Yak: It's What's For Dinner

As you can imagine, since there’s no shower at Samye Monastery, the eating situation is also limited. We bellied up to the monastery café for our meals, and I stuck to what I knew: rice and more rice. Greg, however, has really been enjoying all the yak meat Tibet has to offer. Barry and Greg ordered some yak and potatoes, looking forward to a hearty meal after our hiking. Both Ivone and I were finishing off our meals, and they guys still had not received their dinners. We joked that the cooks had to go out to a nearby farm, kill a yak and chop it up. A few minutes later I glanced into an open doorway just by the kitchen. There, I saw a gigantic yak head, horns protruding, eyes wide open, sitting propped up next to it’s body, which was being hacked away at by a kitchen worker. The piles of yak meat were all over, separated by body part and the floor was covered in blood. We had a good laugh at the fact that yes, they DID go out and kill a yak to chop up for Greg and Barry’s dinner. At least we knew the meat was fresh.
I actually tried to take a picture of the scene I just described, but the restaurant staff got a little freaked and closed the door on the yak hacking. Later, we heard banging from inside the room and realized that in their effort to hide the yak from us, they had locked the poor butcher inside the small, dank yak meat room. Oops.