Tibet 1.7 - When they stick their tongue out at you... (July 30)

Yesterday I was in Bayi, which I guess is the second largest city in Xizang. Our group was walking to lunch and I noticed an elderly Tibetan woman walking in the same direction, spinning her prayer wheel and glancing at me. Many of the places we’ve been have not been opened up to tourists other than Chinese, so me and my western colleagues have been the recipients of many a curious stare. This made me uneasy until I learned that all I had to do was smile and give a nod or a wave. Such a simple gesture seemed to break through the awkward barriers of uneasiness and insecurity as the locals responded eagerly in kind. From perplexed to enchanted, almost every Tibetan returned a big ol’ grin and waved back. I was told Tibetans were friendly, but experiencing it is something else. I can only imagine that they must have been told the same thing about westerners.

Anyway, I did the same trick with the woman on the street, but her response was quite new to me. She stuck her tongue out at me! Now, it wasn’t your typical “nya-nya, na-nya-nya” type tongue, but more of the tongue-depressor type tongue.... (Sorry, that’s the best visual I could come up with.) If I wasn’t reading Peter Hopkirk’s “Trespassers on the Roof of the World”, I wouldn’t quite know what to make of this. Apparently, the sticking out of the tongue in this fashion is a traditional greeting in Tibet. After the woman did this, it did take me a little time to process it and I found myself thinking about it at lunch. In the end, I felt rather touched to have experience such and interaction.

“An old Tibetan woman stuck her tongue out at me in greeting.”

How many people can say that?

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