Back When I Couldn’t Feel My Fingers

The week before last the weather was beyond awful. Frightening even. The sky would take turns between snowing and raining and the temperature was permanently bellow 10ºC (the forties Fahrenheit), which doesn’t seem very cold until you remember there’s no heating anywhere. This was the week I came down Giardia, the week we moved in with our host families, the week the electricity went out in our library –where there are geysers that will heat up water for showers– for three days. Mind you, I’ve become flexible when it comes to showering regularly –not something I’d want to admit to the world in writing but here it is. By Friday, the situation was dire, and I left my host family’s house early, embarked on the brisk hike up to the library, only to discover there was still no electricity. By this point, I was feeling so dirty and cold and frustrated that I jumped into the freezing shower and wept through the process of washing my hair and soaping my body. It was so cold I couldn’t feel my fingers by the end of it, and to my great enjoyment, it started hailing ice the size of mothballs that afternoon. Let’s just say it was a low point, one of the lowest so far.

I can write about it now that the sun is shining and I have showered each of the last three days. I even had my first glimpse of His Holiness the DL last Thursday, when he gave a speech inaugurating the 52nd Tibet National Uprising Day.

Mcleod is turning out to be quite the experience. My friends and I hike to the nearby waterfall in Bagsu on an almost daily basis (pictures coming soon, promise), and I’ve discovered my host family is flexible about me coming in and out and staying out at night, though I’ve never pushed their flexibility past midnight. One of the Teaching Assistants has a kitchen where I cooked my ginger almond broccoli last Wednesday night (I mention it because chances are, if I’ve fed you, you’ve had my ginger almond broccoli), and we shared a couple vodka-lime-sodas and spoke into the night. Similarly, my Pa-la is teaching me to make Pale, the Tibetan morning bread, and taught me how to make the vegetable momos that gave this blog their name. Of course, once steamed, you could tell which ones he had made and which ones I haphazardly assembled. I’ve been eating so uch my a-ma-la has taught me how to say, “I’m full” in Tibetan, a phrase I use every night after downing bowls of noodles –called thugpa or tentuk in Tibetan depending on the shape.

Barriguita llena, corazón contento, verdad? Especially after being sick, every bite tastes of glory and I’m looking forward to hiking to Triund tomorrow with Anna, a good six hour hike that should make me feel that, despite all I’ve consumed, I’m nearer to my regular shape than I am today. We’ll see.