A Day in the Life

I've been trying to go on morning runs when it's not raining. It's nice to get out and see the street early and enjoy the surroundings. Of course when I run, I have on my heartrate monitor, a footpod to tell distance and speed, an altimeter, and occasionally my I-pod. All this helps me to get in touch with the nature here. I don't see a lot of Bhutanese running for exercise; walking up and down the sides of a mountain to go to shopping or to work, just life itself, is enough exercise in Thimphu. As I attempt to go out of our door, the big black dog Shadow is asleep on the stoop and I literally have to slide him off the porch with the screen door so that I can exit. When I run, I am often accompanied by various packs of dogs. Usually they are pretty friendly, but sometimes I pick up a rock for extra security. I start my run through a field of cannabis. A woman burns a stack of this on the hill below me and strange odors come across my path (...I don't inhale).

There are two types of terrain in Thimphu: up and down, so it makes distance running somewhat difficult. I run past a group of Indian laborers hauling bricks in a carrier made out of a bamboo pole, rope, and burlap. They are barefoot, and stop to watch me run by. On my I-pod I am listening to Jimmy Cliff sing reggae songs of redemption, overcoming oppression, and freedom... and I wish for a moment that my I-pod had speakers, so I could play some words of encouragement to them.

After breakfast, I head to the OT (Operation Theater), scrubs in hand. As I am scrubbing for my first case, I ask Dr. Tshewang where the water comes from, and if it's filtered. He replies that no, it's not filtered, and it comes directly from the stream, and having seen various activities taking place in and around the stream I wonder why I bother to scrub at all. We don't use any antiseptic solution on our hands; there is one scrub brush that is used for several days in the OR, and one bar of soap to be shared amongst the surgeons. Usually we do about 50 cases a month here. So far in the past week we have completed 21 cases. Here are some highlights from today:

--I operated on a four year old boy who had polydactyly of his small finger (i.e. his small finger was actually three fingers, each complete with fingernails). This is considered very bad luck in Bhutan, so we removed the two smallest fingers and then reattached muscles and ligaments to the remaining finger.

--Next we operated on a 12-year old girl with an elbow that had been dislocated for six months. Then we operated on a ten-year old boy who had exposed tibial bone from osteomyelitis (i.e. a bone infection). In order to cover the bone to allow it to heal, we took a portion of one of his calf muscles and tunneled it under the skin to the front of his shin to cover the exposed bone. This is not the kind of surgery I perform in the US - this type of work would be done by a plastic surgeon.

--Next I debrided a sacroiliac joint in a young child who had an infection. Then I put a metal rod in the humerus bone of a woman who broke her arm after being hit by a stone. Finally, we operated on a disaster of a case: a woman who had an open fracture of her femur, treated in eastern Bhutan in January by a Burmese orthopedic surgeon (there are two or three Burmese orthopedists in Bhutan who work under contract with the government - they are poorly trained, and their work is almost universally bad). He had put an external fixator on this without even attempting to line up the femur fracture; in addition he had missed that she had also fractured her hip on that side, so the hip went totally untreated initially. The external fixator had been revised in April by another doctor, but still with a one-inch gap between the bone ends. An attempt had been made to put an external fixation device on the hip, but since there was no X-ray available, the implant was put in and missed the hip completely. She arrived in Thimphu a few days ago with an obvious infection of her femur. Today we opened her up, took out the hip implant and the external fixator, washed her out, and put her in traction. Basically we will start over by trying to clean up the infection, and in a couple of weeks hopefully I can go in and fix her fractures.

There were other cases, but I will stop here. When I got home, Jamtsho came running into our house to announce that Phoebe, one of the puppies, had died. We did a quick assessment to verify that she was dead, and later heard that she had been seen yesterday eating a dead rat that had been poisoned. Phoebe was a close friend of Jacob's (he is de-ticking her in the photo we posted earlier) and he was stunned that she was dead. He sobbed for a long time on my lap. Then there is the question of what to do with a dead dog in Thimphu. Burial in the small yard was considered and rejected because of possible further contamination of the already-chancy water supply. Jamtsho's mother Tashi said that the usual thing to do is to take the animal down to the river and throw it in, out of sight of the authorities (as if this does less to contaminate the water supply... but it is a very wide and fast-flowing river). We send Jacob off solo, in a car with Uncle Dono, a monk, Jamtsho, and Phoebe in a grease-stained old cardboard box. Jacob returns later, feeling a little better and somehow connecting Phoebe floating down the river with her journey into a better place.

The upper portico of the Thimphu Cinema, showing the signs advertising "Kikhor"
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40 Nu Seats at the Thimphu Cinema

Thimphu boasts a single movie theater, showing one movie at a time. Sometimes it is a Hindi film, otherwise it is a Bhutanese film in Dzongka. The current Bhutanese show, Kikhor ("Fate") had such an enticing hand-painted banner, as seen in the picture, that we thought it would be fun to go. We saw the huge lines to get in on the weekend, so we chose a Tuesday night and headed downtown to the cinema an hour and fifteen minutes before start time. Tickets are sold from a wooden table set up on the porch of the cinema, also hawking CDs and cassette tapes of the soundtrack. The ticket seller had a seating chart of the theater and he was X-ing off the seats as they were purchased. Each ticket was marked with the seat row and number, and had the name of the film printed on it. "Starts at six-thirty sharp," he told us, and though it was barely 5:15, most of the theater was black X-ed out already. Seats cost 80 Nu (aboutt $2), 60 Nu ($1.50) or 40 Nu ($1) depending on where you sit. All the 80 and 60 Nu seats were gone, so we bought 40 Nu tickets for 6 seats in a row (since why would we want to pay twice as much for a film we weren't going to understand anyway?) and pocketed them while we walked around for an hour killing time and buying snacks to take into the movie. We also asked a few people on the porch what the general plotline of the film was, so we might have a rough clue, since it was not subtitled, but no one was very forthcoming.

At 6:00 we filed in to the theater to take our seats. The entrance was an extremely narrow door, where the usher took a flashlight to our stack of tickets and waved us down front. 80 Nu seats are in the balcony, 60 Nu in the back of the floor, and 40 Nu in the front 10 or 12 rows. The seats were painted wooden benches, with small posts between each seat, and the seat number written in black marker on the back. The interior might have appeared spacious if it were not so dimly lit and dirty. At the front was a cement stage, with a gigantic painted white wall, framed by black curtains. The theater was obviously going to be full, and the several ceiling fans in the back weren't doing much to relieve the oppressive closeness of the room. We counted exits, and there seemed to be five, with wooden doors, so it made us feel a little better that we wouldn't have to crush through the tiny front door if there was a panic in the theater. We disaster-obsessed Americans have to think about these things, you know.

