9/8

9/8 6:46am CST

http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_8?authkey=Gv1sRgCOKuuu_ryavPZQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqrvCkZeb6Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vAKLhwCNP0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEuiF-ke07g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFYcYdPUOQ8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7-xAMzSxNw

I'm starting a new sidestream, that I'm tentatively going to call Fashion Victims. I've tried forever to casually describe how the average Chinese person dresses. The closest I've ever come is labeling ones who try as fashion victims. That's not to say that I think the people I have in mind dress poorly or come off looking terribly. Rather, a lot of the looks just go way outside of the box from what you'd expect in the US. So yeah, I'll try my best to get candid shots of good examples. If anyone catches me and asks me what's going on, I'll just do my best "No speaking Chinese" impression and run.

Today we're going to that big lake we saw on the train, Lake Namtso. It's supposed to be very beautiful. Because of the distance, we have to get up really early to make it out in time. It's basically a frenzied drive through Lhasa and then the cities/zones up to Lake Namtso. The gutsy performance put on by our driver might make some people faint, but I have faith in the rules of the road in China and didn't sweat it too much. It was a long drive, punctuated by stops at various checkpoints. The way it works is that you get a timecard for your route, and the speed limit imposes a minimum time it should take between checkpoints. For every minute you arrive early, you're docked a fine of 100 yuan. This ends up working exactly like a Time-Speed-Distance rally event. If you know where the checkpoint is, and how long it should take to get there, you can speed like hell as you need, and park for some extra minutes at the end, just out of sight of the checkpoint. Our driver, being a tour guide professional, has done this circuit plenty of times and made quick work of finding places to park and knowing for how long. Whenever we had one of these stops, I'd walk around and look for interesting things. On the way up there was lots of traffic, so usually we didn't have to punt before checkpoints. At the places we did stop, though, there was highly specialized catering to tourism.

It's disappointing in that any heavily frequented area inevitably becomes commercialized and robbed of its original character. Whenever we stopped at one of these checkpoints, there'd be lots of tour buses also parked there. And when you have hundreds of people milling about, there's opportunity for making a buck. I saw broadly three classes of business going on. First, there were cart vendors. Each cart is a little table on wheels with a roof. You can pack your wares into the cart and push it away, or you can put all the wares out and start selling. It was all the trinkety stuff you'd expect, like jewelry, models, carvings, etc. I was actually looking for a phurba dagger as a gift for a friend, but nobody was selling at a price I wanted to pay. Second, there was the bathrooms. 1 yuan per person. These were pretty horrid bathrooms for that kind of money, but I didn't see the government running in and trying to regulate, so let the free market reign. That said, I've seen free "bathrooms" that I'd gladly avoid by paying 1 yuan to class it up a bit. Third, tiny roadside huts with their standardized shop signage, offering tea or food. I'm a brave eater but I wouldn't go into those places. Not only is hygiene a big question mark, but the huts, basically the building equivalents of a cubicle, seem ready to implode. In one place, some enterprising Tibetans had roped up their dogs and a goat for picture-taking. You pay a fee and take your pictures with these animals. I suppose they are better fed and cared for than the numerous strays in the area, but it must still be a very rough life for them. My disappointment is that, instead of being able to see something unique everywhere you go in Tibet, you are forced to run the same gauntlet every time you make a tour stop. I think the underlying reason it bothers me is that it highlights the casual wage-slavery accepted by the poor and looking-for-work. For example, at the Bird's Nest, there was a peddler at every corner clutching a sheaf of folded up flying bird toys. It was like a rubber band power airplane, except the rubber band turned a crank and flapped a pair of wings. I think they were being sold for 20 yuan a piece and subject to haggling, of course. I'm guessing each morning, each person selling would show up at the main office and get handed 20 toy birds from a box. They'd pay up front for the birds, and whatever profit they could make was theirs. The same routine every day. Some days, they might be able to sell out their stock. Some days, maybe not a single sale. Yet in the long term, each of them must be undoubtedly making a living doing it, otherwise they'd be off doing something else. And underlying this is the crippling realization that the vast majority of people out there don't have interesting lives by virtue of living in poverty. Back to Tibet -- I'm not exactly sure what all these tourist-stop vendors would be doing if there were no tourism. I suppose the stituation could be worse for them. When we were driving along, I saw one woman on the roadside, holding up a pan full of fried bread, standing next to her small stove. I'm guessing it was worth her time to sell some bread to tourists while tending to her livestock. I guess you could call that making the best of it.

Anyways, the weather got progressively worse as we drove up the mountains to get to Namtso. At some point the altitude peaked at 4700m. The rain turned to sleet and snow, and driving along was pretty treacherous. It was pretty miserable all the way to Namtso. My mom once again felt the effects of high altitude sickness. When we got to Namtso, all we did was huddle in a restaurant for a bit and then take some lakeside pictures. My mom didn't even come out. So about 15 minutes after we finished lunch, we were back in the Landcruiser on the way back to Lhasa. My mom started breathing out of the oxygen bags we'd brought for such emergencies, and she got better. I wish she'd taken it as soon as she started getting a headache and feeling lightheaded, but she was too stubborn to treat herself earlier, thinking all her preventative medicines would help.

The drive back to Lhasa was under much improved weather. I shot a couple videos of how daring our driver was. There are some principles to how to drive around here, and I've almost got them sorted out. Going out there and on the way back, we passed a Buddhist doing the prostration pilgrimage to Lhasa. The prostration is where you get on your knees and do sort of a butterfly stroke, and then stand back up. You only move a couple feet each prostration, so it can take years to get to Lhasa this way. Such is their devotion. I wasn't able to get a picture in time. I didn't spot if the pilgrim had a sack of food on him. I have no idea how they make it.

I'll take some time now to comment on how dirty things are over here. Hygiene standards are simply different. Like I mentioned before, nobody cares about the cleanliness of common spaces. If a wall in the lobby gets slightly scuffed, it'll stay that way pretty much forever. It seems like no one is in charge of cleaning these places up. That sort of casual attitude extends to cleaning most public bathrooms. When you're in America, you don't give too much thought to where your shoes have been. Yeah, you're reminded every so often that there's dirt on the ground, but it never seems like a big deal. Once you've stepped into a public bathroom or latrine in China, you'll never forget how dirty the soles of your shoes are. It's contagion theory. It's easy to track the grime from the bathroom onto your shoes, from which they'll never be clean. That's why Chinese people are such sticklers about taking off shoes before going into homes. So while I haven't made much explicit mention of it, whenever I've been going out, I've naturally assumed Chinese habits with respect to what is dirty. I won't ever lean on a wall, for example. It comes naturally.

After getting caught up reading on Tibetan languages on the wikipedia for a bit, I have to overturn my conclusion that Tibetan isn't tonal. The dialect spoken in Lhasa is a Central Tibetan language. The Central Tibetan family acquired tonality from its contact with Chinese languages. So somewhere in there, there are tones. I just can't hear them I guess.