When we finally arrived at Serxu on Day 3, I rented a room with two guys I met who were from Zhejiang province, just to get the Chinese room price. (When I came back after walking around, they were all freaked out. One of the items that I had unpacked and left out was this 6-inch long knife with a tacky faux-jade case.

While I was eating, I had the pleasure of watching the proprietor repeatedly pour tar onto a (detached) pig's head. His wife was cutting up its entrails with a pair of rusty scissors.
It was an attempt at a traditional Tibetan knife and I had bought it at souvenir store. Apparently, though, it's illegal for Han people to own a knife of that size and they didn't want to be associated with that.)

Walking around Serxu itself wasn't that interesting. It was a random place where they decided to stick a PSB office and some military barracks. Nor was walking very easy: the altitude hit 5,000+ m, and I wasn't fully acclimated yet and I could feel UV rays turning my skin into one large tumor. I stopped at one "restaurant" (more like someone's grubby kitchen opening onto the street) to have lunch. I had a plate of the reliable old tomatoes and fried eggs. While I was eating, I had the pleasure of watching the proprietor repeatedly pour tar onto a (detached) pig's head, dip it into cold water, and then peel off the tar, in order to remove the hair and dirt. His wife in the mean time was cutting up its entrails with a pair of rusty scissors. Yummy.

After lunch, I hung around the kebab man, eating grilled potatoes and chatting with a group of people that was slowly starting to form around the goofy foreigner. I found out that there was this large temple nearby that was about to have some huge festival. I also met these two random guys who invited me over to dinner. One was this recently married schoolteacher who could somehow afford a set of leather sofas, a big TV, DVD player, and a pair of kicking speakers. He grilled me on every action movie hero that he knew. His favorite action star was Nicholas Cage from Con Air. I didn't have the heart to tell him about City of Angels. The other guy, Ci Cheng, was actually one of the top government officials of the town, and he would be really helpful to me later on.

The next day I dropped off my stuff at one of my newfound friend's house. He even set me up with a ride to Xiqu, a temple about 30 km down the road.

They put in a tape with a techno remix of "Whoops! There It Is!" and asked me for a translation.
The ride over was interesting. I was packed into this early 80's model of a station wagon with about 12 other Tibetans. I had the honor of riding shotgun, which wasn't the safest option considering that the door wouldn't shut close but instead had to be tied shut with twine. And so we sped down this dirt road, mud splashing in from the hole in the floorboard, my head hitting the roof every time we went over a small crater (which was often), everyone singing along to a tape of Chinese soap opera songs. They soon realized that they had an honored guest with them so they put in this tape with a techno remix of "Whoops! There It Is!" and asked me for a translation of the lyrics. This truly was an impossible task because the lyrics consisted almost entirely of "Whoop! There it is!" and "Boom sha-ka-la-ka sha-ka-la-ka!" I translated the "There it is" part, and they clearly seemed disappointed that that's all they were singing for 15 minutes.

When we arrived at the festival, I felt like I had entered a Wild West movie. There was an incredible number of people here. There were hundreds of tents of all the herders who descended on the place.

Hey, mon! Nice dreads!

We were in the middle of this mud road with all of these horses tied up outside these hastily constructed general stores. People walking down the street with cowboy hats and machetes leered at me. Women wore surgeon-like masks (I don't know why. I've seen them in Beijing because the city is so dusty. This was not a problem here, so I think it might be some sort of cover-up-the-women Muslim-like thing.) Mothers walked hand-in-hand with their children, sons and daughters both having long hair so dirty that they had turned to dreadlocks. Some women wore a lot of white makeup.

I decided to take some pictures. When I whipped out my camera, near rioting ensued. People were clambering over each other in order to see. I let some kids play with the zoom function for a while. Getting pictures was surprisingly easy: most people were actually begging to have their picture taken. This is opposed to a place like Lijiang, where people also wear all sort of colorful costumes, but since it's so overrun with whiteys testing out their new Canon, they literally run away at the sight of a camera-wielding foreigner.

Aww, what cute kids.

Just about nobody spoke any form of intelligible Chinese so I learned a couple of phrases of Tibetan. Specifically, I learned three phrases of the particular local dialect:

1) "Tashi delay" - Hello

2) "Gar dinchee" - Thank you

3) "Mizah, mizah" - I don't want any. This phrase was particularly useful as people are downright rude with their hospitality.

I went up to the temple itself, which wasn't too swift. It was in the middle of reconstruction and they were trying really hard to make it look tacky. I learned that the reason for the festival was that it was the temple's 300th anniversary hence the festival which was to last nine days.

Guy on the left was the Tibetan government-in-exile dude I was chilling with.

&Outside the temple, I met a monk with a smattering of English and no Chinese abilities. He invited me to his pad. His walls were covered with pictures of the Dalai Lama. Using an English-Tibetan phrasebook, I was able to decipher he was from India. In one margin, he had scribbled in childish writing, "I am a member of the Tibetan government-in-exile." He treated me to some milk tea, which is mildly unpleasant, and this bowl of rice mixed with yak butter and sugar, which was perhaps the grossest thing I've ever eaten in my life. First, he took a bowl of rice, scooped out a few dollops of yak butter and sugar with his hands, mashed it all together with his hands, and handed it to me.