We sat in front of a group of teenaged boys, and although they had not seen it before, they were eager to make conversation, touch Halle's hair, and agreed to help us understand the dialogue. As the seats filled up there was some negotiation between the ushers and people trying to get better seats, and we soon figured out that one ticket meant one seat, but as many people as you could fit into that seat. We put 6 people in 5 seats, but in front of us were 14 people in 7 seats, ranging in age from grandma to infant tied onto her mother's back. By the time the lights dimmed even further and the digital projector set onto the balcony railing started up, the theater was packed with what we estimated were probably a thousand people. And yes, we were the only Caucasians in the whole place, which seemed to amuse the people sitting around us.

I am going to ruin the plot for you, so if you plan to see Kikhor in Bhutan and you want to be surprised, stop reading now. The acting was decent, but the production was sort of amateur-video level, and the sound was really choppy, with ambient sounds closer to the microphone coming out very loudly. There was background music composed on synthesizer, and there were three or four music-video-type musical interludes in which the actors lip-synched the songs as a part of the storyline (hence the CDs for sale). The main characters were a close-knit prosperous family from the town of Paro (even the kids recognized the many Paro landmarks): a mother, father, two grown sons, a grown daughter, and a cook and housekeeper who seemed well-integrated into the family business. The cook, apparently, was played by a Bhutanese comedian whom the teenagers recognized, and the audience roared with laughter every time he spoke; he seemed to have the punchline of many of the family scenes. A scene of him cutting white radish in the kitchen was a spoof of "The Good, The Bad & the Ugly" right down to the music. The conflict was centered between the noble, reserved older brother and the somewhat rash, reckless and better-looking younger brother. Older brother, in buff physical condition, beats up a gang of pool-playing hoods who had attacked younger brother (in these carefuly staged fight sequences, the best part of the punch-throwing or bad-guy hurling action was repeated two or three times in slow motion for our further enjoyment). Older brother wanted to get married, and had even seen a girl in town that he liked, but was too shy or polite to speak to her; he only watched her from a distance. Younger brother, meanwhile, without knowing older brother had designs on her, also met the girl, whose name was Tsering, asked her out, and started courting her. No one in the family finds out that they are interested in the same girl until he brings her home to meet his parents, whereupon everyone is very upset but hides it from younger brother so not to ruin his happiness. Older brother sucks it up nobly and drowns his sorrows in beer; he even unselfishly sings a tribute song at younger brother's wedding.

Then the plot thickens... older brother wakes up with blood on his pillow and is diagnosed with leukemia ("blood cancer," explain the young men behind us), but again for some reason the family keeps this knowledge from younger brother. When Tsering gets in an accident and needs a blood transfusion, older brother refuses younger brother's request to donate blood and younger brother flies into a rage and storms out of the house. He ignores older brother on the street when they meet, and refuses to defend older brother in a pool-hall fight in which older brother is so badly injured that he dies in the hospital. Only then does sister spill the family secrets to younger brother, showing him proof of the older brother's admiration for Tsering, and telling him the real reason he wouldn't give blood. Stricken with remorse, younger brother rushes to the hospital bedside, just in time to see older brother dribble his last bit of blood from his mouth and croak. Younger brother and Tsering name their first son after older brother, in a "four years later" epilogue.

The audience seemed to enjoy this production very much; there was a lot of laughing, some applause here and there, and some discussion about the unfolding plot. Babies were crying, people climbed over each other to get in and out of the rows, everyone was packed in tightly, and it got extremely hot and stuffy over the two and a half hours. Luckily they opened all exits at the end, as Thompson was feeling a little green and needed some fresh air, and the theater emptied quickly out into the cool night. We snapped one photo of the theater as people were leaving, but it doesn't really convey the closeness and size of the crowd.

You should have seen us talking to people outside the theater, trying to fill in the gaps in our understanding of the plot. We even asked our taxi driver if he had seen it (he had), and got a few more details from him about the storyline. He was the one who translated the title for us, as "fate," which makes sense. The next time you are looking for local entertainment in Thimphu, I recommend the 40 Nu seats, especially if you have helpful schoolboys behind you to interpret.

Thimphu Christian Fellowship

While Ratna and I are walking to the weekend market, she asks me about my religion. I tell her I am a Christian, and then she surprises me by saying that she is one, too. Buddhism is the only established religion in Bhutan; government and Buddhism are deeply entertwined; taxes support the monastic system and the upkeep of the dzongs; and other religions are not permitted to construct houses of worship or to meet in groups. Religious proselyting is illegal, and we did not think there were many Christians in Bhutan. But apparently Pentecostalism has been making quiet inroads, especially among the economically disadvantaged classes of Nepali and southern Bhutanese immigrants, like Ratna. She invites us to a cottage meeting in English that takes place on a Saturday evening in the neighborhood up above our house. Intrigued, we agree to go.

The Thimphu Christian Fellowship (English meeting) has a small group of devoted lay clergy, a stack of xeroxed songbooks, perhaps a dozen people in attendance. The Bibles I see in evidence are New International Version or King James, wrapped in fabric or repaired with packing tape. It meets in the living room of its pastor, a man from eastern Bhutan who was converted to Christianity while in India. The house is unmarked as a house of worship; there is no sign out front except "Beware of Dogs" although there are none evident. This is an underground meeting conducted in some secrecy. The room is spare, with a Jesus calendar on the wall, and a banner embroidered with a scripture about the lion of Judah. The preacher for the evening is a former Hindu. Everyone in the room, upon their Christian baptism, has taken a Biblical name and they call one another by these names in their meetings: Caleb, Simon, Martha, Naomi, Priscilla, Rebekah, a small child named Moses, etc. They are house-servants, hospital orderlies, simple people without prestigious jobs. Ten people have been baptized earlier in the day, in the bathtub here in this home, but because they speak Nepali they are not here at this small English meeting. We are told that the other pastor of the congregation built a large home with a gigantic attic, large enough for the 300 or 400 Nepali-speaking Christians who meet there on Sundays. Services are conducted throughout the week in Dzongka, Sharchop (the language of eastern Bhutan), Nepali, Hindi and English (the latter being the smallest of the groups); they are launching a youth program, and they spent their free time in meetings, in prayer, in visiting fellow Christians, and in some door-to-door work.

