thu 06-29-00 The 7:00 pm shuttle to DC never left. They put me on the 6:00 pm shuttle, which left at 8:10 pm. Should have told Andy I would be the last one off the plane, when I called him.

fri 06-30 Took the metro to the Mall and got there just before the Tibetan culture festival opened at 11:00 am. Nice day, not too hot. Saw the big stupa, yaks, and a dollmaker sculpting a clay nose.
I liked the paper making. He takes cheescloth stretched on a wooden frame, puts it in water, pours in two cups of pounded inner bark, spreads it around with his hands, picks out some bits, and carefully lifts it out starting with the edge nearest him. Then two hours in the sun to dry, the down side comes out smooth. She was rubbering the other side with a small conch shell to smooth it, and said for book covers it could be left rough or patterened by using a surface made of woven strips instead of cheescloth. The paper can be dyed with roots, bark, or pomegranate to get brown, red, or yellow, and can be dyed again and some of the dyed squeezed out by hand to get a mottled pattern.
Listened to singers and musicians in fur trimed nomad costumes, an opera by the builder of Tibet's first iron bridge, about how seven demons destoyed the day's work every night, that he wrote to raise funds to finish the project, and two nuns chanting and playing reed trumpets. Sogyal Rinpoche, the author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, gave a wonderful teaching.
Afterwards, the family took me out for Vietnamese food and played the two Wallace and Gromet films I hadn't seen, and we played Masterpiece.