The dog that terrorized a town

Yep, I finally got a friend in China. Which, on the bright side, means I can stop having conversations with the yaks next door. (They were pretty one-sided anyway, and also, I think people were starting to look at me funny.)

So she's this giant ball of bouncing puppy love. Except there are two small caveats.

One, she has a deep-seated hatred of monks. She's a lamb with small children, sighs patiently when the students swarm over her, is trying desperately to make friends with the town's donkey population, and is actually frightened by cows. But when she sees a monk, she lunges like a frothing maniac. A bit tricky, given that I live on monastery grounds, and an estimated 50 percent of the population in this town are of the monastic persuasion.

And second: Unfortunately, it turns out that people in Tib*t are terrified of dogs. Here, they're kept not so much kept for cuddling and long walks on the beach, but to protect hearth, home, harvest and livestock, and hence bred to go for the throat. So when I walk down the street with the pup on a leash, little old women dive out of the way, children squeal in terror and grown men yelp and duck into doorways. She parts the crowds like a canine Moses; just walking her down the street feels like a small act of terrorism, like taking King Kong out to stretch his legs in downtown Tokyo.

In other news, given my currently precarious situation, I'll just say problems persist: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/world/asia/23china.html

(I knew we shouldn't have shown the kids that movie about those plucky villagers in India who overthrew their British overlords.)