Learning Tibetan

Today has been good so far! Remember yesterday how I said I skipped meditation? Turns out- there was no meditation yesterday! Or today!

I wanna focus this post around a particular conversation.
After class I was walking to tea, but I stopped to talk to one of the monks I have spoken to a lot since being here. He invited me to have tea with him and the monks instead of having tea with all the teachers and translators as I usually would. I asked if it cost money, he said yes, so I declined, but he insisted! So I went! Glad I did!!
This monk is very nice (duh). He has been studying at Emory for the past year! His English is very good. We met up with three other monks back behind a tea/goods shop run by Indians. We spoke over tea for the entire break.

So, my suspicions were confirmed; the monks like soccer. Lol I didn't tell y'all that was just a suspicion, oh I'm bad. So we talked about how Manchester United is rude and Barcelona FC plays beautifully and how players from Holland play uniquely. Lol, isn't that ridiculous!? These people aren't allowed to play any games at their monasteries. They are so sneaky to know all these world-soccer facts.
They all asked me about where I lived and about my school. I asked about their outfits and what the different colors mean on their clothes. They asked if i was happy here in Dharamsala. Of course I am.
For some reason I feel like monks are seen by the average person as being completely uniform and calm and quiet. As with any group of people, this is not the case! Each monk I meet is completely different from the others (what a silly thing to point out, I know... I just don't know exactly how I can explain this right... These are people, not gerbils. But obviously my 2 gerbils have completely different personalities, so one can infer that, duh, every individual human has a unique personality. Ugh, why am I mentioning this again??) . My god, they are funny. It is especially funny because in order to make a joke to me many of them must resort to hand motions and facial expressions- this is fun because they explain things so differently than we would! Basically- I would predict that playing Draw Something with a monk would be a freakin' HOOT.
At the end of the break I started asking the monk who invited me (I'm closest with him) how to say different things in Tibetan. I started a list. I will know Tibetan fluently by the end of this trip. Yay!

I'm in the middle of a review period for the monks and it's funny, so I'm going to go. Lol one of them is telling me what they are saying and the jokes!