Day 7 (3/3) - Norbulingka

After have late lunch at a Sichuan restaurant, We headed over to Norbulingka, the summer palace of Dalai Lama. This place feels like a big garden with a few buildings for Dalai Lama to live and conduct official business. There were fewer visitors here, giving us much relief from fighting the crowd in Potala palace and Jokhang temple earlier in the day.

Though Tibetan and Buddhism artifacts were plentiful here, the outdoor was what set this place apart from others. The sun is now in full shine, that definitely helped too. In our stay in Tibet, it was always cloudy in the morning, then sunny in the afternoon, with occasional rain mixed in. It felt pretty hot under the sun, even hurting a little bit. Sunscreen would definitely come handy.

There were plenty of flowers. This was my first attempt at taking objects upclose.

A zoo was here for the entertainment of Dalai Lama. The preserved body of the tiger in this zoo when the 14th Dalai Lama was lived here was displayed in one of the buildings. The tiger died a few days after Dalai Lama left Tibet.

There was a pond area with koi fishes and ducks. There are some sitting areas around, very nice to sit under the shade and immerse into the surrounding.

A lot of buildings had historical paintings on the wall, mostly telling the history of Tibet and stories of religious significance. Unfortunately, many were damaged over the years. Some paintings were restored. Having a guide to explain the meanings of the painting was definitely necessary and recommended.

As with other areas, there were plentiful of status of Buddhist figures. In addition, Dalai's bedroom, study room, and meeting rooms were all available for visitors to explore. One interesting spot was a bathroom for Dalai as is from the 50's. It had tub and modern toilet made of porcelain imported from England.

Here is an good Norbulingka video on YouTube. It appears to been produced in 1997. There are more flowers today than comapared to the video. The 1950 Israelis made radio mentioned in the video is still there today, I wonder if it still works?

Lion statues were fixtures in many places we visited

As usual, tickets required for tourists

More outdoor pictures

We spent about two hours here going at our own pace. We ended the day around 6PM, the day was still very bright. Sun was up till around 8:30PM or so. It was a very eventful first full day here in Lhasa to say the least.

I did not feel the effect of altitude sickness (AMS) today at all after getting acclimatized the day before. In addition to drinking plenty of hot water, the guide told us not to wash hair or head the first day to combat AMS. It seem to have helped.

We headed back to our hotel and arranged for massage - we love massage. I think I will do a blog just on massage later :-) Oringinally, we planned to go the massage by the blind. But it was a little bit of walk, and the hotel offered us massage, so we decided to give it a try. I am not sure if the therapists were properly trained, or if there was Tibetan style massage. We did not enjoy the massage too much. My therapist appeared to be most experienced, but the pace was way too fast. Levi thought the massage was too hard, felt like literally getting beat up.

The massage was like Thai massage with a lot of stretching and moving. It was much too fast compared to Thai massage we have had. However, since this was only sample of one Tibetan massage - we did not get another, I would reserve judgment until I have another chance to get Tibetan style massage.

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