Friday 17th, Chengdu 10 a.m.

The girls are still sleeping. They must be quite tired after all
these days of traveling and short nights in between!

I already talked to Yangchen in Lhasa. She'll try to meet people this
afternoon to help with the permits but there is no guarantee that
they will be able to do something. As I wrote yesterday, we have two
problems: one is getting the Lhasa permits for my Tibetan named
daughters, the other is that all offices are closed in Lhasa until
the 23rd!

We have no special plans for today except to wait for news from
Lhasa. We will certainly make a good use of the washing machine here!
The girls want to get some DVD's while I would like to take them to
the Chinese Buddhist monastery nearby. In addition to housing a bone
relic of the Shakyamuni Buddha, the monastery has a vegetarian
restaurant that is supposedly one of the best in China. Their
specialty is to offer meat like dishes. So you can order beef, pork
or fish that will look and taste like beef, pork or fish but it's all
fake, it is pure vegetarian!