Doing Patience

            Today is our last day in Kathmandu, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to stop and reflect on the past month. A couple days ago, I learned the Tibetan vocabulary for talking about being patient. Whereas in English we say, “I am patient” or “you are patient or “she/he is patient” and “I/You have or He/she has patience,” the Tibetan version of trying to express the same idea—at least the way our gen-la taught it to us—translates into “I/you do patience” and “He/she does patience.” This difference in patience as a quality and patience as an action may seem insignificant to you. Just another one of those small oddities that arises from translating one language to another, you say. But I’ve latched on to this alternative perspective—I like that by becoming something that is done, patience can be practiced or developed as a skill. Some people might argue that “being patient” is also understood as a behavior one can practice to become better at, but I like that “doing patience” brings attention to the temporality of patience (the quality only exists as long as it is being acted out) and makes patience seem to be less of a personality trait (i.e. She is impatient/patient), something that is open for anyone to practice. The concept of “doing patience” has helped shape the way I look back on the past month.

            For one, I have been doing patience a lot. I absolutely loved learning Tibetan, but I’ll admit that the pace of the class frustrated me. Based on what I’ve heard from some of our staff who have learned Tibetan or seen students learn Tibetan in other courses with other institutions, I am very grateful I am where I am. According to them, our class was one of the fasted-pace classes they’ve seen. In any case, it felt like we kept repeating content and making tiny, tiny steps with out language skills. I managed to do enough patience to stay focused in class by keeping in mind the great respect I have for our gen-la (our teachers). In the end, I was also able to feel a little bit helpful in answering students’ questions that seemed to be misunderstood when asked in class. Anyone who knows me well understands that I’m a rather gung-ho, full-speed-ahead kind of a person, so you might be able to see how sitting in a class knowing I could be learning more and more quickly is difficult for me (especially after being spoiled by Bowdoin academics that tend to really push me). In that sense, I would view getting through these classes without getting too frustrated was the greatest challenge of this first period of the program. I think if I had the concept of “doing patience” in my mind earlier in the month, I would have had fewer moments of frustration during class time, but even now having just brought the concept into the equation in the past couple days, I have been able to look back on the month and appreciate the month (in addition, of course, to learning Tibetan!) as a chance to practice doing patience. Additionally, I feel that the combination of this month and the concept of doing patience will help me in the future when I find myself in situations where patience will be helpful.

            I also think that it might be helpful to think that if we can say one does patience, can’t we also say that one does frustration? And if one does frustration, one can also not do frustration. And I’m beginning to think that whether or not I do frustration is more in my control than I may have thought in the past. Another Tibetan word highlights this: like doing patience, diligence is also addressed in Tibetan as doing diligence instead of being diligent. I see the actions I do that can be considered diligent as very much intentional and in my control. (Indeed, I feel out of control of many things, but at least I can trust myself to always work hard.) Transferring that idea of intention and control to the doing (or not doing) of patience and frustration sets me up for doing more patience, doing less frustration, and, as a result, existing or participating in potentially frustrating situations without seeing them as such and without the visceral tension of frustration that makes such situations harder to enjoy.

            Another way in which “doing patience” ties into reflecting on our time in Kathmandu is that the difference in perspectives—that between being patient and doing patience—is an example of what might be deemed the “favorite part” of this first month. Just today one of my classmates asked me what my favorite part of being in Kathmandu was, and it is, of course, a challenging question to answer, both because there are many great things to recall in the past month and because “favorite” and “part” can be interpreted in so many different ways. What I ended up describing was the love for being able to take in what people do and say and how the landscape looks, feels, and smells, because it enables me to become aware of the multiple ways any given thing or activity can be done or thought about. It isn’t so much that it’s exciting because what I see, hear, smell, touch, or taste is always different—indeed I think I’ve seen a lot of similarities to aspects of home in addition to “different” things—but it’s exciting because it highlights possibility. It invites me to take into account that there isn’t just one way of doing something or thinking about something, that whichever “way” is most familiar to me is just one of many. Accepting or being aware of different ways of doing things is by no means a particularly new concept in how I navigate my own life, but in this reflection of the month, I bring it up as an extremely enjoyed aspect of being here. Just as my past journeys have shown me many ways of doing and thinking, Kathmandu has provided sights, sounds, and experiences that have added more options to what my mind can conceptualize as possibilities for carrying out human life.

