The cheerful staff of the Saga Hotel. In my diary I wrote about a conversation with one of the housekeepers. That housekeeper is the woman sitting on the right.

I checked the hotel out a bit—there was no running water and the men’s toilet consisted of the usual holes in the floor in a room above someone’s field. I felt like a wash so I asked the housekeeper if there was a shower. The town had a population of about 10,000. Apparently no one had ever asked her that before. She said that she would ask around. She came back a few minutes later and said that no, there was not a public shower. “So what do you do?” I asked her.

“Maybe it’s different in Lhasa or in Gyantse, but here the Tibetan people just bathe once a year—in the summer.”

“I see” I said. “And what about the girls who work in the karaoke bar?”

Karaoke bar means brothel.

“The same,” she said, wondering how anyone could be dumb enough to think that their situation could possibly be any different from hers.