I am luxuriating in a hot bath in shigatse, the second biggest city in Tibet. Pretty random place right? so imagine me in my own little tibet bubble with my SIT group, going to check my e-mail when an asian looking guy walks in and goes 'you go to Northwestern too?' You can imagine my surprise/stunnedness. He said his name was Kenji, a senior econ major doing a chinese study abroad program
in Beijing, they are now travelling around and happened to be in this
same hotel the same night that we just happened to be passing through. My
faith in my ability to escape the known world was further diminished by
the fact that Doug Sunshine from Willard and Ingrid, a
girl from my freshman spanish class, were both here as well. I was
aghast, and you know when you totally don't expect to see anyone you know
or are connected with and then you do but you didn't really have anything
to say to them anyway? so what could we do aside from talk in generals
about how his whole group has been getting altitude sickness and none of
us have despite trekking through 17,000ft passes and about registration
times - yes folks conversations with college peers can really be as
awkward in Tibet as on campus. As Ian Crouch noted, who has become my
official roommate and friend since the trek, all of them looked a bunch
of 'dudes.'

After taking a bath my whole body is glowing in warmth in a way it hasn't
since LA - this is by far the nicest hotel we've stayed at on this trip.
I was looking forward to getting my laptop but it seems now that it's too
much money and hassle/risk to send it. I'm really bummed.
As far as stuff we've done, the past week I feel was much easier than our
trek because we didn't do any trekking. We started from Tsethang and
drove to Drakyul, which we had to cross on a ferry to get to (this
becomes a common theme) We stayed 4 days at Drakyul where we saw the
retreat cave of padmasambhava, the guy who brought buddhism to Tibet, and
I got to interview some tibetans about the local govt and life. It was
pretty cool - one of those days was also the election. We had tractors drive us down to
the river so we could listen on a staticky radio to the BBC world
coverage, since we were not near any jamming station which was in fact
quite entertaining as the Brits put there pointed, brutal objectivity to
task on both dems and reps, though more on reps. It was depressing but
hard to sink in when you're halfway around the world where ppl hardly
know what's going on, let alone care.
Strangely, chocolate has become one of my closest companions. I have
honestly become quite addicted to it to a degree I never was before.
Today we drove for 8hrs from dorje drak where yesterday we took a ferry
across to see a nyigma monastery. The drive consisted of a lot of windy,
completely dirty and dusty roads through high passes - I'd love to have a
map of Tibet to see how we're driving - though I know we went through
gyantse today and the last day we'll be driving over a 20,000ft pass into
Nepal.

As a side story, Ian's car was passing around a blind curve way too fast,
swerved out of the way of an oncoming vehicle, going up the hill which
led to them almost flipping, save for the driver holding the car up, and
a flat tire and the entire steering column to stop responding. The whole
next hour was apparently filled with hail marys from the driver and a
kata, or silk scarf, holding the steering column in place. pretty sketch.
Supposedly they're going to fix it but we're skeptical.