            To wrap up this post, I just want to express my gratitude for all the people who have done patience with us as students, visitors, and temporary inhabitants of Kathmandu. Certainly our teachers, our host families, and the people with whom we’ve interacted on our various minor and major excursions to the city and beyond have engaged in doing patience to help was get from who we were before we got here to who we are now. On the one hand, I can’t believe I’ve already been here a month. On the other hand, I can’t believe I’ve only been here a month. It feels both long and short, and it’s hard to sort out which factors make it seem either. In terms of content, it’s really quite amazing what we’ve accomplished in a month—there is the language, which though not at my desired pace, resulted in knowing hundreds of words and many ways to use them, and then you can watch the way we talk about what we read and experience and see that together we’ve formed a setting in which we use terms regarding Buddhism and Tibetan history with the confidence that everyone in the group will understand what we’re saying. In that sense the time has felt long enough to accomplish such things. Living with a host family has been very enjoyable, but I don’t feel like I have been in Kathmandu long enough or spent enough time at my family’s house to really develop strong relationships with my amala, baala, and ajak. In that sense, the time has been short.

            So now we’re headed to Bhutan (land of the thunder dragon, if you care to know). Although some student groups have traveled to Bhutan during study abroad in the past, we’re kind of the guinea pigs for potentially setting up an SIT program in Bhutan in the future, so our group will be spending an entire month there. After that is the independent study project period, and it’s shaping up that I’m going to be staying in Bhutan for that month as well. Of course, who knows what could happen? As our program director says, all plans are subject to change. Let us see what happens!

            (There probably will be few to no posts during that time, because I’ve decided to leave my computer here at the program house. There will be computers and internet in Bhutan, of course, which I will inevitably be using to get my summer work in order and do silly things like register for classes, but I don’t know if I’ll be spending much time doing other silly things like writing blog posts.)

And for you visually-oriented folks:

The Wheel of Life, seen painted on monastery walls, basically contains through symbols the Buddhist understanding how the universe works. Maybe sometime when I get a chance I'll write about all the different parts of this image. For the time being, I'll just note that I find it notable that this expression of Buddhist teachings does not require literacy. It reminds me of the murals in the churches we went to during Western Civilization which were able to portray the stories from the Bible to illiterate followers.

This is the Shechen Monastery in Boudha. They have training for Buddhist philosophy and art and have many opportunities for people coming from other parts of the world to study.

Mani ("prayer wheels," though they are related to mantras not prayers) have mantras written on many layers of metal that are wrapped around to form the cylinders, which are spun in a clockwise direction to multiply the merit gained by reciting the mantra printed on the mani. These manis have the mantra for the Bodhisattva of Compassion (whose emanation is the 14th Dalai Lama), "om mani padme hum," written on them. Tibetans recite mantras in Sanskrit rather than translating them to Tibetan, because it is the sounds of the words themselves which have power.

This is a water source in Patan that is in the middle of being repaired. We spent an afternoon walking around Patan learning about the dependence of structural heritage on living heritage and the dependence of living heritage on natural resource management. Patan seems to have it down pretty well--their water system has been function since 537 AD!

This image shows my favorite mudra (a symbolic gesture with one's hands in Hinduism and Buddhism), which is the varada mudra signifying generosity, giving, compassion, forgiveness for self and others...those kinds of things which I find very important.

The outside of a well. The center part appears to be a carving of the 8 Auspicious Symbols. The snakes are significant, because the snake gods, Nagas, control the water. Wells are cleaned once a year during a specific festival, and people will send a light down into the well. If the snake gods are angry, the light goes out, and people know not to send people down. Sound like a similar test that happens in our own wells?

An interesting name for a restaurant...

Just to clear up the debate (as there has been one here at SIT): there are monkeys in Kathmandu. This one was doing kora one morning on the rooftops around the stupa.

The Stupa (and Chapel) as Centerpiece

If you were to take a look at my photo albums of the Bowdoin campus, you might be shocked at the large number of photos I have of Bowdoin’s chapel. It’s not so much that the chapel as it functions as a chapel plays any part in my life, but instead it serves as a physical centerpiece to my habitual pathways. The chapel enters my vision many times throughout any given day. The chapel is also incredibly photogenic, what with its twin spires, massive door, and gray stone that contrasts with its surroundings. With the aid of changing light, it becomes a common subject of my photographs.

