Hala

    He met Hala who invited him to her home near the mosque in Lhasa for dinner. Her father is a factory worker, her mother a homemaker. One brother is a doctor, married with one child. Another brother is finishing his two year compulsory military service.
    A pleasant small place displaying a carpet of Mecca on one wall and a 4x6’ glossy photo of a two-story white American clapboard dream home surrounded by trees and a large green yard.
    Ah! No money down. Act now!
    It reminded him of the ubiquitous color glossy images decorating simple Chinese and Muslim restaurants here; large strange revolting pictures of Western bread, cheese, wine and gleaming dishes of food as if an advance team from Better & Better Houses & Wild Gardens or Lifestyle Of The Possessed ripped out the advertising and plastered it up for an eater’s dream.
    They dined on butter tea, rice, meat, and scrambled eggs with tomatoes as Hala translated conversations about life.

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The Potala was constructed in 1694 out of stone, wood and mud. It contains 1,000 rooms, 10,000 shrines and 200,000 statues.
    He entered through the west gate climbing steep wide stone stairs. The interior passageways were packed with pilgrims filing through rooms and chapels. It was very dark, mysterious and beautiful with yak butter lamps flickering in front of statues, rows of dark texts stacked in cubicles accompanied by mumbling muted prayers from the mass of humans squeezing through twisted corridors and along narrow, steep stairs.
    Uneven stone floors were slick with yak butter as pilgrims spooned offerings into thousands of flickering candles on altars. He climbed through a series of temples, past shrines to the roof overlooking Lhasa.
    He wandered around the north side of the Potala inside markets fronting the Dragon Pool. He had a noodle lunch, and made images along path and bridge of Potala, prayer flags, mendicants reading sutras, beggars, pilgrims.
    Calm mind, slow steps in dust wearing out old boots.
    A Tibetan woman selling butter on the street near Ramoche asked him to read some of her English writing. It was a story about someone hiding something behind their back in a classroom. A guessing game. He pointed out a couple of awkward sentence constructions and asked her about her life.
    “I stay single because if I had kids they’ll have to go to a Chinese school. They wouldn’t be allowed to speak Tibetan.”  Historical shades of American Indian treatment by the white Anglo Saxons.