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February 22 - Tibetan Art and Culture

Tibetan Institute of the Performing Arts (TIPA)
TIPA is located 1 km from McLoadGanj. It is a school of performing arts for Tibetans. They have workshops to create tibetan costumes, musical instruments, they do painting, singing, dancing, etc. They had a performance last Friday, and I went to film it. The costumes are very colorful. See short video extract.

I had been in touch with the director of the institute because they needed a volunteer to help on their website. Unfortunately the lady in charge of the website is away and will not come back before I leave. So I suggested instead that I film one of their shows, and I give them some video in web streaming format so that they can publish that on their website.

Butter Sculptures
March 3 will be the Tibetan new year. They call that "Losar". In prepartation for Losar, the monks at the Namgyal monastery have been doing some "butter sculptures". They mix flour, water and some coloring, to make a paste that is easily shapeable before it dries. They use that to make various sculptures. They also fry a similar paste (without coloring) to make food offerings. Some of the butter sculptures have lots of details and take days to make.

Power Outages
This week the weather has been very bad. We had a big storm with lots of wind, and even a few inches of snow. The power is not reliable here, and we had frequent outages the last few weeks. It was even worse during the storm, we only had a few hours of power each day. We had to cancel the training at the monastery for two days, as there was no power for the computers. Only a few cyber-cafes have generators, so connecting to the Internet has also been difficult. However It looks like it is now improving, and I hope to have better weather for the remaining of my stay...