Forrest hears us asking about whether they are harassed much by the police, and he begins to get worried, envisioning the door being broken down by AK-47 wielding officers ready to fire upon any Bible-carrying Christians, but although the curtains are drawn the meeting does not feel threatened. Thompson thinks it is like ancient Rome, when Christians were persecuted and met secretly in homes... suddenly his New Testament studies come alive for him. The meeting lasts about an hour. There are prayers (typically as in American Pentecostalism, one person is called on to pray but while he or she does so, everyone else prays out loud in a cacophonous murmur, with hands uplifted), songs (we try to follow the tunes, since they are not written, we have only the words in front of us), an offering basket, and an extemporaneous sermon from a brother speaking from his well-thumbed Bible. We are introduced as Christians from America, and invited to say something about our church there and give a short message. Don bears simple testimony about Christ and says how much we enjoy the opportunity to meet with other Christians in this beautiful country. He tells them a little about his responsibilities as a bishop in the US, as a lay church leader like their own, and about our desire to serve the Bhutanese people as volunteers. I read to them from Matthew 20 about how Jesus walked on the earth as a servant, not to be ministered to but to minister, and how much he loves the simple and the servants of the earth. Along with our children we sing them a children's song ("As I Have Loved You") which brings tears.

The scripture for the evening is Luke 10: 30-36 (parable of the Good Samaritan). The brother reads it to us, and then explains it in his own words. The account of the Samaritans - being downtrodden, second-class citizens, rings utterly true to these people whose ethnicity and religion make them lesser in the eyes of most Bhutanese. He compares the priest to the high lamas and lopens of the country. He compares the Levite to the monks and officials of the local monasteries. And he compares the Samaritans to the lower-caste Hindus (i.e. untouchables) from his own background as a Hindu. He urges them to be good Samaritans, since they are labeled as something like Samaritans by outsiders, this story calls them to be good ones and to share the joy of Christ and what meager substance they have, with those who suffer lacking physical and spiritual nourishment. I have never heard the story explained with quite the same emphasis; it has never seemed so immediate. At the end of the sermon he speaks about Revelations 8, about the coffers of prayer in heaven that we fill with our constant and sincere petitions, until when full they overflow back onto us raining blessings from God.

The senior pastor arrives towards the end of the meeting, just back from a Unity meeting of the Christian pastors in the region. We are amazed to learn that there are Catholics, Brethren, Emmanual, and Pentecostal leaders all meeting together to pray and work for the opportunity to spread Christianity legally in Bhutan. He says a long prayer naming trouble spots in the world far from Bhutan - their minds are not focused on their own problems - praying for peace between the two sides of the Nepali rebellion, for tsunami victims, for victims of carbombings in Iraq, for world leaders by name, for hungry people in Darfor Sudan, for peace in the Middle East, on and on with great detail. Juice and crackers are served afterwards to everyone present.
We walk home in a sort of stunned silence. What a tremendous blessing to attend such a meeting! What a fascinating side of Bhutan that we have never had the opportunity to see before. It is a complete inversion from the US, where Christianity is often prestigious and taken-for-granted, to be in a place where it is neither. The core essence of Christianity - that every human life is important, that none is too insignificant to be blessed by God, and that all are equal in his sight despite what worldly social position has been assigned by others - is here joyfully received by the "poor in spirit" and the gospel is being taught by honest practitioners in the true spirit of its message. We took the pastor's card and asked him what we might send him to help in his ministry. He just looked at me and said, "God will lead you."

Prayer wheel chorten
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Painting and Drawing

Don is off to the operating room and the sun is shining, and we have something of a free morning, so the kids and I walk and then grab a taxibus to the eastern neighborhood of Thimphu, where there is the National Library (we save this for another day), and the Traditional Painting School, a high school for artists in training. Public schooling goes to the 8th grade, and then there are academic, vocational, and other kinds of specialized high schools by competitive admission. At the Traditional Painting School, students train to produce religious statuary, decorative carved panels of wood or slate, tankha paintings, embroidered silk panels for handmade yak-felt boots, metalwork bowls and religious objects, etc, in a four-year program. Also they learn to produce the exquisite building adornments that make every surface special - here is a small prayer-wheel house in the Botanical Garden, an "ordinary" sight here with all its wonderful detailed paintwork.

The first workshop we see with an open door turns out to be the woodworking shop. Four or five young men are at work making screwdrivers. They have blacksmithed iron nails into straight screwdriver points, have set the blades into a block of wood, and are using a sharp machete to carve the handles. We are attracted to a workbench of 12" square dark slate panels, each with a carving in progress of a seated Buddha or a lotus flower. One young man comes over and spends quite some time with us, explaining how to transfer the design onto the slate and then he shows us how to carve it with the corner of a sharp chisel, gently tapping the back of the chisel with a wooden mallet, and slowly carving out the edge of a delicate flower petal. He even gives us a piece of scrap slate to practice on at home.

From there we peek into the statuary workshop: complicated, very detailed hero or demon images are being made in what looks like clay, but no one looks up to talk to us, so we quietly move on.

We climb a flight of steps into another building and encounter a drawing class. This is a class of 4th year students, preparing for their exams on July 7th, hard at work drafting the multi-armed hero and his consort whose name I can't remember just now. To draft this image takes careful measurement. Tankha painting is very precise: the proportions and the measurement are extremely important in making the final product look correct and pleasing. These students can sketch anything, all in the same flowing style, with little individualization of the artwork (of course this is a completely different mindset about artisitic production than in the West). Their instructor is not in the room at present. One young man tells me that they work at their desks from 9-12 with one bathroom break, and then again from 1-4, and they stay at a "hostel" next to the school... they have come from all over the country to study here and the work is obviously very rigorous. But they are glad of the diversion that our little family provides, and they let us sit at the vacant desks and draw. He digs in the drawer of his desk and comes up with a couple of images of the Guru Rinpoche, a common tankha subject, and a couple of pencils, and Jacob and Forrest set to work copying the images with remarkable detail. To amuse Halle, he draws in the curious stylized manner a deer, a dog, and a lotus flower (the pema). This is a quiet interlude; we are in no hurry to leave, and the students are entertained by the children's serious and careful attention to making copies of the Guru.

