on saturday night i exchanged slang terms with some of the girls in the hostel. now i can say things like, "you're annoying," "he looks really hot," and all kinds of slang terms for bodily functions like vomiting and farting. they now know things like, "word," "sweet," and "oh jeez." the weird thing about tibetan slang (and spoken tibetan in general, really) is that because there are so many isolated groups of tibetans in exile, every dialect is different. so i didn't really learn "tibetan" slang saturday night; i learned "CIHTS girls' hostel" slang. if i went anywhere else - even if i talked to the boys here on campus - and said the things that the girls taught me, nobody would have a clue as to what i was saying. jojo has run into the same sort of problem. she learned lhasa dialect this summer, and whenever she tries to talk, people just kind of laugh at her.

it's really kind of fascinating, but sad at the same time. yesterday i was talking with my friend yangli, and she said that even if tibet was free tomorrow, it could never be like it used to be. tibetans in tibet now all speak with chinese mixed in, while tibetans in india speak with hindi and english mixed in. then there are the tibetans in nepal, in the u.s., etc. if everybody went back to tibet, they wouldn't be able to understand each other. yangli even thinks that if it were free and people could return there, tibet would become so segregated between those who stayed and those who left that the country would turn into an india-pakistan sort of situation. i think that's a little extreme, but i definitely see her point. it's amazing to talk to people like my friend lhamo, who just came from tibet and feels so out of place here, and yangli, who says that she really doesn't feel connected to tibet at all because she was born and raised in india. lhamo thinks in chinese, yangli thinks in hindi. tibetan is a second language for both of them. it's just really amazing (and incredibly upsetting) to be able to actually observe an entire culture disappearing in front of me.

yesterday i went to see "taj mahal" with a few girls. the movie was a little slow and the music wasn't terribly exciting, but it was entertaining enough. one of the girls who came with us is a nun, and she really doesn't like wearing her robes. so, as soon as our auto got out of sarnath, she took off her robes (she was wearing pants underneath) and put on a hooded sweatshirt, sunglasses, and a baseball cap to cover her shaved head. apparently she does this whenever she goes into varanasi, and the other girls just tell people that she's their sponsor from south africa.