Tomorrow will be the children's last day at school and the next day we will have to figure out how to fit everything back into the luggage. We're coming home with many more clothes than what we arrived with - school uniform ghos, kiras, etc, not to mention the new curtains, along with schoolbooks, some small souvenirs, and a truckload of memories that luckily don't add extra weight.
End of the month business for the HVO volunteer involves having the phone bill delivered to the ortho clinic and then walking it down to the Bhutan Telecom office and paying it in cash. In America all this face-to-face has been replaced with online payment, of course, but here, you've still got to do it in person. Likewise the cable bill - the office is on the way home from the kids' school so I stop in to pay the monthly charge. We leave some notes for the future families in the house logbooks. We clean out the fridge; we put together some small gifts for the kids schoolteachers.
Food roundup: We went through several bags of red rice, two pounds of Amul butter from India, some spaghetti and canned Prego, uncounted bottles of Bhutanese mineral water and boiled/filtered water, at least a case of Mirinda soda, two bags of powdered milk, a canister of drinking chocolate, several trays of local eggs, half-dozen boxes of Kelloggs cereal... one 10 Nu bag of Norbu white sliced bread lasts a day around here, and 12 of the tiny lemon-flavored bananas barely make it through breakfast and snacktime. Three trips to the weekend market for potatoes, onions, tomatoes, chilis, and mangoes.