After some time, we drift into a classroom across the hall, where two girls are doing the tiniest embroidery I have ever seen - beautiful phoenixes and flowing flowers - without any hoops.
In the nearby shops, which sell the student work, we ask about where to purchase thick handmade paper, paints, and brushes, but we are told we have to go back downtown for those items. Later that afternoon we find the art shop, tucked into a handicraft gallery in the clock tower plaza, and we buy little sets of watercolors for 21Nu and fine animal-hair brushes, and the rest of the afternoon is spent pleasantly in the guest house with Jamtsho and our kids making paintings and drawings using the new paints and the watercolor sets we have brought from home. Jacob copies another image of the Guru and tries to master the "endless knot," a Buddhist symbol that looks like an angular Celtic knot, symbolizing the union of wisdom and compassion. Jamtsho shows the boys how to fold origami flowers and Halle paints lots of rainbows. We have drying paintings sitting on every horizontal surface in the living room.

Doma

One of the more enlightened things the king has done is to ban tobacco from Bhutan. Cigarettes are not for sale here, not even in the duty-free shop I believe, and there is a very prohibitive tax on bringing them into the country for personal use. It is illegal to bring them in for resale. Consequently, in contrast to many other Asian countries, there are few smokers (I haven't seen anyone smoking since we arrived), and no butts on the sidewalk. Rising smoke in the air comes from burning trash, or from cooking fires, or from incense. Interestingly, one of the most prolific weeds here is, well, weed, and although I think that a few people smoke the dried leaves of the marijuana plant that grows roadside here in abundance, it is not widely used.

However, they do have doma. The king & royalty have a PR campaign going that doma is a nasty habit, harmful to one's health, and it may be less common in the younger generation than in their parents, but it is still a frequent sight and has been a fixture here for centuries. Doma is betel nut, something that looks like an ungrated nutmeg. It is wrapped in a large, heart-shaped green leaf along with a smear of white lime-powder paste, and then rolled up into a small bundle and chewed. Once chewed, the doma turns into a bright red pasty lump, turning the mouth, lips, and teeth a bright red color. Doma chewers of many years have blackened teeth. Red spittle and used-up doma chews liberally dot the sidewalks and streets; sometimes you must watch where you step.

We spoke at length to one shop-keeper about doma. She said she began chewing it when she was about 20, and although she doesn't like what it does to her teeth, and she knows it probably increases her risk of things like stomach cancer, she says she can't stop, that she feels sick when she doesn't chew it. She has a chew in her mouth almost constantly - she told us that she chews 30 or 40 doma a day, sometimes as many as 50. I don't know what that costs; here we have taken a picture of doma for sale at a counter inside a small grocery: a leaf, the white lime, several betel nuts, all wrapped in someone's old geometry homework from a school exercise book. You see doma sellers on the sidewalk too, and hawking it from small baskets at sporting events, but I haven't seen too many of the young, Westernized, cellphone-chatting young adults chewing it, so I think that may be a good sign. If they can gradually eradicate doma, continue to ignore the weed, and keep out tobacco, then this bodes well for the king's program of measuring his nation's progress by its "gross national happiness."

The Diglop on his Damyan
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First Operating Day In Bhutan

Although we've been here for a number of days I thought it important to write an entry about my first operating day at the Jigme Dorji Wangchuk National Referral Hospital (JDWNRH to you). I had heard from the previous volunteer that there was a challenging case ahead, so I showed up a day early in the operating room. The attached picture shows the operative list for the day. It's not unusual to walk into the OR, never having seen the patient or even knowing what operation the patient needs, and figuring it out on the spot by looking at the chart and x-rays.

I tend to bring my own scrubs into the OR, because the Bhutanese scrubs only reach to my elbows and knees. They now have a supply of disposable gloves, although when I was first here, gloves were washed and re-used until they had holes in them. Sterility is still very lacking; the operative field is draped with sheets that have large holes in them, and oftentimes the anesthesia staff is working inches away from the operative field. Flies still inhabit the OR and I find myself shooing them away during the case, but at least we no longer have dogs outside the OR doors sleeping in the hallway. It's not uncommon to have relatives waiting right outside the OR, chanting and burning incense. I feel like I need the right karma in this environment and I appreciate any help they might give.

My first case was a 13-year old boy with a massive tumor in his thigh. The Bhutanese orthopedic surgeon was planning a hip disarticulation (i.e. amputating the leg at the hip socket). The boy had had a previous biopsy that was read in India, and as we were getting ready for the case, I looked at the pathology report, and realized that although the tumor was huge, it was likely benign and not malignant. The boy had had an MRI in India, too, but it was of such poor quality that it gave no useful information. I convinced the Bhutanese orthopedic surgeon that we should try to save the leg. The young boy was very happy with this suggestion, and wanted to be operated on by the American. We ended up removing a tumor that literally filled a bucket. We had to dissect out the major nerves and arteries in the leg, which was very challenging, but we were able to save his leg, and he's actually doing quite well. When he first woke up, he kept asking to see his leg to make sure it was still attached. Today, on post-op day #5, I put him on crutches, and allowed him to walk.

Weekend Market

New to Thimphu? Need plastic dishes, a rice cooker, some ancient cloth, spices, yak cheese, vegetables, or rubber flip flops? Take ye to the weekend market, running all day Friday, Saturday and Sunday down near the river in a big fenced cement lot with corrugated tin roofs. We have, as you have read, braved the Bangkok weekend market, and this one here is much less crowded and much more food-oriented. This is the week's only opportunity to buy fresh produce. Mid-week there can be had some wilted cabbages and sad-looking tomatoes in a handful of the shops in town, but the only good produce makes its appearance at the weekend market and everyone goes there at some point during the weekend to stock up, carrying large burlap tote bags to bring home their wares.

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 side, 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.

An Evening with the Diglop

Today, after hours of pleading from Thinley, our frequent visitor and sometimes seventh family member, we visited her home again when her father was home and had the pleasure of meeting him. He has three careers: in his day job he is a diglop, a government-employed protocol specialist (he calls it "display"), teaching people entering official government service at the university level how to dress, eat, drink tea, carry oneself in official capacities. He has tutored members of the royal family in this, despite himself living in the extremely humble home we described earlier. Thinley is obviously very proud of his high position, and the honor that has come to him; he has even received an official government award, as she put it, for being a good father. She thrusts at us pictures of him at ceremonial occasions, with one of the princesses, etc. In his second career he is a movie actor in the thriving Bhutanese film industry. Unfortunately these films are not widely available on video, but he showed us his certificate awarding him the best supporting actor from the Bhutan Motion Picture Association for 2002 for his role in a full-length feature film. But his real love, it turns out, is singing and playing the damyan (?spelling uncertain), a traditional Bhutanese instrument that looks like a lute. It has seven strings and is played with a small pointed piece of ivory that looks like a sharktooth. He has had the honor of traveling throughout Europe performing traditional Bhutanese and Tibetan folk songs.

