My own personal sherpa
I went to Pangboche to practice my Tibetan, but Pasang (my buddy from college who moved back in '93) wanted to brush up on his English almost the whole ten days I was there. He has two brothers, Pemba and Pasang, but it's not as confusing as it sounds having two Pasangs in the house. They mostly don't talk to each other anyway because my pal Pasang is "westernized" from his twelve years in New York City which is kind of a trailer park thing there. He got his Master's in diatetics from Columbia with a minor in interior design. He started in therapeutic recreation, but I told him there was no future in that.So we started talking about his great uncle Tenzing Norgay (actually everyone is a great aunt or uncle there, so I'm not sure about the blood relations), and we decided to go to Tshechu where he was born which is like a little sherpa party town. They have three Starbucks and a disco called the Yak Yak and there are people dancing there 24 hours a day. The problem was that they only had two CDs; Kate Bush and KC and the Sunshine Band. It made for an interesting four hours, but still no help with my Tibetan.
Shake, Shake, Shake... Shake your Buddha.
posted by Aaron at 5/16/2006 02:41:00 AM
4 Comments:
Whoah, Tenzing Norgay? You will have to firgive my boorish western education, bloated and crappy as it is (Im just saying, we dont pay our teachers shit here), but was he not he same sherpa who excorted Edmund Hillary up Everest? Do not ask me what dark crusted corner of my mind i dug that out of, it is a place men including myself fear to tread, but i do believe that he was the guy, that got the guy up that hill thing. Shouldn't he, the sherpa, be famous for first going up everest then?
Yes, that's correct. Maybe you recently watched the Coen Brother's Intolerable Cruelty where they referenced him:
"I wanna find her Norgay."
"How do you spot a Norgay?"
"You start with the people
with the funny names."
The Coen brothers are Da Bomb! Nobody does it better.
I'm sure he's more famous than Sir Hillary in some places. Ask my buddy Pasang.
Not the Coens, twas Jeopardy. But white men who have exploited the people and resources of exotic and beautiful lands has long been a fascination of mine. and if i do remember correctly, as his famous pic atop the Godly mountain was taken, you can see the true hero standing just off of him, casual of course, having been up that mountain a thousand times, watching as Hillary planted his flag or whatever, and claimed the land for Britain. maybe i am just a little twisted, but i always hoped right after that pic, Norgay would club Hillary with his own flag and ride him down the mountain like a sled, yelling something like "Who's leading the expedition now, bitch" or soemthing. Not likely, he was probably a pacifist.
sorry i have not been commenting lately on the blog at all. as you well know, with the 2week old daughter today, i have had no time.
also wanted to apologize for the expletive i placed in my last comment. totally unnecessary and i should not have done it. plus, Norgay probably wouldn't know what that word meant anyways. more than likely, would have dropped some f-bombs in his own language.
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