The amazing thing about the trip to tibet other then the many friends i obtained and the coetaneous experiences the other students and i shared and the landscape that seems to breath out in one constant long exhalation of understanding and the bijou which pours freely from the mouth of the bottle that seems to be clutching a cigarette in clenched teeth and the festivals with masked dancers waving from behind demonic masks to the sounds of cymbals and long horns and smiles and long stares and eyes and children and the rhythm of life in the village which is so slow one almost wants to give it something but you know it wouldnt take it if you asked three times…Drinking with tibetans is like dancing with tibetans or discussing politics with tibetans, they either know how to do it way better than you, or they do it with a kind of natural rawness which makes the visceral seem quaint and either one leaves you speechless on the back of a bike going up a mountain towards a vilage where a child lama wait with a khatta which he will momentariuly be placing around your neck as the light dapples between the branches of the trees in patterns of shadow and light and the wind picks up with dust that makes your throat sandpaper and the monk next to you says something you cant understand and in the end you just have to laugh as he laughs not at you but with you and all things…welcomed into homes it is good manners to drink the paterfamilias under the table while letting the sloivers of yakmeat stuck in your teeth stay put since they would never show you their teeth perhaps its a custom harking back to our neolithic past and speaking of ground stone tools let me tell you there are plenty of those on the roads and in the ripped-open valleys of Tongren county…more later