Similarly, the past three weeks have been spent almost entirely in the Boudhanath area of Kathmandu. In this short time I have developed habitual patterns, as well, often going to do kora at the stupa in the mornings before class, walking to school from there, sometimes adventuring back to the stupa during our break before lunch, and often returning to the stupa with classmates in the evening if we have a bit of time before curfew. It’s not that the stupa is the only place to go in Boudhanath. Indeed, I do wish that I’d taken some of those times to venture off in other directions, yet despite the repetitiveness of where I spend my time, there is never a shortage of people and activities to watch from any vantage point around the stupa. Like the chapel, the stupa is quite photogenic, and with various angles of light and even more angles from which to view the stupa, it has become the chapel of my photographic existence here in Boudha.

I find it interesting that the Boudha stupa, like the Bowdoin Chapel, is both the physical centerpiece and a prime photographic subject for me, because each is a structure for religious practice. Perhaps that shows the importance or ubiquity of religion in both societies. But it is also somewhat interesting that patterns of movement and my camera lens is so focused on such structures, since religion has never been a significant part of my life. In any case, religious places and light…

 

Incredibly Close: Observations of Proximity in KTM

One aspect of living here in KTM (as I’ve come to call Kathmandu) is the apparent closeness of just about everything. Sure, we can think about it in the sense that I’ve already written about, the sacred and profane/mundane being quite close or even intertwined, but beyond that, there is the physical closeness of bodies, buildings, and vehicles

During those busy times at the stupa when a lot of people are doing kora, nobody seems to be miffed that walking on the inner pathway means people are packed together, and people still seem to manage to go their own pace with the faster folks darting in between others when a small space comes into existence.

Then one dares to step into a vehicle of sorts. Getting onto a bus, micro, or tuktuk almost guarantees a physical closeness with others that is much, much tighter than the crowd doing kora. But even getting into a taxi or riding a motorcycle means you’re about to become part of a tightly packed puzzle moving in all directions. Beyond the fact that vehicles are supposed to travel on the left side of the road and that drivers should pay attention to the traffic police when they happen to be at an intersection directing traffic, there aren’t a lot of rules. (Or if there are, they aren’t enforced or followed.) Part of the craziness that occurs in vehicles has to do with narrow roadways, in the sense that sometimes two cars coming from opposite directions are wider than the road. There isn’t really a middle line, so the number of lanes of traffic going in either direction at a given time is a little blurry. Even on the big Ring Road where the highway is wide, the space is usually packed so if one wants to turn into the moving traffic or shift lanes, there has to be a certain level of assertiveness (or I suppose aggressiveness, but assertiveness explains it better) on the part of the driver. One time when we were on a bus coming back from Patan, an assertive tuktuk driver decided he needed to get around the car in front of him so he eased in between us and the car and for a minute or so was about 1 ½ inches from our bus. Amazingly, after awhile this closeness of moving vehicles no longer is alarming. Sure, the first time our taxi driver pulled a u-turn in wall to wall traffic or the first couple times we met buses coming around corners on winding mountain roads was alarming, but soon it ceases to be a novelty or a cause of increased blood pressure.

So I’ve told you a bit about people, and I’ve told you a bit about vehicles. What about vehicles and people? The best way to describe crossing the street is Frogger. Did you ever play that game on the computer when you were a kid? In Frogger, your arrow keys control a frog that you have to move through traffic to the other side of the road, sometimes having to pause in the middle of the road or back track before moving ahead again. Now that I’ve described Frogger to you, I no longer have to describe crossing the street here, because it’s just like Frogger. Except that maybe you aren’t a frog.

