Today we slept till late and at 12.00 met the guy from the tour agency in the lobby of our hotel. He took us to Lhasa’s old center, called Ba Jiau Jie. It looked amazing, white houses with colorful ornaments, people dressed with traditional costumes – simply beautiful.
A bitter taste to this atmosphere added soldiers, walking among the Tibetan people wearing uniform and guns. Since Tibet is politically sensitive area, very often you can see Chinese police walking on the streets, road controls and even passport controls at the entrance to the temples. Not a tourist is allowed to enter a Monastery or Temple without a local guide – this is another strange rule. You feel like in a closed country with some kind of dictatorship…which is not far from the reality.
We had breakfast in one of the restaurant in the middle of the old area and finally met our guide, a very nice lady, called You Dun (for us YouTube haha).
This is the beautiful view from the restaurant where we had breakfast....
And prayer flags - you can see it everywhere in Tibet...red, green, blue, white, yellow prayer flags...every Tibetan house has them on the roof, and as they say it bring luck (each flag has a prayer written on it).
And people holding prayer wheels...which has prayers written inside, it is a Buddhist practise and you see lots of people doing it every day in Tibet, mostly older people...
Together with You Dun, we went to Tibet museum, which had an exposition of all kind historical and cultural objects and paintings, related to Tibet’s history and royal family. Also it had a bit of propaganda, about “Tibet liberation by China”.
After that, our guide invited us to have some tea in one of the galleries, which was the usual trick for tourists – a bit of explanation and then a huge gallery with all kind of products for sale haha
We had a look and some tea they offered, Tommy bought some present for his parents and finally we went to visit Sera Monastery.
The Monastery was really beautiful, besides we had luck to see monks debating (about religion), which happens every day between 3 and 5 pm.
and the monks aparently were wearing fancy shoes haha
At 5pm, discussion was finished and monks left the discussion garden...
Later, we decided to walk around old area again and found one really simple place with local food, where we had a great dinner and paid 60 Yuan (6 euro) for 5 people :-D
But in case you wanted to go to the toilet after the food...the process was the following: First you need to ask this little guy to unlock the door in the toilet with his key..
The toilet looks like this....but it smells even worse haha
And the door has this kind of air window haha
Yep! But the food was wonderful :DDD
No comments:
Post a Comment