The wonderful clown characters from the Tsurphu Monastery festival!
In between the more serious religious cham dances being performed, these guys came out and kept the crowd entertained by causing mischief.
At random they would select people from the front of the crowd to come and perform silly tasks with them like going for a piggyback race across the courtyard, covering someone’s face in flour (the second photo), or (in the last photo) taking off someone’s jacket and putting it on inside out over their legs!
Anyone who was trying to walk across the courtyard was instantly bait for the clowns, and I saw several people carefully trying to time their frantic dash across the open space to avoid being noticed by the clowns.
They picked on everyone - the elderly and small children were not exempt from being harassed like everyone else!
The crowd was loving these guys and their slapstick comedy, it was wonderful. Sometimes it was a little hard to see exactly what was happening on the other side of the courtyard but you could always tell when something awesome had just happened by the eruptions of laughter all around.
