Saturday 28th August

We wore up early, but not early enough. We weren’t sure how long it would take us to walk to the temple, or where it was exactly and our showers had taken a bit longer than we had anticipated so we had to forgo breakfast and try find our way instead. Once out on the street we realised that we would be fine, there was a steady flow of people in the direction of the temple, everyone was heading over there to head the teachings. On our way we grabbed some cookies to keep us going through the morning session.

The temple was packed full of people, it took us ages to decide where we should attempt to sit, we finally settled on perching on the edge of the ‘Monks’ section, which was directly opposite the Dali Lamas chair, but behind a partition wall. If we turned around to fact the wall, through a window we could just about glimpse the man himself. It was so surreal. The teaching itself, was hard to follow and understand due to the disjointed translation. The experience however was worth every moment. About an hour into the teaching we were given round Tibetan bread, Ch and I were not sure what to do, all the international attendees were eating the bread, all the Tibetans were not, so we waited. Thankfully we did as it turned out that once the bread was distributed, they then gave out buttermilk tea. The idea was to dunk the bread into the tea, and it was certainly a necessity. The bread with out the tea would have been too dry and the tea without the bread, well it was definitely not a drink for me!!