At Thinley's urging, he lifts the gorgeously carved and painted damyan, with its curved dragon-head scroll, down from its nail in the dirty turquoise-painted plaster wall, and we sit entranced while he plays us several traditional songs. His voice is indeed a lovely one, a trilling baritone, and he plays the damyan beautifully with flying fingers on the place where frets would be on a guitar, plucking the strings so rapidly that the instrument both sings the tune and provides a humming bass line at the same time. His children know the songs well; Thinley's five-year old brother sings bits and pieces as he runs in and out from the house to the garden and back.

His English is, as he put it, "small," and so Thinley does most of the translating between himself and us. He gives us a CD produced here in Bhutan of his singing and damyan-playing. We express our delight with his musicianship, and we marvel at his dignity and talent in the midst of what in the US might seem like squalid conditions. He is hoping to hike with us this weekend to one of the local monasteries (goemba) up in the mountains outside of Thimphu. If so, hopefully we will arrive with our gho and kira in perfect order, and conduct ourselves with politeness and proper Bhutanese decorum. One would expect nothing less when in the company of a diglop.

Why business is good # 2: Bamboo scaffolding on the new hotel construction in Thimphu
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Why business is good on the Orthopaedic Service at Jigme Dorji Wangchuk National Referral Hospital #1
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Warrior King

The King of Bhutan, H.M. Jigme Singye Wangchuck, is western educated and a very modern forward thinking man. (This picture is a copy of the one that hangs in nearly every home. King is on the left, the supreme religious leader Je Kenpo on the right). He has abdicated his legislative powers to an appointed ministry and an elected legislature, but on December 15 of 2004 he returned to his warrior roots and personally led an attack against 31 camps of Indian separatist terrorists along the southern border with India. At 9am precisely, the King hoisted a shoulder-carried mortar and charged into one of the camps of the ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam) surprising the camp which was in the midst of having a morning meal. The coordinated attack at all 31 camps was carried out by the entire Bhutanese army of 5,000 men armed with AK-47s and small mortars, as well as two thousand of the royal guards. Thirty thousand Indian troops had been offered by the Indian Prime Minister, but declined by the king, who felt that this attack should be carried out only by Bhutanese in defense of their own border. Previous attempts by the Indian army to remove the three terrorist factions from southern Bhutan had ended in tremendous casualties for the Indian army, and some Indian generals had felt that further attempts would be a suicide misison.
The terrorist groups were heavily armed, including heavy mortar, machine guns, and anti-aircraft weapons. They had been fighting in India from their bases in Bhutan, Bangladesh and Burma since the 1980s. The Indian government had been pressuring Bhutan to take action against them and had stopped funding major development projects in Bhutan including the building of a new hospital in Thimphu. The king had personally visited all 31 camps, under the guise of paying tribute money and to try to encourage them to leave peaceably. He had tea with many of the terrorist commanders.

The king also started a program of patrolling southern Bhutan, ostensibly to take a land survey, so the terrorists were accustomed to seeing government officials in their area. A new lakhang (Buddhist temple) was built in southern Bhutan near some of the major terrorist bases, and in early December 2004, the king arrived with many officials and royal guards, ostensibly to dedicate the new lakhang.

The Indian government had evacuated many border hospitals, preparing for Bhutanese casualties, but after touring Jigme Dorji Wangchuk National Referral Hospital in Thimphu to determine available bed space, the king requested only 40 beds be reserved in Thimphu, saying that if he had more than forty wounded, that he would lose the war.

On the morning of the 15th, "surveyors" entered all 31 camps. A loud puja was being held in the lakhang within earshot of some of the camps, and at 9 am the attack began, led by the king himself, defeating all 31 camps within an hour and a half. It took two additional days to capture the remaining stragglers or force the remainder to cross into India where they were captured by the Indian army. Although many hundreds of terrorists were killed, Bhutan lost only 10 men and 30 wounded.

In memory of this battle, and out of gratitude at not having lost the king to it, the four queens have built 108 chortens to commemorate his victory.

I heard this fascinating account from the king's personal physician, who accompanied him on the trip to drive out the ULFA.

We are Twice Adopted

The first thing to go is privacy.

The current volunteer family lives in a small guest house in the compound of the family of Dr. Gadho, an assistant Minister of Health in Bhutan and an important official at the Jigme Dorji Wangchuk National Referral Hospital, named for the current king's late father. Dr. Gadho's household is busy, with relatives coming and going, and two or three hired helpers hanging around to do the cooking and washing for the extended family. He himself is almost never here, traveling to meetings and official dinners, making a genial and impressive appearance now and then, in a well-tailored gho, on his way to somewhere else. His wife is Tashi, who drives a LandRover SUV and carries a large black leather tote bag into which she is often digging for her ringing cellphone. She is a delightful person, and was an important mentor to me the last time I was here, when Thompson was an infant and her two oldest children were adorable girls ages 6 and 4, who called me "Auntie" and hung around us much of the time. Their social position, and twelve years of American volunteers in their backyard have made the family very savvy to all things Western. Those little girls have become gracious and well-spoken young adults: Chimi is highly versed in American films, has just come back from a 6-month visit to the US, and is looking forward to attending medical school either on scholarship either in Germany or Sri Lanka. Her sister Tashi is a studious 16-year old, headed this fall for a two-year stint at an international school in Thailand. She wears Western clothes most of the time, dark blue jeans with a bleach-stripe down the center of each leg. Jamtsho is 11, the young heir-apparent to the family, being the only boy, and the undisputed leader of a passel of cousins and friends who wander in & out to play. I toured his small bedroom, which he shares with a bachelor uncle. He pointed out the posters: Beckham the British soccer star, Kurt Cobain and Enrique Eglasias. I asked him if he liked their music, and he said to me, "Yes, Auntie, but I like Eminem better." We have one of the housekeepers, Ratna, to come wash for us and tidy our beds and, as she says, "complain" to the maintenance department of the hospital when there is something in the house that needs fixing. Jamtsho's small girl cousins become pals of Halle: Sonam who is about 10, and Deki, who is 5.

Any of these folks, grown or children, will walk right into our house, with only the squeal of the screen door hinges to announce their arrival. They enter into a large living room with a Western-style dining table and chairs (unusual here), wide-plank wooden floors, lots of windows, two sofas, some chairs, a large desk, bookcases, benches, and some electric radiators for the winter. This takes up about a third of the house. The rest are smaller rooms coming off a central hallway, all with stone floors: a kitchen and a bedroom to the left, two bedrooms off to the right, each with a bathroom. The back bathroom, with a deep tub, serves as laundry, and the front bathroom has a shower in one corner, and a hot water heater that heats up during the night for morning showers. Both have regular toilets, which is a relief to Halle who is afraid of the floor squat toilets that are the norm in public bathrooms here. The kitchen is well-appointed compared to when I was here before: a cold water tap with a stainless steel sink, a very functional large water filter, a 2-burner propane cooktop sitting on the counter, and a half-sized refrigerator. A dish cupboard with screen doors and some wall shelves with pots & pans make up the rest of the room.