One of my favorite examples of vehicles and people is when we were in Patan learning about water systems and resource management. We had split off from one of the main roads and were walking down a fairly narrow road. It was easy enough for us to just step to one side for passing motorcycles, but then along came a truck. It wasn’t even that big of a truck in comparison to the hulking chunks of metal you see flying down highways in the U.S., but in comparison to the width of the road…

The photograph accompanying this post is during that situation. Some Nepali guys who had been walking on the street were squished up against the wall on the other side, the truck took up the middle, and our group was lined up against the wall on the other side. Maybe the nice balance to the close proximity of objects is that they aren’t moving incredibly quickly…

Shifting into a more philosophical mode, the location of things in the streets makes me see certain processes as being more proximate as well. Imagine a goat tied up to a light post, and maybe chicken pecking around nearby. Look up from the goat and the chicken and there’s a butcher, displaying his or her wares, namely chicken carcasses and chunks of goat. Sometimes a leg or head is hanging out on the table as well. Now, walk down the street a shop or two and you might be able to find some fried meat on a stick or be able to pop into a restaurant for meat-filled momos. Some students seem put-off or disgusted by seeing life and death and consumption so near to each other. I’m actually not bothered by it at all (maybe the myriad times I got in the car in the garage and turned the headlights on, only to find a deer carcass hanging in front of the car desensitized me?), but this juxtaposition and perhaps other students’ reactions to it makes me marvel at the way meat seems to be treated in the U.S. Not only are live animals and saleable meat products not physically close, but also the products that are sold in stores typically don’t immediately point to what was once a living animal (i.e. legs and heads). Heck, most of the meat is deboned already, further disguising it from its previous life form. Further we have terms that distance the consumable object from the living animal: instead of pig we eat pork (which is of course further classified), instead of lamb we eat mutton, instead of baby cows we eat veal, instead of deer we eat venison. We also don’t tend to look at the kind of animals we are eating as we eat. A lot of times we we’re served meat here, we have to be aware of many little bones, because a whole chicken will be used or a piece of mutton might have skin and hair still on it. Watching people’s reactions has brought to light an American perception of what edible meat is or should be like. (Is it weird that bones and hair don’t bother me at all? :-/)

Interestingly, there is one thing that has stood out to be as being not “incredibly close,” but rather being entirely separate. Whereas the consumption of meat may occur right next to the original source—the goat—or the raw product—the carcass on the table, the production of metalwork for the shops around the stupas—objects that are seemingly tourist trinkets and/or objects for ritual—isn’t occurring next to the shops that sell those items. Rather, on my walk from the program house to my homestay house I pass many one-room operations where 2-5 people will be sitting marking metal rings and dishes with painstaking patterns or softening and shaping a piece of metal over a flame. There could certainly be a practical reason for this separation—primarily that it seems everything into those rooms of construction is smudged with soot, whereas final products need to be clean. Or maybe it’s an authenticity thing when it comes to selling things to tourists. Tourists want old things, things with histories. The items can be made to look antique-ish, but that façade would disintegrate if tourists saw the items being made right in front of them. The Authenticity Points of an object might further fall if tourists discovered it was not Tibetans but Newaris or some other less-famous ethnic group making them…In any case, I find it very interesting that while many things that are part of local people’s everyday production, consumption, and action are incredibly close, the products made for sale around the stupa are generally not physically close processes of construction.

Maybe the space and people around me wouldn’t feel so “close” if I had grown up in an urban area in the U.S.? (Ask me about my Pancake Placement Theory if you are curious about proxemics in the United States. I maintain that one’s childhood setting can be deduced from way one cooks pancakes on a large grill. :P) Any New Yorkers out there want to describe what kind of space bubbles people have in the city? I kind of like having to rethink space and adopt new habits to operate in that space.

“Don’t Honorific Yourself” and other rules and tidbits about Tibetan Language

Laundry and Language on Losar*? Yes, I think so. No need to share my laundry with you, but I do have something on language…

“Don’t Honorific Yourself” and other rules and tidbits about Tibetan Language

Let’s just get this out there: I love Tibetan language. Even though the pace of our classes isn’t my favorite, the language is quite stellar. Though in usage it can be really difficult to understand (just as English speakers talk fast and don’t enunciate, so, too, do Tibetan language speakers), it is the most wonderfully systematic language I’ve studied. Sure, every language has a system, but have you seen English? Some systems are more systematic that others…

In any case, I love Tibetan language. And while I’m not going to fill a post with explanations of how it all works (especially since I’m still quite the novice), I wanted to share with you some little snippets about the language.

