Monks, butter, hand soap and happy mayhem...

[msfledermaus]

Yeah, you read that right...at the Jade Mines today we have a local Tibetan Buddhist monastary in with tubs of butter for making flower sculptures. They're actually quite colorful and beautiful...at first we were a little worried since they needed a fair amount of water and apparently hand-soap for the carving. But things have shaped up nicely and there are lots of people leaving with delicate little flowers wrapped carefully in paper towels. (We guards are watching carefully to make sure we don't have any Butter Incidents in the galleries.)

It's beautiful when they're singing, too... they were singing various things earlier, and combines with the echoes down the stairs it was just so haunting and unearthly...

So there you are...

Comments

[emschin.livejournal.com]

Please explain about the flowers people made. You said they brought tubs of butter, but you also said you needed hand soap for carving. Were the flowers butter, or soap, or a combination?

[msfledermaus.livejournal.com]

They had butter colored with food coloring in tubs, and these molds with flower shapes to press into the butter. The hand soap was liquid, to keep the butter from sticking to the mold...so you had these little squares of pretty colored flower shapes...

They had some examples of butter sculptures from the monastary they brought in...amazingly detailed and beautiful:)

[annablume.livejournal.com]

That sounds beautiful. I wish I'd known.

[msfledermaus.livejournal.com]

I should have checked the list of events for yesterday; I knew we had monks in but not what they were doing.

But we always have some cool stuff on the weekends, just about every time.

[roadskoller.livejournal.com]

Wow. I would've loved to see that.

[msfledermaus.livejournal.com]

It was fun to watch the monks work. They were amazingly friendly and polite, too...I shouldn't be suprised, I don't think I've met a mean Buddhist monk yet. (I'm sure they're out there, but I haven't met one yet.)