I go to the weekend market twice. The first time is on Friday, with Ratna leading the way, simply for vegetables and fruit. We stop at the Bhutan National Bank to change some travellers checks into Ngultrum, and then she leads me expertly through the mud puddles and the piles of wilted leaves and the pungent smells to her favorite and trusted produce sellers. There is so much food, I have no idea what they do with it at the end of the weekend. The stalls are elevated concrete platforms, each of which holds 10 or 12 vendors and their vegetables; the aisles are crowded with additional vendors and there must be 20 or 30 platforms. I recognize most of what is for sale: plum tomatoes, red-skin potatoes, chilis, cucumbers, eggplant, long white radishes, cabbages, extremely long green beans, shelling peas, broccoli, cilantro, mushrooms, turnips, pumpkin, onions, garlic, apples, plums, pineapple, tiny fingerling bananas, and did I mention chilis? Some of what is on display is bewildering: baskets full of the flat green leaves used for chewing doma (betel), spiny cucumbers, banana root (on Saturday Don and I ask about the tall fronds on display and he says, banana root, and we ask how do you cook it, and he gives us a look like, Dumb Americans, and he says, "In a pot!"), things in husks and pods that I do not recognize and cannot name. Ratna and I are efficient vegetable shoppers, we are not here to browse. She bargains for good prices and turns away easily if the price is too high. A kilo of most kinds of vegetables runs me 20 or 30, and a kilo is determined with a hand scale with a 1-kilo weight in one side, the shopkeeper allowing us to choose our vegetables and put them in the empty s
ide, and then she lifts it and sees if it balances yet. The money is exchanged in a combination of ngultrum and Indian rupees. I buy tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, onions, broccoli (looks like the broccoli rabe at home), a small cabbage, some expensive Thai apples because they are red, a pineapple (for the equivalent of 50 cents!!!), and some very ripe and wonderful-smelling mangoes. This is too much, along with potatoes Ratna has bought, to carry home straight uphill, so we grab a taxibus. The food that won't be peeled I soak in a dish of filtered water and iodine tablets; the rest I just wash well and will peel it before cooking.The second trip to the market is purely for entertainment, a Saturday stroll with the family (and Thinley along, of course). We look at the Chinese shoes, the blankets, the boars head, the strings of hard yak cheese, the mysterious produce, and then we end up in the corner with the altar bowls, the necklaces, rustic turqouise and coral and silver jewelry, religious statues, betel boxes, handwoven kira. We wait out a sudden downpour under these tarps. Forrest and Thompson purchase a coveted machete in a wooden sheath, and Jacob buys a tiger tooth amulet.
Based on these supplies and what we have bought in the Tshokhang (groceries) which are spaced within doma-spitting distance of one another, I can assemble some meals: a ramen-type soup with onions and carrots (but I add the enclosed "flavoring oil" thinking it is sesame and discover too late it is hot chili oil, rendering the meal nearly inedible)... and several variations on the egg/bread theme for breakfast: hardboiled eggs, toast, and fruit salad; french toast and fruit; hot chocolate and eggs cooked into bread slices; crepes. Snacks are butter cookies ("biscuits" here, baked in West Bengal, India) or "cream crackers," or the very ripe and tiny red plums from the Gadho's tree in the yard. Drinks are mango, apple or pineapple juice, soda (our kids favorite is the orange-flavored "Mirinda"), or filtered water. I can make passable hot chocolate from Cadbury Drinking Chocolate, powdered milk (here called "Nestle Everyday Dairy Whitener"), large-crystal sugar, and filtered water. Lunches are PB&J (both are available here, on the square white sliced bread sold here under the Norbu label) or PB& crackers. Dinners we have taken in hotels: Mid-Point for excellent Indian food (best buttered nan in town); Plums for Bhutanese/Chinese food (we liked the pork tsoem, cubed pork + chilis + vermicelli noodles), and we will try many others throughout the month. We often take a taxi back after dinner, because the walk back up the roads is so steep in the dark, and it costs us about 90 cents to taxi home from anywhere in Thimphu, and takes less than 10 minutes, and we arrive to the chorus of barking Gadho's dogs and tuck everyone in to bed.
Sunday we took an excursion to the Botanical Gardens near Simtokha, about 7 km outside of Thimphu. It was a sunny day and we saw many picnickers. We were invited to join someone's family picnic (would this happen in the US?) and they opened plastic dishes and rice cookers to unveil a hearty but typical Bhutanese supper: white rice, soy-barbecued meat of some kind, chicken curry, Indian-style yellow alloo potatoes, a potato stew, fiddleheads in chili-cheese sauce, emadatsi (the national dish) which is just chilis with melted cheese, and three or four other dishes I can't remember or didn't try, and they washed bowls for us and offered silverware, but they were using their fingers so we did too. Turns out they live below us near the hospital so they are neighbors, but even if they hadn't recognized us we might have been invited to join, I would bet.