Don’t Honorific Yourself

While languages such as Spanish and German have that nice polite form of you (Usted in place of tu, Sie in place of du), Tibetan sidesteps polite forms of pronouns and uses honorific forms with all sorts of words. For instance, the regular form of “to go” is འགྲོ (dro), while the honorific form is ཕེབས (phep, which, confusingly enough, also means “to come”).  Head is མགོ  (go), but an honorific head is དབུ  (bu). A body is གཟུགས་པོ་ (zug po), but an honorific body is སྐུ་གཟུགས (ku zug). “To eat” is ས་ but honorific eating is མཆོད (chö). A name is མིང (ming), but if talking about someone’s name in an honorific sense, by golly, use མཚན (tshen). Similarly the verb for “to be called” is (ser) and (shu), accordingly. Another way that respect can be conveyed is the use of the particle ལཀས་ (la) after people’s names or titles. A teacher (gegen) becomes gen-la; your friend Ben becomes Ben-la, and so on. I tell you this because a) I find it interesting and b) a key thing to learn when beginning your Tibetan language study is to not use honorific words when talking about yourself. That would be a little presumptuous wouldn’t it? Hence, the rule “Don’t honorific yourself.” That’s not proper English, you say, ‘honorific’ is not a verb! But hey, that’s what one of our gen-la says to us when we accidentally use honorific terms. In some ways this complicates things—if someone addresses you using honorific terms (khyerang-ghi tshen-la ghare shu-ghi yö? What is your (honorific) name (honorifically) called?), you can’t just parrot back the phrase inserting your answer in place of the question word. You have to know the non-honorific forms (khyerang-ghi tshen-las Nica ser-ghi yö). Also, just don’t ever add ལཀས་ (la) to yourself when speaking.

On the other hand you can add the nearly all purpose postposition ལ་ (which has the exact same sound as the honor particle, la), which brings us to the next factoid...

Homophones Galore!

Even though the various rules of vowels, superscripts, subscripts, prefixes, and suffixes can modify pronunciation, resulting in an immense variety of sounds, there still ends up being soooo many homophones. In some cases this is because two unique combinations of rules result in the same sound, and in some cases pronunciation of words have changed through time irrespective of spelling. It’s really not any different from meat and meet, read and reed, need and knead, etc., and I don’t think that anyone has counted homophones in English and Tibetan, but it seems like there are more in Tibetan! (Could be the infamiliarity with sounds and meanings, thus it is more effort to draw meaning from context in Tibetan than in English?) Two ways to reduce the confusion? 1. Memorize spellings and when you don’t know which meaning a sound was referring to, ask someone to spell it. However, this actually isn’t very effective because a lot of times people aren’t certain about the spelling. 2. Context, folks, context. Use it. (which of course requires you to know more words!)

False Homophones Galore! (a.k.a. Injis’ Homophones)

So, sure there are quite a few homophones in Tibetan language. However, this issue is made more difficult by the fact that our poor Inji (term referring to white westerners) ears are not finely tuned to important subtle differences, nor are our mouths used to projecting each of those subtle sounds consciously. For one, suffixes are, as they say in our language book, “pronounced softly.” At first it seemed as if this meant they weren’t really pronounced at all (and that is the case for some words), but if you listen really carefully you can sometimes here those faint suffixes that seem to function more as a way to cut vowel sounds short rather than actually make a sound themselves. In that way, you can think you’ve heard a word that doesn’t have a suffix, you write it down as having such and such meaning, and then later when you try to use it yourself you end up saying something you didn’t mean to say. The second aspect that makes for “false” homophones is the way high and low tones make for distinct phonemes (smallest unit of sound that has unique meaning). Whereas in English you can say “kit” with a high tone and a low tone and it means the same thing, to use an aspirated velar stop (that is, k as it would be said at the beginning of a word) with high and low tones is to say two different letters of the alphabet! Differentiating between aspirated and unaspirated stops is quite easy because we are tuned to recognize such differences: d is just an unaspirated version of t, b the unaspirated version of p, and so on. Once I learned the different tones in the classroom setting it was easy to hear the difference, and with some practice, the Inji mouth can produce each at will. It is in speaking with others, however, that the difference between high and low tone becomes much more subtle than when letters are recited in the classroom. Not being able to differentiate between high and low in conversation isn’t that much of a problem if you understand the context, but if you’re ever trying to transcribe something…

Learning and Speaking in Different Registers

Also in terms of differences that exist in and out of the classroom, I’ve noticed quite the difference in the registers we use in each location. In the classroom we learn a formal register in which we answer questions in the “polite” way (la [aux. verb], Subject Object Verb Aux. Verb). Thus, the formal register becomes habit. And then you go home. I don’t know about other students’ experiences with being formal at home, but let me tell you, my amala and bala just laugh at my formalness and sometimes parrot back the formal form with glee. I don’t mind providing a good laugh, but it does make me recognize that it’d be worthwhile to practice using and switching between formal and informal registers. (In case you are wondering, a less formal way to answer a question is Verb + Aux. Verb.)