Our first night Liz & George, the previous HVO volunteers, have left us some food in the fridge along with a list of what has been recently purchased and can be trusted, but Tashi offers to make us supper and I am glad to accept, as we are tired and sore from hiking Taksang and the drive to Thimphu. She cooks us red rice, potatoes and stewed meat, yellow dal, and a plate of raw sliced carrots, and serves us the crunchy rice called Tsao alongside. Everything is delicious. Within a day our kids are inseparable from theirs and spend the day roaming, playing tag, and checking out the stack of board games here on the shelves in the house. We are "Uncle" and "Auntie" to the children, and we are part of their family, with anyone passing in & out of either house whenever they please. We do lock it when we're not home, but when we are home, it is free game for anyone to come in and sit with us. It is good to have a family here.

Our second adoption also takes place the first night we are here. A slender girl with a loose ponytail arrives by climbing over the wire fence behind the house, bringing two small girls with her, and introduces herself as the best friend of the girls who lived here in June. They attended a local school and this girl was, apparently, their constant companion. Her name is Thinley (silent h), she is Thompson's age, and she has come to meet the girls' "Auntie" (meaning me) and the children she has heard will be living here in July. She is an eager and winsome character, who attaches herself to our family partly out of loyalty to the previous family, and partly for reasons known only to herself. We make her feel welcome and she soon becomes a daily feature. The second day, we encounter her on the sidewalk on our way to breakfast and end up spending the entire morning in her company; she brings our boys back to her house later that day; and on the third day we spend another several hours with her in her home or ours. We become her second family and she takes over care of Halle with some authority, especially in braiding Halle's hair.

Yesterday we went to her home, what she calls a "government cottage" in the district behind the bakery near the Indian military compound. She explains that her family were squatters in the Motithang area who were relocated to these public housing units. Her family of 5 occupies half a small cottage, consisting of a front room, a kitchen the size of an American broom closet, one bedroom, and a toilet, with a small patch of land out back for the clothesline and a garden with corn, tomatoes. The front room is dominated by an elaborate corner prayer altar. Her young mother speaks no English and has a 2-month old newborn son. Our children play in the street with the kids in her neighborhood. She is an endless fount of circle games, tag variations, and street fun, and she plys us with many invitations to go with her to a monastery, to the botanical gardens, to spend the afternoon at her home, to come for cheese momos which she will make for us, etc. We are both charmed and somewhat bemused by all the attention. We bring the baby a gift and she chides us for bringing a gift on the first visit to her home, but in contrast to where we live here, to say nothing of the vast luxury in which we live at home, it seems a trifling thing. We balance between the two adopted families, a little gingerly, as we find our way here the first week.

Jacob de-ticking a dog
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Dogs of Thimphu

Our first night in Thimphu I cannot sleep. Dogs are everywhere barking, discussing, arguing, and calling to each other across the weedy garden patches between the houses. The Gadho's compound has 6 dogs, who are considered pets and are fierce guardians of the compound's boundaries. Beyond this, there are dogs everywhere, and they run in packs at night through the streets and alleys. Buddhists will not kill these wild dogs; sterilizing animals is unheard of here, and so there are a generous abundance with always more on the way.

There are many body types and sizes of these dogs of Thimphu, but they tend to be either sandy-colored, or black, with curled-up tails and pointed, flopped-over ears. They nose in the trash, drink from the gutters, sleep on the sidewalk, piddle where they please. We do not approach them, and unless it is night and you are alone, you needn't worry that they will approach you. Humans and dogs occupy the same space here on different planes of existence, living in grudging acceptance of one another, if not exactly harmony. Some become pets, like the motley crew of dogs here at the Gadhos, who are fed a pot of rice in the evening and even wear collars, and who roam with gentle authority and arrive energetically barking at the gate whenever a person or vehicle approaches. They are Shadow, the black matriarch; Polo, a younger black dog; Puppy, a kind of small sandy shepherd dog with black muzzle; Licky, a brown feminine-looking Pomeranian mix; and Puppy's two puppies, perhaps 10 or 12 weeks old, one who is her exact likeness and one who is black, whose names I think are Pepee and Phoebe. The kids and the dogs roam in a kind of integrated pack, rolling in the grass and shoving one another, and staying outside the entire day.

At home I left careful instructions for our own dog to be checked for ticks. It has been a bad tick year in Massachusetts, meaning I can easily pull one tick off our dog every time she has been out for the afternoon. Jacob sometimes helps me with this task; he is fascinated with every sentient being, as a Buddhist might say, and ticks are an interesting novelty at home. So he is horrified and distressed to flip back the ear of one of the Gadho's dogs and count 14 attached ticks on the underside of a single ear. Jacob spends lots of time grooming the dogs, petting and combing through their fur and mourning the number of critters he finds there. This morning Jamtsho and our the boys have taken it upon themselves to rid just one dog, "Puppy," of her many bloated ticks, and they count upwards of 15 and smash them merrily on the concrete outside. Jamtsho does the smashing, although this is frowned-upon as Buddhist practice. His mother Tashi said to me apologetically yesterday that the flies in the house are a nuisance, but "what can we do, we can't kill them."

Tigers Nest

Coming back from a walk to the Gantey Palace in Paro, on our first day in Bhutan, the hotel proprietress hands us a phone message she has taken. It is from the June HVO ortho volunteer, Liz Regan Lowe and her family, and it tells us that they will be coming with a car in the morning to pick us up to hike Taksang, and then at the bottom there is the cryptic but important phrase: "We have permits." Both of these items are very good news. It means we will be able to meet and talk with the family that has been in Thimphu for the previous month, so Don and Liz can talk doctor and transfer the reins, and it means that we will be able to go inside one of the most unique and sacred places in all the world, if we can manage the ascent.

