 After the Empire State Building and the Flatiron Building, the Potala Palace is the third Wange set that I assemble and the choice of this model was influenced by an offer found on eBay. I have many Wange in my wishlist and many times the selection follows a logic of saving and bulk rather than that of the building that I like the most. I had already noticed the Potala Palace on the site where I recently purchased the last Wange, however it was no longer available there, this detail had made me put this set aside in favor of others however I have always continued to be fascinated by this building. The original Potala Palace is located in Tibet and is a building that from what I could see in the photos is very imposing and massive-looking, practically built on a rock. For a long time it was the residence of the Dalai Lama and today the large complex has been transformed into a museum. What I like about the palace, besides its grandeur and its sloping walls, are the colors: the white of the monumental staircase up to the first levels, the red of the central block and then the yellow of the various towers built on the roof. The mix of size and colors of a building that stands on the peak of a rock have an incredible charm for me and this detail was reproduced in a very personal way in the Wange set. Despite many differences, the set gave the idea of the structure and its characteristics where part of the rock where the palace stands was also reproduced. As always happens in these cases, while I was on eBay for other searches, the suggestion of the Potala Palace appeared out of nowhere. In this case the algorithm worked well and managed to understand what I was interested in. I immediately purchased the Potala and also gave it precedence in the construction compared to other Lego sets that I own. The inside of the box contained many envelopes for an assembly process divided into six steps. At first glance I noticed that for each single session at least two steps could be done, managing to assemble the set in about three days. On the first day I managed to assemble two steps starting from the base and then with the reproduction of the fortress and the steps of the building. Already after the first day I noticed an anomaly in many duplicate pieces that concerned the reproduction of the greenery around the fortress. Even on the second day I managed to advance two steps, only that on the third everything went well but at the same time I started to have a problem with missing pieces. At this stage, in order to continue assembling, I had to open all the envelopes and look for pieces in each of them. In addition to this, I had to adapt other bricks and use others of different colors. I understood that this would be the case until the end, so probably my Potala Palace unit was full of errors. To remedy this, I had to do a particular operation. In detail I had to spread all the pieces out of the bags, then I started to separate them for steps 5 and 6 looking for the units of the missing pieces. Later I had the excess bricks left and with those I tried to modify them to transform them into the missing ones. After the inventory I recorded 48 missing pieces in the last steps marked as 5 and 6. On the third day I managed to advance one step by setting up the structure on the left and the in the central part and at that point I preferred to stop and finish the building in a single session. On the fourth day I completed the Potala Palace essentially with the construction of some upper rooms, then I added the roof and in the final phase I carried out the assembly and placement of the towers on the roof. However, before even finishing the assembly I started to dismantle several flat 1X3 bricks replacing them with 1 ones. By doing so I was able to give uniformity to the roof which otherwise was a mix of black and white. In the end I also removed some 2X2 square bricks and placed the towers directly on the roof because I liked the way they adhered better that way. I must say that the third experience of a Wange has proved to be more interesting even in bad luck. Despite the dozens of missing pieces, I managed not only to assemble the set but also to give it a personal touch. In addition to this, all the previous problems regarding the Wange related to the interpretation of the instructions, have literally disappeared because they were cancelled out by more important problems such as the lack of pieces. This has helped me understand the construction logic even better many times making it useless to look at the instructions. This Wange set that reproduces the Potala Palace, has almost the same proportions as the Lego Notre-Dame de Paris set, however the difference in details and the bases of the structure is notable. Notre-Dame is built like a real palace with colonnades, beams and buttresses, it is an exact reproduction of the structure. The Potala Palace by Wange, on the other hand, is practically empty inside so not only does it not reproduce the details but also the construction is not faithful to that of the original palace but simply follows a structural logic conceived for plastic bricks. We can say that Wange is totally an aesthetic project and from this point of view it is beautiful because it is an effective reproduction, with a lot of personality because it reproduces the palace giving a different interpretation from the original but which still gives the idea with a lot of style. In the end, to assemble this model, despite the lack of pieces, it took me only four days but I had to dedicate more time to make the inventory of the pieces and to cut and adapt others. These were operations that I did in my spare time and not while I was assembling the model. All in all, assembling the Potala Palace was a different experience but not difficult, it certainly would have been better if there had not been this inconvenience and I hope that this was only related to my unit and that it is not a common problem for all sets. This is because I have many Wange in the list, sets that I will buy anyway because they reproduce buildings that I love very much. I hope that in the future Wange can improve by creating models without defects and missing parts because they pay a lot of attention to the type of buildings they reproduce so it's really a shame that these cannot be assembled correctly due to a problem of missing parts. Progress  Day 1  Day 2  Day 3  Day Details       A.M.
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