There are rules…and there are exceptions…sometimes

I’m not going to go into too much detail here, as I don’t know enough parallels between dialects to describe it well. Let’s just say that, like in any language, there are a lot of different ways to say things, and there are many “rules” that can be followed to the T or can have many exceptions. From the beginner point of view, it’s been frustrating to learn something in class, use it with a language partner, be told it’s “wrong,” get in the habit of following a new rule, go back to class and use it and be told it’s “wrong.” Despite being “corrected,” people seemed to know what I was saying, so maybe once I’m out of the school setting I’ll just get weird looks rather than interruptions when I use a rule differently from my fellow interlocutor?

Built-in Honor for Good Ol’ Pops

The word for father is bala. The word for mother is ama. Unless you want to use the honorific term, in which case it is amala. Aha, you see that there? You can choose to respect your mother, but by golly you’re going to respect your father. Intriguing, no? Granted, I almost always hear people say amala rather than ama, but the build in honorific particle for father is an interesting piece of how language might reflect a society’s values.

Intention and Control

You know how in English (and many other similar languages) we conjugate verbs by 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd person, as well as by singular and plural? With Tibetan, don’t worry about changing a verb if a subject becomes plural. (Finally, you say, something easy about Tibetan.) And while you have pronouns that enable you to talk about the same sort of people who get talked about in 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd person (namely, I, you, and he/she), verb conjugation follows a different set of rules than just tacking a form to a pronoun. I’m not going to go into super detail here, because knowing me, it would spiral into something long that people wouldn’t want to read, BUT here’s the deal: verbs are basically paired with auxiliary verbs that are categorized (in our books) as being “personal” and “impersonal.” You might think that this means you always use the personal form with “I” and the impersonal form with “you” and “he/she.” If you do, you think incorrectly. You see, as the speaker chooses which form to use, he/she is basing that selection on 1) whether or not the speaker is in control of the matter at hand, and 2) the intention behind the action—whether the speaker did something on purpose or by accident. Once you get into the Impersonal realm, the form is further differentiated by actions that are/were habitual/general statements and actions that are/were just discovered and experienced. With just the change of that ending auxiliary verb, you can change the entire connotation of your statement. Subtle differences, folks, subtle differences. (The personal form has these two different meanings, habitual and nonhabitual, but the form doesn’t change.) I can’t help but draw a few strands of though from ideas of intention and control to Buddhism…

A Tool for Reducing Gossip?

Okay, this subtitle only works if people always spoke the truth, but here’s a cool fact: when using past tense, in addition to the narrative past that just tells your conversation partner something happened in the past, there is a form that you use only if you were there when an event happened and then a form used if you found out something that happened in the past but weren’t there. I’m just saying it might help people evaluate sources of information… (Thubten-la says that if you find out a car is stolen and are talking to the police, you must use the “-shak” (weren’t present) form and not the “-song” form because otherwise you’ll have to serve as a witness to a crime you didn’t see!)

Don’t Ask, Just Tell

This is less of a language thing than a “personal experience being a somewhat long term ‘guest’ in someone’s house.” I’ve been trying to ease from the position of always being served, always having someone wash dishes, etc. Questions of “Can I help?” were turned down profusely (as they grabbed my dishes and ran away). Last week I managed to sneak into the kitchen and wash my own dish while amala was eating dinner and at least got that habit started, but yesterday when the opportunity arose that I might was other dishes as well, I jumped on it. Amala found me in the kitchen, clicked her tongue, and shook her head. I said, in shaky Tibetan, “I want to help.” She then “corrected” that sentence into a structure that essentially means, “I will help.” So maybe if I just tell people I will help then I can?

I’m a language nerd. Sorry if this kind of post bores you. I know at least one person—that person who will always geek out with me about language—will enjoy this.

Welcome to the year of the water dragon!

ལོ་སར་བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས།

*Losar=Tibetan New Year