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...
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