Greetings from the business center of the Shigatze hotel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shigatze is a complete dust bowl right now. Every sidewalk is ripped up in preparations for the celebrations in early July. Based on my casual assessment, I don\u2019t think they\u2019re going to make it. They still seem to be in the \u201cdestroy everything,\u201d phase of street repair. At some point, somebody needs to start putting concrete in place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That same July celebration, somewhat ironically, is the reason that all western \u201cTibet Permits\u201d conclude by June 30 this year. It should be quite a party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The \u201cTibet Permit\u201d is an interesting piece of paper. It\u2019s more of a starting point than a permit, per se. We also needed a licensed guide, who checks us into hotels and registers with the local police and army in each prefecture. The guide carries the permit, and apparently has to have enough copies of it to give to any checkpoint officer who feels the need to take a copy. The permit does not actually have our names on it. The register of the trip is stapled to the back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Interestingly, when we wander the city without our guide \u2013 nobody bugs us. When we\u2019re with him we\u2019re constantly getting the \u201cpapers please.\u201d Maybe it\u2019s just that we go more interesting places with him \u2013 but it does give a pretty clear impression that the permit is more to control the guide than us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The hotels are drained of people. We had a fair crew of english speakers at breakfast this morning in Gyantze, but they only offered the buffet at 8am. Lunch this afternoon was four of us (me, Jen, guide, driver) in a hall that seats 160. Rules are rules though, and they fired up the massive dining room for the four of us. Changing the procedure would probably be quite difficult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At an individual level, people are terrific. We interacted with an old monk today at the Kumbum shrine in Gyantze. He shook my hand and Jen\u2019s, and then insisted that Jen take his picture in front of the shrine. He had walked from Samye monestary \u2013 perhaps 150km \u2013 on his pilgrimage. We\u2019re hoping to be able to send a print of the picture to his monestary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the topic of food, we\u2019ve been eating really well. We say \u201cvegetarian,\u201d and that weeds out the more unusual options. Sheeps head and yak penis were both on the last menu we saw. Identification can be tricky \u2013 we had one dish that we got down to \u201cnot cabbage.\u201d I accept that \u201cnot cabbage\u201d doesn\u2019t rule out a lot \u2013 but this was definitely not cabbage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Greetings from the business center of the Shigatze hotel. Shigatze is a complete dust bowl right now. Every sidewalk is ripped up in preparations for the celebrations in early July. Based on my casual assessment, I don\u2019t think they\u2019re going to make it. They still…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-real-life","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1288"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1289,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288\/revisions\/1289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}