Just look at these space age time pieces!

In the afternoon we went to the museum. At first, I was reluctant to go, but it was actually pretty good.

There were lots of interesting Tibetan artifacts, and you were actually allowed to take pictures!

This mask reminds me of Mexico.

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It turns out a Tibetan nunnery is not so different from a monastery, particularly because it’s hard to tell nuns and monks apart; both groups have their heads shaved and wear voluminous red robes.

The great thing about the nunnery is that finally I was allowed to take some pictures!

Here is a photo of the famous Buddha of Compassion that has a thousand arms and a thousand eyes.

Here is an example of a Buddhist wall hanging. These have great religious significance, and at certain times very large ones are displayed in the city.

yak butter candle.

nuns block printing and rolling the copies of Buddhist scripture that will later go inside of prayer wheels.

BTW, said soup was consumed in a traditional Tibetan tea house.

In the middle of the square is Jokhang Temple Monastery.

Here, my guide gave me a very thorough lesson on Tibetan Buddhism, all of which was very complicated, and therefore I have retained almost nothing except for knowing that the Buddhas with a thousand arms are the Buddhas of Compassion. It’s all very different from what I thought Buddhism was all about. There is a lot of leaving offerings to statues in hopes of attaining blessings, so I guess it’s not just a philosophy after all.

Here is a view of inside the monastery courtyard.

Everyday outside the monastery you can see a ton of people doing their ritualistic kowtowing.

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To enter the palace you must first climb up to it.

Once you reach the top you can get some good views of the surrounding area. The picture above is of the Chinese built Peace Plaza directly opposite the palace.

Here is a view of the snowy mountains surrounding the city.

So, back to the palace…Potala palace is not just a famous landmark. It is an important holy sight for Buddhists as well as being the place where the Dalai Lama used to live, before he had to flee because of you know what.

There’s a lot of history here, but unfortunately you aren’t allowed to take pictures inside, so I have nothing to show you. Inside the palace you can see what it looked like when the last Dalai Lama lived here in the 1950′s.

(Day 2 to be continued…)

The beautiful whitewashed walls of this monastery contain many beautiful and interesting sights.

The two most notably cool things here were the sand mandalas and the debating monks.

Mandalas are a religious art form created by very carefully placing sand into a square design containing a circle and center point.  Typically they are colorful and contain many elaborate and intricate scenes or designs.

Tibetan monks create these mandalas as a form of meditation.  The patience and dedication it must take to create this artwork is astounding.

The debating monks were completely surprising and something I’ve never seen before. Sera monastery is also a school for young monks. After morning classes the monks convene in the courtyard and “debate.” Well I don’t know how much debating was actually going on. It looked more like younger students were being quizzed by older students. When a question was answered incorrectly the quizzer would lunge toward the offending student with one arm outstretched and he would then slap down his free hand on top of the other one right in front of their face.

It almost looked like the student who was wrong was going to be struck, but I guess they are just supposed to get scared? Anyway, when you get thirty or forty pairs of students doing this all at once it gets quite loud, which is the opposite of how I expect Buddhist monks to behave.

With that Day 1 in Tibet came to an end.

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