Xining
Today a full day in Xining (pronounced "Shinning"). We boarded another trusty bus at noon and made our way to the Tibetan Medical Museum, past stores with Chinese signs, an outdoor pool-hall and a notable banner for a new, luxury apartment building that read "For the New Noble In the City". What do think Mao would have said about that?
The museum itself was a spacious two-story marble monster. Most of the signs that described the exhibits were in Chinese or Tibetan. The few signs in English managed to use many words without saying anything, such as "Medical research has approved that the history of human beings shares the same span with the medical history." We gathered that Tibetan doctors can identify 300 pulses on the body, that there is connection between medicine and cosmology, and that someone started a thangka and couldn't stop; the top floor featured a winding, colourful, 600 METER depiction of earthly history from creation to the present day. In the beginning there was not only light but exploding mandalas of Chaos, water, blood, and fire, and the rest has been variations on these themes. Like the West's Big-Bang and Darwinism, this thangka depicted something coming from nothing, a Noah's Ark water-covered world, the arrival of land, then animals, and finally monkies making pre-history romance. Then, like everywhere else, there were woman with babies and men pointing sticks, then arrows, at each other and people making fancy fur loin-clothes. The monkies evolve into humans, people tame the animals, build homes out of stone, and are granted celestial from Dieties through Kings. My head exploded at about the arrival of Sakyamuni's enlightenmight...
After the museum we piled back on the bus and tore Romy away from the crying friend she made in the courtyard...that Romy is easy to love and breaking hearts along the way. But she wasn't the only one..we went to a restaurant with the good students (and Prof. Kevin Stuart) from the university here who had given us a lecture after the museum. We spun the lazy susans on our tables and nibbled on a feast while performers on stage sang songs in bright costumes, somehow not choking on the dry ice that swirled around them. Highlights: the crew dancing on stage and whooping it up; and, especially for Ms. T, a dashing Indian man who ruled the floor with his Bollywood interpretations. Even those who didn't come here to fall in love wondered if they had tripped... :) Many thanks to the gaggle of Gentlemen who introduced us to their town. Tomorrow we leave here and then it's only one day to Rebkong and our host Families.
xo
berk