Oct 9: Once you go Yak, you never go back!

We've only been in Lhasa for 5 days now (having spent one night at Lake Nam-tso) but we are in hotel #2! We spent our first few nights at the Yak Hotel, a highly recommended establishment in the Lonely Planet, but we hated every night of it. First of all, our room was on the third floor, right above the bar (on our last night people were rocking out to "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane, how random). Next, loud (Chinese) tourists would check-in at 11pm and talk very loudly in the hallway (until I learned how to communicate with them: you just have to get louder to be heard, I was banging on my own door to shut them up and it worked!). The attendants for the rooms were located down the hall from us, the two girls would sit there all night, reading US magazine (I nearly stole it from their hands to catch up on my gossip) and then sometimes answering the loud staff phone that rang in the hallway. Of course, if the phone rang at 1am, nobody would answer for about 10 rings.

So tonight we've moved into the DongCuo International Hostel down the street. For only Y10 more/night we get our own bathroom, yay! The only drawback being that said bathroom evokes smells we thought we left behind at the rustic facilities of Lake Namtso. But if you leave the door shut and the fan on it's ok.

Monday is mostly recovery from Namtso, savoring every O2 molecule we can get our lungs on in Lhasa.

Tuesday we visit the Jokhang temple, less imposing than Potala but actually more important to the pilgrims. We tour and take lots of pictures (outside only, not allowed inside). It's *really* crowded and the best we can muster on most of the peripheral shrines is to peek in over the heads of the pilgrims. We find out later that the pilgrims are supposed to get their circuit over and done by midday (about 2pm on one-zone-fits-all China time) and later on it's pretty much deserted. Whoops. Fun to see the crowd anyway, which was apparently not even that big according to the locals!