Taksang Lhakang marks the place where Guru Rinpoche arrived, on the back of a flying tigress, to bring Buddhism to Bhutan. He surely had to fly there, because the spot is 900m above Paro on a sheer rock face, shielded by mist most of the time. The Guru meditated before subduing the demons that ruled the land before the arrival of the Buddha's teachings, and the sacred meditation cave has been surrounded by a monastery and temple (lakhang) for centuries. Taksang partially burned in the 1950s and was rebuilt, and then in 1997 or 1998, the entire construction went up in flames, probably from a butter lamp. It has once again been painstakingly rebuilt on its old foundation. I have heard that the local people were conscripted to dedicate a certain amount of time to the temple's reconstruction and to improving the foothpaths that lead up to it. Tourists to Bhutan -- of which there are only several thousand a year, due to strict government regulation -- nearly all walk the trail that winds through the woods, snakes around the mountain, providing tantalizing glimpses of the misty cliff with its white monastery clinging to it high above. The trail brings one to a teahouse, with strings of prayer flags all around, close enough to see the monastery in beautiful detail across a steep pine-covered canyon. Anyone may, if they are not completely winded from the altitude, continue on to a small checkpoint some 45 more minutes up the mountain, where incredible pictures like this one may be taken at nearly 10,000 feet up. From this point, the trail drops off the cliff and becomes a stone staircase, leading down many flights to a footbridge over a narrow frothy waterfall, and then up again on the other side to the monastery itself. Without a permit, tourists may go no further. But Liz and her husband George have gotten a permit, and this will allow them, their two daughters ages 11 and 13, and ourselves, for the first time, to enter the lakhang and see its treasure rooms.

Fortunately the weather is cool, cloudy, and some light rain. This cools us off as we hike and share snacks to encourage the kids. Liz and George have found Oreos in some shop in Thimphu and these are a welcome sight for our kids. We are accompanied here and there by stray dogs, some of them bearing grisly wounds from dogfights, watching us hopefully for dropped Oreo pieces. The hike is spectacular, and the path is well-trodden both by people and pack horses, though we see few other hikers today: only two other tourists, from Japan, and perhaps a dozen other Bhutanese people making the climb today. We are one day away from the low elevation of Bangkok and Stow, so we are struggling a bit with the altitude, which is here around 8000 feet and going up quickly. However, the group of kids meshes well and they keep a good pace, with Halle only occasionally flagging in her energy. We piggy back her part of the way, but the trail is not always conducive to this, so she takes some rests and the ten of us stretch out along the trail, meeting up again here and there to make sure we have all our hikers. Reaching the tea house feels like a major accomplishment, and we continue on to the photo checkpoint, and then it begins to rain as we start down the multiple flights of stone steps, some with railings between ourselves and the chasm, some without. I am concentrating on every step, breathing is labored, and my worry level about falling on the slippery wet rocks is high, but to look up and see the sheer rock face with the monastery perched on it is an incredible sight. The clouds are flowing in and out of the chasm like living animals, and the loudest sound is the waterfall coursing down between us and the monastery. We cross the bridge, with many dogs barking our arrival and their barks echoing out into the chasm and being carried away with the falling rain.

A Bhutanese policeman in camoflage uniform and flip-flops checks our permits. We respectfully wait, while a small novice monk sticks his head out of a nearby window above us somewhere and practices his "Hello! How are you?" We are admitted into the complex, a complicated arrangement of porches, wooden staircases, rooms, small temples, and vertical arrangement of tin roofs painted brick red, crowned by a central golden roof with a beautiful spire and golden gargoyles off its four corners. The rain is coming down at a good clip, and we shed our raincoats, sneakers, and camera bags at the doorways of the rooms we are allowed to visit. These number four, it turns out, though I don't think any of us knew ahead of time what was inside or how many rooms we would be allowed into. A small contingent of red-robed monks in their teens bring us from place to place, but none of them seems to know very much English. Each Bhutanese family is encouraged to have one boy become a monk, and they begin this training very early in life once their calling is designated; consequently they become quite expert in Dzongka and in texts and in writing, but perhaps (it depends on the monastery) do not study English as much as their counterparts in the public school system here. At any rate, we encountered the treasure rooms without commentary by the monks--esoteric Himalayan Buddhism in its richest, rawest, least interpreted state.

The treasure rooms are gorgeous... gigantic wall paintings of the life of Bhutanese saints, rich silk canopies and banners, pillows and mats on the floor with evidence of the ceremonies and prayers that take place there: giant round drums with curved drumsticks, trumpets, bundles of texts, chimes, bells. An altar wall in each one takes up the entire wall, with a central statue of Guru Rinpoche enconsed in a carved decorated house, surrounded by smaller niches for smaller statues, and an elaborate table in front with the seven bowls of water, detailed butter-sculptures, and burning butter lamps and incense. Liz and George have remembered to bring offerings of money for each room, and when they place them in the bowls, one of the monks goes and fetches a silver pitcher with a narrow curved spout, and a peacock feather on its lid. We hold out our cupped hands in front of us, and he pours a little of the perfumed water into our hands. We touch our mouths to the water, and then spread it on our already-wet heads. The rooms are quiet, there is only a kind of murmur from outside from the waterfall and the wind. By the second room, Halle begins to get sleepy. It has been a long 3-hour climb for small feet. She curls on my lap and nearly falls asleep. In one of the rooms the monks hand us silk threads to tie around our necks also. We respectfully spend some time in each room, looking at the beautiful objects and paintings, and then we gather our sodden sneakers and jackets and proceed to the next.

By the fourth room, Liz has decided to start down the path, and our two youngest are a bit weary of the rooms and decide to stay outside by the gigantic brass gong at the entrance. The rest of the group is permitted to enter the most sacred of the rooms and report to me that I have missed the most spectacular of all, with really enormous golden statues of the Guru Rinpoche and the Buddha, and a young monk with the most articulate English to explain them for us. It continues to rain as we cross the footbridge, and head up the stone steps. Across the chasm from the monastery I can hear a low buzzing chanting begin, like a deep hum from the mountain itself, prayers for every sentient being, from somewhere inside the lakhang. I know we each feel a keen sense of privilege at being permitted inside Taksang and also of accomplishment at finishing the ascent despite our lack of acclimation and the young ages of our children. This is no small thing for any of us.

It rains heavily down below the stone steps on the trail. In places the trail has become a small mountain stream, and our clothes are soaked. At the teahouse at last, we fuel on butter cookies and mango juice; Liz and George have some of the steaming hot milk tea that is served everywhere here. On the way down Halle is carried part of the way, but walks most of it herself, and the three boys are far ahead of us for most of the descent. The rain stops, or perhaps we walk down out of it; Don thinks it is still raining up at Taksang, and we cannot tell because the clouds have swirled in around it again. We started the hike around 10 am, and we are down at the bottom by 3, where the implacable Passang waits at the van for us. We have scaled the Tigers Nest, and we will carry the silken thread of that memory with us into our trip, while Liz & George will take it with them as their last taste of Bhutan on their way home to Denver. It is blessing both ways.

