Barley is feeding Tibet. Tsampa is a traditional meal that some remote farmer families have 3 times a day. It is made of toasted barley flower mixed with yak butter, tea and honey, sometimes nuts are added. All these mixed together in a dough and eaten by hands with a sauce (or not). Here is a video demonstration 🙂
Center of Tsang area (or Shigatse area) is a rich region because of its fertile soils and vast barley fields. We noticed that the farmers’ houses here are larger than in Lhasa area. So Kunchok, our guide, told us an astonishing fact about the way Shigatse families are formed. Say one family would have several children and 3 or 4 of them are boys. When the boys grow up they take home a wife. One wife for the 3 or 4 of them. When the wife has a child, there is no way to know who is the father, so the kid will call the 3 husbands “uncle” and the grand parents will be called “father” and “mother”. And so they all leave together in a biiiig family house.
This fascinating fact raises even more questions. So how is the new family formed then? We only got a short explanation that sometimes a couple moving out into a new house and start their own big family. What is the conditions for that we hope to find out via google.
