Chinese Waitress in Nyalam restaurant, Tibet 2nd January 2007

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CameraCanon EOS 5D
Focal Length50 mm
Aperturef/2.0
Exposure1/400 sec
ISO400
Date Taken15 Apr 2006, 03:41

The story behind "Chinese Waitress in Nyalam restaurant, Tibet"

This poor girl was working her behind off in a filthy restaurant along the way from the Nepali border to central Tibet. When entering the place your shoes might either stick to the floor or slip away, which promised not much good for the food served.

But looks are deceptive and we had some of our best meals here, a nice mix of spicy veggies, well cooked rice and meat and tofu dishes, accompanied by unlimited jasmine tea.
As all the groups were nicely planned together at the same time and mountaineers normally eat about 3 times as much as normal people, the kitchen was a frenzy of pots, hacking of meat and vegetables and resembled an overdressed sauna.

It was this girl’s task to distribute whatever was ready evenly across a few dozen hungry mouths of people whose basic needs superseded their normal polite behaviour and many times she was close to tears because of all the hard work and the impossibility of communication as Chinese generally do not speak any English and westerners not a word of Tibetan or Chinese.

But at the end of the meal, when things settled down, I asked her if I could take a picture and after the first one, she actually smiled a bit and that is when I took this second one :-)

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