Darby man in paradise

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Today was a long and interesting day. We went to some really cool places and some major tourist traps. I woke up at 7:30 to go down and have breakfast. When I went down I foudn that one of the men sitting in the little cabin next to mine on the train was having breakfast there. Turned out he was the only one in the hotel in our tour besides myself. The rest of the tour people were spread out in three or four different hotels all over. Originally this Chinese man I knew and I were to share a room - but then it turned out that I'm not a man. So we met up with our tour group around 8:30. Turned out all the rest of the people sitting with him were also in our tour. I thought for a long time that I was the only foreignre on the trip but then I realized there were 2 others in the very back of the bus. At first I kind of stayed away from them. We went to Jokhang Temple and got a look around - it is really eerie how close Mexican and Tibetan culture are. After checking out the temple I was trying to make some stealth pictures of people outside and Mathieu ran into me. Turned out he was meeting a Tibetan who spoke French to translate a meeting he was going to have with some Tibetans. It sounded really cool. We had a fairly bland lunch and I went to Potala Palace with the Chinese group I knew. It's funny how Tibetan and English are more similar than Chinese and Tibetan with words like "Potala" and "Yak". In Tibetan "Yak" is "Yaa" whereas the Chinese is "Mao Niu". Anyways, the palace was absolutely gorgeous - in fact it was one of these places where everywhere around you that you can see is beautiful - which makes it hard to take pictures.Even the sky qas nice blue and the temperature was perfect all day. I found one of the strangest things - in front of Potala Palace there's a Chinese flag flying with a fence around it to keep others away from it. It felt so out of place I had to take a picture. I think the only things Tibet and China have in common that one can see is the money. The food, culture, music, language and people are all completely different. I took a nice leisurely stroll around the small lake in front of the palace before we left for a Chinese medicine hospital. Apparently it's Chinese custom for Chinese tours to visit these places. So we did. The English people's translator didn't come for the lecture so I decided to be the translator. After that some people on the bus asked if they were my parents, as they're old enough to be. After the medicine place we went to a place that sold everything Yak where I bought some necklaces and then a REALLY expensive bead place. The travel guide gave me my plane ticket to Nepal and everyone on the tour started calling me my Chinese name. We then dropped a bunch of people off - including the Brits and went to dinner. It was okay - Chinese again. After dinner I decided to go to the market street to get what I wanted here in Tibet to buy for people. It was a lot of fun and I ran into the Brits again so we went around together. I bought 2 hats for 23 kuai after the man asked for one hat for 20. It was great! I ran into the Brits again and at one point people were literally pulling and pushing the two of them around so I had to get them away from it. They had bought a bunch of Tibetan prayer flags for 25 and I ended up getting 3 pairs for 45. I also got 5 pairs of jewelry at 50 after they asked for 1 at 30. But I think the prayer flags ere the most fun to buy because they had already packed everything up and had to unpack it all to show it to us. It took me the longest time to convince them of 45 and they even pretended to pack everything up before they gave up. I then bought an expensive but really cute kitty ring.

I forgot this morning I took an Indian bucket bath because there was no hot or even warm water. But there were no buckets so I had to use my water bottle. It was a bit nuts.

Anyways, after shopping we went to get somehting to eat - an awesome little foreigners place with Tibetan, Indian, Nepali, Chinese and Western food before taking a taxi home.

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