Movement

Five days ago I was in Drom, an odd patchwork city on the Nepali border and in the clouds. Now I am in Beijing, where smog melds with humid fog and it is difficult to breathe for different reasons.

The interim between Here and There was deliciously in between. Our last evening in Drom we were flabbergasted to find that we would be driving the ~20 hours back to Lhasa in a BUS. The gravel mountain roads that don't technically exist had been rough in a land cruiser... this (overnight) journey in the back row of the bus was punctuated by alarming moments of anti-gravity. I'm talking absolutely-no-contact-with-anything-solid-are-you-sure-we-haven't-driven-off-a-mountain?

We made it back alive and only a little bit frozen from enduring high altitudes with no heat.

We then had one last day in Lhasa, where we wandered the old city and I said goodbye to yogurt like I would a dear friend. That night a spectacular thunderstorm boomed through Lhasa. When the rain subsided I ascended to the roof of the hostel to watch lightning flash on the skyline. I tried to figure out what these six weeks in Tibet have meant--if I will come back, what I will remember, what within me has moved...

I went to bed late, and there were only more questions.

Then I continued my love affair with trains. It was 48 hours from Lhasa to Beijing, and the time passed surprisingly quickly. I met an amazing Romanian Religion professor who I'm convinced is a reincarnation of a Tibetan lama. (Incidentally, the word for "cheers" in Chinese means "you drink too much" in Romanian.) As I read and conversed and rocked ever so gently as one does on trains, the clouds got higher and Tibet morphed into China.

Seven more days.