A first stroll in Lhasa

After meeting our female guide Choredna who was educated in India when Tibetans could still get a passport, and our driver whose name I have forgotten, we drove about 1 hour from the airport to the city. Infrastructure construction is going on everywhere with new highways and railroads (built by the Chinese) but it is contrasted by the farmers manually planting and tending their crops of barley (a staple of their diet), potatoes, some vegetables, and water melons. People's diet consists of all kinds of meat, but Tibetans do not eat fish as they are considered to be gods.

We are left to our own devices regarding dinner every evening, so we took our first stroll in the town.The buildings are typical of most streets in the center of Lhasa - white with beautiful decoration around windows and doors, and nearly always 4 floors high. The ground level is rows of small shops with large doors which when closed cover the storefront at night, and most of the have a sign with large Chinese letters and very small English words. That together with the fact that they do not have street maps makes finding places difficult.

Finally, we stumbled on an upstairs vegetarian restaurant where we ordered what we thought were two main dishes and two sides. It was 4 large dishes of great food but it would have fed 6 people. It only cost $12!!! Amazingly, they had boxes to go so we packaged up food as we had seen a few people begging on the street, and it did not go to waste.

Then it was home to our comfy beds for what we hoped would be a good nights sleep.