Do nuns have fur? And other English adventures in Mcleod Ganj.

Gyatsen Choesang and Gyatsen Chodon share one small, blue-walled room just down the mountain from Mcleod Ganj. A gas stove surrounded by mismatched kitchen utensils and simple food sits on one end. Across the room, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama smiles down from a bookshelf crowded with holy texts, Tibetan flags, and elementary English books. Seven small bowls are filled with water as a prayer offering, and a Pringles can full of incense sits on a small table, also surrounded by Tibetan regalia.

We’re sitting on Choesang’s bed, pronouncing our way through an animated children’s dictionary syllable by syllable. “Fur. Animals have fur. This dog has soft fur.” The nuns repeat the sentence slowly, and then look at me quizzically—what is this, fur? Illustrating that “fur” is the hair on animals, I touch some of my own hair. The nuns touch their neatly buzzed heads and laugh mirthfully. “Ours is much less fur,” they giggle. After about 20 new words, they offer me hot water and a basket full of butter cookies. We switch to reading a Tibetan children’s story, “Snowlion.”

Depending on how I phrase the question, Choesang fled Tibet when she was 16 or 25. She is in her thirties now, learning English so she can communicate with Dharamsala’s constantly replenished foreign community, and also so she can read Western philosophy to expand her studies. But first, we concentrate on the story of Tenzin, a poor firewood gatherer who receives a modest amount of gold from a magical stone snowlion, and his friend Tashi, who greedily tried to get too much gold, causing it all to disappear. The old legend feels familiar. It seems even possession-denouncing Buddhists can appreciate a good rags-to-riches-and-the-greedy-man-falls story.

I leave just before lunch and begin the trek back up to town from their room, a journey I hope to someday complete without wheezing audibly. The narrow path meanders past cows, goats, the occasional young Indian hoodlum who almost hits me with a firecracker (we both giggle when I jump), a tattoo shop that I’m sure doesn’t charge extra for the hepatitis, and a handful of locals I didn’t know six days ago, who now greet me with a cheerful, “Hello/Namaste/Tashi Delek/Where are you going?” Near the top of the path, a shop sign reads, "Daily Need's Shop," and the English nerd in me chuckles anew every day at the thought that the shop belongs to a Mr. Daily Need.

At the afternoon conversation hour, I hear Jason’s stentorian voice covering topics as varied as the American banking system, atheism, and thermodynamics with monks and high school students (he swears they asked.) I’m witnessing the strangest debate I’ve ever heard, between a middle-aged monk who thinks the world would be a better, more peaceful place without religion, and a teenaged lay Buddhist who insists that we need religion because it makes people feel good in their hearts and minds. The teenager is brave for taking on his elder, and his impassioned speech slips into Tibetan when he can’t find the words he needs to express religious ideas. Yesterday, I taught the word “intangible” to a group of monks trying to explain to me where the soul is located in the body.

Jason and I are tasting our way through the town, alternating between Indian, Tibetan, and pleasantly accurate, if not authentic, Italian food. With it’s delightfully earth-toned buckets of aloo splattered on roti, Jason commented that Indian food “looks like something they just found on the ground and made delicious,” which is probably a pretty accurate description of what happened. Tibetan food reflects the simplicity of ingredients available on the Tibetan plateau—you can even drink tea flavored with yak butter, for a truly authentic experience. A full meal for both of us, including chai, costs around three dollars.