I promise, at some point I’ll start talking about my actual memories again instead of hopping on my soapbox every few minutes. It’s just very difficult to do so after reading the news.
]]>I’ve been trying to find the words to express how angry and sad and frustrated I have been since this violence started. It is a very strange feeling to look at pictures coming out of Lhasa and recognize in the burnt-out shells places I and my classmates passed every day for three weeks. Yahoo has an extensive photo gallery of Lhasa and Tibetan protests. In the rubble, so far I’ve recognized a teashop in which I got a wonderful cup of tea, a little Chinese dumpling shop that would belch out the noxious fumes of cooking cabbage and unidentifiable meat, and various shops near the Barkhor. Of course, we can’t contact any of the people we met in Tibet, so we don’t know if they are safe or not.
]]>You can see the video by going to YouTube and searching for “bjork tibet”. (For some reason, embedding the video here broke everything else.) I recommend not reading the comments unless you enjoy being angry.
]]>The Prince of Wales has snubbed the Chinese government by refusing to attend the Olympic Games in Beijing this summer.
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Here in Mississippi we’re only a few feet above sea level, and on the coast, many folks are below sea level. The atmospheric density is far above Tibet’s, and the humidity is much higher. Moving quickly from this low altitude to the high one–as we did–can produce symptoms in some people. (It’s not so much the altitude itself as it is the speed at which you move to it.) However, even this doesn’t always determine whether you will get sick–some people just seem to be more susceptible than others.
]]>His speech and the speeches of others at the ceremony reemphasize that he is not a “splittist,” as Beijing claims, but simply a crusader for peace. He restated that it is not independence he is after, but actual autonomy, something the “Tibet Autonomous Region” utterly lacks. He thanks the American people for their support, and is rather politic in thanking the Bushies for their “support of religious freedom” (heehee, I don’t think he’s been reading the US news much…).
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