Shimla to SanJauli

I was invited over to Shimla by one of my students Ama twice so I thought I better come over before heading up to Ladakh and missing the chance to spend quality time with a Tibetan family.
So now I have been adopted as a new granddaughter never mind that her youngest son is half my age. So life in the tibetan colony is a bit like life in the squat back in NYC so it has some familiarity to it if the language isn't. Tsumo tseyin. I can now almost read and it's so exciting! One of my monastic friends got me a tibetan english phrase book from Drepung monastery...mostly it's for tibetans as the phonetics are for english...but the tibetan words are there so I've been trying to write the sounds down. Which means my student is now my teacher and checks if I wrote it correctly so that I say it right.
Today I took a side trip on my own over to San Jauli to visit the Jonang temple there...
Having missed the stairwell up the mountain (without knowing of course). I followed the road till I could see monks running around the monastery and headed up a small trail till I could get with in earshot to say "Tashi Delek". Turns out the first person I met was the Rinpoche... who invited me to lunch. We tried in our broken dialects to communicate with each other and I got to see photos of Khakhu Rinpoche from Mongolia who is the Jonang lineage holder and turned this monastery into a Jonang monastery via the blessings of HHDL if I have the story right. Anyway it turns out I was right to read that book last year the Buddha of Dolpopa...because there he was with Kalachakra right next to him. We stopped by the office and had a chat with two monks named Namgyal both who spoke perfect english...one of them being english... the tibetan Namgyal took me on a tour over to the kalachakra retreat area (unfortunately only for monks) and up to the Palden Lamo and Nechung stupas where they celebrate the Panchen lamas birthday and also do fire pujas. This is just above the tibetan old folks home. On the way out I stopped by to say "Rinpoche la, dewoche" and he interupted his class, they are learning of course Prajnaparamita, to give me a kata. Many of the young monks here are from Mongolia and to the smiliest one of them I said "Inigiri" to tease him. My only mongolian word which means "smile". They will all soon be trilingual if not quatro- mongolian, tibetan, hindi, english. Who knows I imagine they might also speak some russian and chinese.
So they will give Arjia Rinpoche a little competition on that front.