Rebgong Adventure

This one is journal style, written over a couple of days. I'm back in the city now

So, I am going to blog this trip in installments, because it's been that awesome so far, and tomorrow is supposed to just bet better. And I can't access blogspot from my hotel room internet, so this is just the way it's going to have to happen. To start off, my sweater smells like yak. Yak smell has become imprinted on my U of T sweater. How cool is that? Now I will tell you how this came to be.

The first week of October is some big holiday in here, although nobody I know has been able to give me a clear answer as to what it's about or what it's for or anything. Typical. Anyway, we all get 10 days off school, and "work" too. Work is in quotations because what I have done thus far should not be classified as work by almost anybody's standards. Hopefully that will change post-holiday. Anyway, my roomates and I decided to take a little trip to the next town over. There is a big monastery here, which we saw today.

I took a lot a lot of pictures, so ya'll should be satisfied. We unfortunately weren't allowed to take any pictures inside the temples themselves, but that just makes common sense. Even I don't like risking incurring the wrath of gods nobody can prove don't exist. Common sense, right? They were beautiful though. Breathtaking. Tibetans like colour and goooold. And HUGE statues. Come visit, I will bring you here. For sure.

Other reasons this town is better than Xining: everything to see and do here is within walking distance of the hotel.The hotel itself is great! Hot water, internet, TV, western toilets (wait till you see what I peed into at the monastery heh heh) clean, safe rooms...that kind of stuff. People are friendlier, and taking a great interest in us. While we were eating our breakfast dumplings (awesome right?), 5 people just stuck their heads into the restaurant, and then started talking to us about anything. Another reason it's awesome: this is a major trading post for nomads. Nomads are sweet. I'm not even sure if I can explain why...they just look so cool. I really like TIbetan jewellry...big and bright. I am going to come home with lots of that stuff.

Oh yeah. The reason my sweater smells like yak is probably because this whole town smells like yak. Because it's awesome.

Okay, that was the important stuff for now. I will upload this along with the second one after tomorrow, because I'm sure that's going to be saweeet.




THE NEXT DAY...
Breakfast was awesome. No MSG, no grease, no meat...it was glorious. And the best bread I've had in China yet. Most of the time they fry their bread instead of baking it, which leaves it pretty greasy. This bread reminded me of the bread in Italy...a little hard and dry, but insanely wholesome tasting. So yeah, that in itself was awesome. Then we climbed the mountain. It probably took us about an hour to get to the hermitage at the top. So we made it to the top, where there is a hermitage that some famous lama (I can't remember which) used to meditate at for long periods of time.They are renovating it, so there were a bunch of workers, as well as three junior monks looking after the temple thing. Apparenlty they rotate every 10 days so taht the same three aren't stuck up there forever.