I cannot possibly convey through the crude instrument of the English language just how disgusting this tasted. It had an overpowering metallic sour taste that triggered my gag reflex the second my brain figured how disgusting it actually was. I nearly vomited it right in front of him. It didn't help that I could see several hairs in the bowl. I took two bites, and he guessed by the grimace on my face that I thought it was unbearable. Embarrassed, I left soon after.

I found a guesthouse to stay for the night. It slept in a room with three herders and a stove fueled by yak dung. As I was writing this in my journal, two of them were standing over my shoulder (You smell. Stop trying to read this. You can't understand this anyway.)

This phrase was particularly useful as people were downright rude with their hospitality.
The third was amusing himself with rummaging through my daypack. They spent all night telling what must have been really lewd jokes and carving boiled yak meat off the bone. Despite my entreaties of "Mizah mizah!" they forced a leg or two onto me.

The next day was interesting. I woke up early in the morning and walked around in the rain. Not a lot of people were up yet, so these feral dogs were ruling the streets. These ugly mutts were all over the place, roaming around, eating litter off of the ground. When they get together in packs, they tend to bully up on the smaller dogs and/or elderly women. They're complete cowards however; throwing a rock in their direction will generally disperse them.

The first event of the festival was some head honcho monk walking up to the newly dedicated temple.

Part of the crazy procession

There was a crazy procession of hundreds of monks mobbing right behind him. But after he got to the temple, he started on some long speech in Tibetan, so I left.

Walking around, I bumped into this Tibetan guy who hails from Toronto. When we first met, our conversation went like this:

Me: "Hey, you're not from around here, are you?" (noticing his Nike windbreaker and Sony Minicam)

Him: "No, I'm from Toronto. What are you doing here?"

Me: "Oh, I'm just travelling through."

Him: "Oh shit, I have to go."

I bumped into him a couple of times after that. Apparently he works for some pro-independence organization and he could only be there on special permission with government officials accompanying him. Therefore, being seen talking with a foreigner might not have been good. Unfortunately, we didn't have many more opportunities to chat.

I decided to head back to Serxu and from there move on. As much as I wanted to stay and watch some of the festival's activities, I just didn't have the time. I went back to the house of the government official, Ci Cheng, that I met and he ended up being extremely hospitable. He let me stay at his house and treated me to meals until he found me a ride into the next town, Yushu.

The first night he made me sing karaoke. Instead of the typical Chinese pop fare, I got to sing along to some traditional songs about the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau. The lyrics were cringe-inducing: "You are so high. Oh, hand me a cup of milk tea. Qinghai-Tibetan plateau, you are my pride, my motherland!" At first, I thought that they were whipping out the karaoke machine just for me. After enduring a second night of singing karaoke songs about the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau, though, I realized that they did this every night. The next day I hung around the city, trying to find a way out of the city. Apparently the roads were so bad in the direction I was going, buses don't bother running that way. I ended up finding this "arcade," consisting entirely of a beat up Street Fighter II machine, and pounded the crap out of everyone playing as Ken.

Bored, I returned to Ci Cheng's house and watched "A Better Tomorrow," probably the best work of John Woo's oeuvre. It doesn't deviate much from the standard cliches of HK gangster movies. There's the main character, a good gangster caught in a bad world. There's an innocent, virginal Madonna figure who's the only one left at the end who isn't killed or imprisoned for life. There's a cop, hell-bent on catching the main character (the interesting twist in ABT is that the cop is the gangster's brother). There's the bad guy, who is evil not because he is a gangster, but because he does not give face where face is due or violates some Confucian relationship. There are also plenty of good "losing face" scenes, where some good guy is humiliated by the bad guy; ABT has a couple of excellent ones where Chow Yun-Fat, former badass, has to pick up money off the ground that his new boss throws on the ground. Then, there is the plot of the movie, which usually revolves around one last hit that the good guy has to make before he can escape Hong Kong. Because the good guy somehow has offended the bad guy, the bad guy kills the good guy right before he can flee with the girl. While ABT didn't have any of those classic gun fight scenes in a church with doves flying around that John Woo is so famous for, many gallons of blood were nevertheless spilled. One reason why I've become such an HK movie aficionado is that they really do give you a good look into how Chinese society works in regards to giving and losing face and Confucian attitudes towards social relations. Another reason is that a lot of them are Shakespearean in nature. There is a heavy emphasis on justice and on not violating some sort of natural ethical code. Inevitably, everyone deceives someone else, deliberately or not, and dies in the end. It's all very King Lear-ish.

The days that I was there, I was treated to plenty of yak. Yak dumplings, yak noodles, tea with yak milk. Yak for breakfast, yak for lunch, yak for dinner. The thought of yak still revolts me.

Ci Cheng was nice enough to help arrange a ride to Yushu for me the next morning…