Singing outside Tibet
The De Werfkring restaurant, right next to the canal in the Dutch town of Utrecht, serves what its owners call "earth cuisine". This turns out to be vegetarian food, mainly comprising multi-grains and various types of rice, served with fresh vegetables and soup. Every evening, when it opens for dinner, businessmen, artists, writers, poets and students throng the place, despite the fact that it does not serve alcohol and smoking is prohibited.
But the real story of De Werfkring takes place before it even opens. Music is practised here – day in and day out, whenever owner Namgyal Lhamo is in town. Admittedly, the food is sumptuous, but the music that emanates from behind the closed doors is even more so. And why not? The one who supervises the cooking every evening is, after all, known unabashedly as the Nightingale of Tibet, despite the fact that she has never set foot in her motherland. Like most Tibetan refugees except the very elderly, Lhamo has always lived outside Tibet, but remains nonetheless inextricably tied to her ancestral land.