Day 4 - Aug 12, 2007 Sunday

 Lhasa 拉薩 (3658M)

(click the hyperlink for the respective photo album)

The reason why we had to go in August was because of this festival - Shoton Festival 雪頓節.  On the 1st day of Shoton Festival, i.e. Aug 12 this year, the most important monastery of Gelugpa in Tibet, Drepung Monastery 哲蚌寺 unveiled the 35-meter by 30-meter Thangka painting bearing the image of Sakyamuni 釋迦牟尼佛, founder of Buddhism for worshippers.

We had our morning call at 4am!  Well, after a night of insomnia on the train, honestly speaking, we all were a mess.  In order to have a good view of the unveiling, we had to climb the mountain to Drepung Monastery.  Because of the celebration, the roads were blocked and we had to walk all the way up.  By the time we got to the mountain, me & Milly were both exhausted and could not go further.  At around 8am, the Thangka was brought out from the temple by some hundred of lamas and worshippers.  They walked the thangka all the way up to the mountain and started to pull out the thangka from the top.  The whole process was really amazing!  Go to my album or watch the videos and see the action for yourself!  The whole unveiling took around 30 minutes and the thangka remained under the sun until noon.

We stayed for another hour, took a lot of pictures!  Because we had not been sleeping enough, all of us (maybe except Kevin) were not feeling exactly right - nasty headache and exhausted.  We had some lunch and then went back to the hotel to rest for the rest of day.  We all slept and had different degrees of fever.  We did not have the stomach for any more food for dinner and thus me, Ronald & Kevin went down to grab some quick food - cup noodles and bread etc and went to sleep again after taking some pain killers.

At around 9pm, we heard the noise of firecrackers!  Ronald knocked and told us that we could see the fireworks from our hotel!  We all poured out to the corrider and got some of the actions in front of Potala Palace.  The small red tower in the picture was the TV tower in front of the great Potala Palace.

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