Urbana, IL

Visiting Cecily

This was my last "visiting people" stop, and much time was spent on such activities as watching "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" and visiting a minor antique show.

The tourist highlight of the trip was that the university art museum had comissioned a Tibetan mandala two years previously, and gotten permission from the Dali Lama to keep it as an exhibit; I arrived in time to see the monks return to dismantle it.

The event was held in a large-ish gallery of the art museum, and it was pretty crowded. The mandala, which is an intricate picture made of little trails of many-colored sand, is supposed by its creation and then dismantling to bring healing and peace to the assembled people and to the land. Two of the monks (the senior one of the delegation and his translator) gave a rather long speach about peace which utterly failed to come across in english. I found it more interesting that the organizers of the event had placed them in front of a giant painting of a mushroom cloud...

After this there was much ritual chanting (what we ignorant westerners would call throat-singing; it's not remotely like gregorian-style monks at all) playing of decorative reed instruments and puting on and taking off of ceremonial tassled headdresses.

Then, after drawing an X across the mandala with a traditional implement of some sort, two of the monks gathered up all the sand with scrapers and paintbrushes, and put it into little ziplock bags for everyone to take home with them.

The remaining sand was gathered and (after more chanting) poured into the nearest running water, thus symbolically washing our ills away towards the ocean. Note the hats, which were many-tassled and felt-like and very impressive. If you look closely, you can also see the cloud blowing away from where the trail of sand had descended a moment before.

In a much more midwestern cultural experience, my hostess also took me to Wienerschnitzel, which is aparently a fast food chain specializing in corn dogs. They were quite good, but slightly perplexing as a phenomenon.

In this location Carmen Sandiego would probably steal: the ceremonial monks' hats