day 3: lijiang

on the third day of christmas, an angel gave to me...

a trip to the hairy yak meadow via cable car (3700m high). the jade dragon snow mtn, a virgin peak, looms over. At the foot of the mountain is the Baisha Land (means white sand in chinese), named for the bodies of the slaughtered Puni warriors (history loves a pun). The Naxi won the land at great cost, but the land itself was too infertile to grow anything but grass for the cows to munch.

ah mah ni bo mi hon--6 holy words that spin the world around. the monks at the top of hairy yak meadow make circles, with tins, rosaries, with their daily walk. big circles and small circles, around the words that called into being. did things exist before they had names? do words create consciousness, or does consciousness create words? a shedding of the beast.

we wandered off the path next to a "lawn no trample" sign. we laid in the grass, under the mountain, and listened to the ringing in our heads. the sky was big above us.

zhang yimou (director of crouching tiger, hidden dragon) produced the impression lijiang show we watched in the afternoon. it's basically a bunch of villagers leading horses around and line dancing. they kept yelling things like "i dance for you! i sing for you! i'm just a villager!" the open-sky theater that gazes upon the mountain was supposed to lend majesty, but the show was too obvious for me. i fell asleep with my head on my hands and my butt on a tree stump. i think jon liked it well enough, maybe b/c he couldn't understand what they were saying.

that evening we spent in the village of the dogs, aka shuhe village, which is 600 years old. i ate my favorite of the local foods: chicken eye pea rice cakes--it's a glutinous fried mass that's mixed with bean sprouts, vinegar, spices...mmmm glutinous, mmmm fried (i actually like yak yogurt better, but only b/c you can drink it out of a glass bottle. i'm a sucker for drunken yogurts. plus, since you drink it, it's not technically a food right? which obviously means it doesn't contain any calories and won't do you any harm if you have 4 in 1 go). anyways, back to the dogs. we saw everything from st bernards to huskies to pitbulls to collies to cocker spaniels (not to mention the countless roaming mutts). i fed a demanding little thing all the ham from our soup under the table. the heartless bastard lost interest in me as soon as we left the table. i mean, is it too much to expect a bit of following around?