(I'm drinking it right now, though. It smells a little suspect but doesn't taste like it'll kill me. The Tibetans know their traditional medicines, so who am I to argue?)

I'll be in Yushu for a week, teaching grammar to middle school students and living with no running water, a three-walled outhouse, and no heat except a yak dung stove. And apparently the electricity is on the fritz.

Awesome.