As I mentioned in a prior post, we arrived in Lhasa. I was exhausted when we got here but since then, we've been cruising around town.

Flying into Lhasa requires a 1.5 hour bus ride into town through some beautiful scenery. You pass snow covered mountains, rivers, prayer flags, and of course yaks.

Lhasa itself has two sides, the Tibetan and the Chinese. We are staying in the Tibetan area, right near the spiritual center of Tibet, the Johkhang. The Johkhang is the holiest temple in the land and it attracts a multitude of pilgrims. Some pilgrims prostrate the entire way to Lhasa and wear protective leather aprons and wooden mittens and knee pads. All along the outside of the temple people are bowing, making offerings and doing the Barhkor walking circuit around the old town. It's a strange place and feels like a cross between the Dark Ages and a modern commercial area where you can buy prayer flags, yak skulls, prayer wheels, and yak butter.

On the inside of the Johkhang, things are different. You start on an outer circuit lined with prayer wheels. When you move inside it's dark and claustraphobic with pilgrims pushing and shoving to get into all the chapels. When I closed my eyes, I got the chills from listening to people chanting their mantras over and over. I noticed that many of the pilgrims were very friendly and would quickly return my smile or offer me one first as they scooped a wad of yak butter into the yak butter lamps. Most of the chapels are lit only minimally and the lamps give it an ancient atmosphere.

After several hours of observing the devout, we couldn't handle any more yak butter smells so we headed out into the open air again. Mark, our leader, wanted to stop by a local charity called Braille Without Borders. This is an school for the blind that was founded by a young blind German girl who had studied Asian Studies in college. The school now has over 25 students from all over Tibet, an area that has a high rate of blindness due to a lack of vitamin A and strong UV rays on unprotected eyes. We were given a tour of the facilities and met some of the students. This boy showed us how he uses his braille typewriter to write out English, Chinese, or Tibetan. Before the founder, Sabriye, went to Tibet she created the alphabet in Tibetan. Never before had any of the countries blind been able to read. The school also teaches the students life skills- how to get around with a cane, cook, do traditional blind chinese massage, among other skills.

The most amazing part was when one student threw a paper across the room and the girl giving us the tour (also blind) reaches down to the exact spot the paper landed because she could heard how it moved in the air!

Today we spent the day visiting two monasteries, Dreprung and Sera. Both were stunning, though not as stunning as some of the people wandering around them. This friendly monk was visiting from somewhere else and was on our bus to Dreprung Monastery. Dreprung was not as damaged during the Cultural Revolution as other monasteries were, but does not have nearly as many monks as it once did and used to be the largest in Tibet.

Not five minutes into our visit did we meet this monk collecting money. He has a great face!! He then began to help another monk fold some of the many offering scarves.

All throughout the chapels pilgrims would leave small denomination jiao notes, which often collected so high they could be sweeped up with a broom. Another common offering is yak butter which can be poured in from a thermos, chiselled off from a solid block, or can be left in candle form.

A major part of visiting the monasteries was seeing the monks themselves. Buddhist monks seem to fascinate every tourist and I am no different. I would point and click my camera at them at every non-offensive opportunity. Before leaving Dreprung, I saw this monk perusing the scholarly books for sale.

Besides clicking photos, we were lucky enough to catch a chanting session which only occurs a few times a month. The ancient looking lead monk makes the deepest chants from his throat though I can't imagine where he gets the energy to do it. It's a very eerie sound and the other monks then join in in between their yak butter tea (a salty concoction that belongs on popcorn) and their tsampa balls. All the while, young novices are bolting at top speed from the main hall to the kitchen to fill up the elder monks bowls.

After the chanting session, we moved on to Sera Monastery where we got get to see monks debating over the dialectics of Buddhism. One monk stands and argues a point while another sits and tells him whether he's right or wrong. It was a really comedic thing to watch because often the monks will playfully gang up on each other and whack each other about the head. Their reactions to each other were really funny. Here are a few examples:

Debate 1

Debate 2

This poor guy was fighting a losing battle. His partner was teasing him and generally giving him a hard time. He also got ganged up on and got forcibly folded into his massive robe more than a few times by his peers. All during their dialogue in Tibetan, a group of us were sitting on the side splitting our sides with laughter because you could tell that they were saying "you're so full of shit!" or "yeah, whatever". After one intense verbal volley, my fav monk couldn't take it anymore. Poor little guy.

As we left, I saw that some monks were far worse off and were melted like the Wicked Witch of the West from the heated debates.

Tomorrow we're off to the Potala, the Palace of the Dalai Lama before he went into exile. It's a massive stucture and I can't wait to see it close up!