There is only one main street in the town, running from East to West, we're staying at the western end, while the monastery is at the Eastern side. This morning we went to visit the monastery, beginning first of all with a little climb up the neighbouring hills to have a better view of it. It is very big and impressive, with the golden temples and pagodas shinning in the sun. We were chased half way up the hill by two very aged women beggars - clearly mountain air must be good for you, even if you are destitute!
The monks live in small houses below the monastery and we walked around there, taking in also the prayer wheels, and avoiding the pigs and piglets wandering through the streets!
We joined quite a large group to be shown round some of the main temples by one of the monks. His English was quite good, but he said he was recovering from an illness - I hoped for his sake he hadn't had the same ear problems as me!
The first temple we went into was the main prayer room, very big and very impressive - and also very dark! 
Our guide explained to us how the Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of the Compassion Buddha and the Panchen Lama the reincarnation of the Longevity Buddha. We saw their Buddha statues and also that of the Maitreya - the future living Buddha. It was all very interesting, and it felt a privilege to be allowed into a living monastery - although some members of the group (not on our tour) still managed to abuse the hospitality by taking photos even when explicitly asked not to...!We then took in lunch - trying out some Tibetan fare after our break yesterday evening. I had lamb with cumin - very spicy - and Tibetan tea. It was very odd tea, practically twigs in there - which would have been fine, except for the half a tonne of sugar: I'm not a big sweet fan so not for me... I understand a lot of Tibetan food is sweet.
After lunch we went out to the Sangke village and grasslands where the nomads live. Well, nomads in the sense of their culture, but they appear to have been settled down by the government. We went to visit a family who were very nice and served us yak tea. This was actually quite good, and if you were brave you could add yak butter - making it yak butter tea: I opted out as I had had the butter for breakfast - it's similar to blue cheese flavour and while this is fine on bread, the idea of it in tea was a no-no in my book :) Others tried, and appear to have survived...!
We spend the next couple of days travelling to Xining from where we will get the 25 hour train to Lhasa in Tibet on Monday evening. Along the way - over the weekend - we will be taking in more monasteries and enjoying the scale of the landscape in this area: I am bowled over by it already and we're not even on the Tibetan plateau!
Ok, that's all for now. I have to go back to my continuing challenge to buy a Chinese SIM card - you would not believe how difficult this has proved to be; but I have a tip-off so I am on the hunt :)
Rob
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