Eat, Pray, Email

I visited India and Nepal for the first time on a Buddhist pilgrimage led by Shantum Seth in 2007. The following is from my 2008 trip to India, Nepal, and Tibet and is about Lhasa, the capitol of Tibet.

The little temple behind the noodle shop. I found this place accidentally.

My tour guide and I parted at the hotel for a lunch break. From the hotel, I went to the little shop that sells bottled water, and I bought four more bottles (two of which I’ve already finished — it’s 8:25 am as I’m writing this). In my hotel room, I dropped off the bottles, postcards, and a little book I picked up at the Potala.

I wandered down the street in the direction of the Jokhang and turned left at the first corner. If I had been headed for the Jokhang, I would have turned right. The narrow street contained many little shops and merchant’s booths and wagons containing bananas that a merchant was selling, but I saw no restaurants.

I saw a woman with a long table on which she served ramen noodles from a heaping huge bowl. In Tibet, Muslim women wear elegant black snoods, and this ramen chef wore such a black lace snood under a sunhat. I walked up to her table and pointed to first the bowl of noodles and then the jar of red chili. She took a little bowl, plopped a heaping serving of noodles into it, then mixed in soy sauce and chili sauce and handed it to me, along with packaged wooden chopsticks.