Filed under: tibetan stuff | Tags: bike, bloomington, Culture-with-a-capital-C, mongolian, tibetan
It’s the Bloomington Tibetan/Mongolian Cultural Center, where you can send your Tibetan/Mongolian children to summer camp so they can, er, “learn their culture” as one volunteer put it. Culture has to be taught at summer camp? When your Specialness is being Violated it does!
Anyway, the place was billions, with a temple (where I failed spectacularly to meditate…like, really spectacularly), two stupas, and seven or eight gers (Mongolian yurts). The grounds are beautiful, expansive, well-landscaped and well-maintained, and when I was poking around Aidi, a Mongolian guy who works there invited me to lunch eat the lunch he had lovingly prepared. It was, mercifully, not too spicy. According to Aidi, Tibetans like spicy food but he does not, because it upsets his stomach. I got along famously with Aidi.
Unfortunately, there were no Tibetans around, since all eleven or so monks who live there were out of town on various errands. Major bummer, since I really wanted to practice my Tibetan. I even tried speaking Tibetan to Aidi but he didn’t understand. Because he’s Mongolian, not Tibetan.
Also, in the middle of my five-ish mile ride home I ran over a nail and had to walk my bike for three-plus miles. While the humor of the situation was not lost on me, I was tired and dehydrated when I finally got home. If you are looking for the most bike/pedestrian-friendly route from downtown Bloomington to the center, this is not it.
(Link to photo, and others, on a map, no less!)
Filed under: tibetan stuff | Tags: bloomington, food, HHDL, mcleod, nostalgia, snow lion
Today I finally got my gumption up and went to the Snow Lion, Bloomington’s own Tibetan restaurant. I’ve been meaning to go for the entire summer, and hence putting it off just as long, probably because I knew deep in my heart of hearts that it would not be as good as the fine establishment in McLeod Ganj by the same name. The Snow Lion in McLeod Ganj is a hotel on Jogibara Rd. with a great restaurant that has cheap and abundant Tibetan staples (tenthuk, momos, et al.), a wait-staff consisting of a Tibetan dude with a lazy eye and a Indian kid, and a kitchen full of local Indians. The Snow Lion in Bloomington is a restaurant established by (I think) HH the DL’s nephew that serves an eclectic mix of various Asian cuisines, with a few token Tibetan dishes (no tenthuk, and no steamed momos), a wait-staff consisting of an over-eager white kid in a Less Than Jake t-shirt (who pronounced my order of “thukpa ngopa” more like “thukpa en-go-pa”) and a kitchen full of people people chatting away in English. Snow Lion McLeod Ganj is patronized by a fifty-fifty mix of whiteys and Tibetans; Snow Lion Bloomington is patronized mostly by the IU Philosophy department, at least according to my professor.
I know it’s not fair to compare these two, since they are literally about as far apart as two restaurants can be. But I really miss greasy, wonderful Tibetan food and am generally feeling very nostalgic about McLeod Ganj (a feeling that is in no way related to that paper that’s due in like a week hahahaha), and a nice bowl of tenthuk is too much to ask, is it? I suppose I’ll have to wait until I’ve saved up enough to fly back to India and pay a visit to ol’ lazy-eye and the rest of the real Snow Lion crew.