Of Highways in Bhutan

The pale brown, wide, white-cobbled river that runs through Paro valley (the Paro Chu) becomes a churning brown river as it enters a gorge to the east. Sliced into the hillside along the river is the Paro to Thimphu stretch of the Bhutan East-West Highway, really the only thoroughfare that connects the country across its numerous north-south oriented mountain ranges. It follows the Paro Chu until that connects with the Thimphu Chu - an auspicious confluence marked by three chortens (one Bhutanese, one Nepali, and one Tibetan, just to cover the bases) and a police checkpoint that signals you are traveling from one region to another. The drive takes about an hour and a half, and there is not one single straight stretch of road on the entire journey. There is only one road visible anywhere, and it's the one we're on. Nothing else is paved or even identifiable as a vehicle road. As most roads here, it is one lane that serves both directions, with harrowing drop-offs on the river side and rocky outcrops on the other.I find it visually disorienting, for starters, because as in Thailand and elsewhere in Asia, they drive on the left side of the road. Our driver meep-meeps his horn liberally while approaching a turn, hoping for open road on the other side of the blind turn. A car - or worse, a truck - coming the other direction is a moment for negotiation, a slight slowing on both parts, and a swerve to just clear the other vehicle with only inches to spare. These are generally only mildly nerve-wracking, except in the case of the oncoming public bus, the Dawa Transport death bus, which nearly drives itself and us off the road with a screeching of tires.

I think it may be the case throughout Asia that travelers put their lives in the hands of drivers, whose car registration, experience, licensing, and capabilities may be only dimly perceived when the driver is hired. In our case, we have inherited the very able van driver who took the previous HVO family from Thimphu to Paro to meet their flight and is now taking us to Thimphu to take up residence there. His name is Passang, and he is quiet, apparently unflappable, and obviously very familiar with this mangled stretch of asphalt that serves as the road from Paro to Thimphu. We had a similarly trustworthy driver on my previous trip to Bhutan in 1993, a genial young man named Choifel, when it was a shock to ride with my 7-month old child in a car with no seatbelts or carseats on this road, but I note it has been significantly improved since then. Still no seatbelts, naturally, so the kids stretch out on the seats (even try back-seat surfing until I catch them at it) and I hold the sleeping Halle on my lap, as we swerve and rock side to side, by sheer maternal will. Cows straggle across the road, slow to respond to Passang's meep-meep. We pass the Dom Che monastery, perched high above the river on the opposite side, and Passang points out that the river here is bridged by an ancient iron-chain footbridge brought up from the eastern town of Trashigang. The iron-chain bridge is very, very old, but here is being re-installed both as a relic and as a functional river crossing. Thompson tells me you couldn't pay him enough to cross that river on such a bridge.

On the Thimphu side of the checkpoint, the road climbs again (now we are driving "upstream" the Thimphu Chu instead of downstream the Paro Chu) and then begins to descend, slowly, into the Thimphu valley. I begin to see roadside stands, ranging from a small girl under an umbrella tending a sleeping baby, with a basket of chilis at her feet, to a narrow wooden stall along the road with fruit, some water bottles, and the ubiquitous Coca-Cola. As we approach Thimphu, a large new chorten is under construction, and then Passang points out something even more interesting up ahead: a two-lane divided highway with streetlights, its brand new black asphalt pavement gleaming with the late afternoon rain on it. We are amazed. It runs right up to the concrete supports of a future bridge/overpass, and then picks up again on the other side. Although the bridge is not built, the road is being used by cars on either side of the construction, and it is the straightest road I have seen in Bhutan and the first divided highway ever. Signal of things to come, perhaps, or at least of the dramatic changes in Thimphu, which has filled its valley and is steadily creeping up both its hillsides with new construction (in somewhat traditional-looking architecture at least) of housing, offices, and shops. (Photo was taken on the outskirts looking towards Thimphu)

However, there is still no streetlight in Thimphu. Instead, there are two traffic circles ("rotaries" back home) in the downtown, each with a stone circular platform in the middle with a little wooden roofed tower built on it, in which a white-gloved traffic policeman directs the traffic at the rotary (and people obey!). Away from the circle, it is every Suzuki Maruti for himself, although the traffic looks and feels slow after the vehicular hell that is Bangkok, and we are glad to be ending our long arrival journey in a city that we have come to love as a kind of second home.

Schoolgirls

A taxi is contracted to take us up the opposite hillside of Paro, on the other side of the river, to a location above the dzong, a drive of about 20 minutes. Our destination was once the watchtower of the Paro dzong (the dzong is pictured, the Museum is above & to the left), to ward off marauding Tibetans, and is a huge 6-story circular structure with a spiral interior meant to be like a conch shell. Today it is the National Museum, and we are among its only visitors an hour before closing time on a Tuesday. It costs us about a dollar, and our children the equivalent of a penny, plus leaving our bag with the ticket taker, to go inside and wander clockwise around the round floors. The exhibits are very old tankhas (religious paintings set in silk frames, which hang like small tapestries) depicting the important religious/cultural characters of medieval Bhutan; a floor of stuffed birds and animals indigenous to the region (looking a little bit scruffy after all this time in glass cases); a floor of gigantic shallow round brass urns, one entirely of brass and copper teakettles, one of baskets, one of clothing and jewelry, etc. Our kids favorite is the philatelic exhibit on the top floor, showing the first issue of some of the country's distinctive postage stamps. Bhutan has made something of an industry out of making unusual stamps for collectors. We saw 3D and holographic stamps, stamps with gold coins set into them, beautiful stamps honoring world events, and our kids thought that the most inventive were a series from the 1970s that were tiny phonographic records about 2 or 3 inches in diameter made of flexible bright-colored vinyl, so they could actually be played on a record player.

We are summoned - reluctantly - from the armor exhibit by the caretaker telling us the museum is closing, and he turns off the lights and locks the door after us. On our stroll back to the taxi we see three schoolgirls - 9th grade, it turns out, cramming Shakespeare for their English exam the following day. They are charmed with Halle, and ask her many questions, and teach her to ask what someone's name is in Dzongka (don't ask me to spell it, but it sounds like Chimi Gochimo?). They take our address and promise to write. We take a picture and promise to send. This will be the first of many such encounters with kindly teenage girls who are enchanted by Halle's looks and her friendliness. She takes it all in stride. The ticket taker has gone home, leaving our bag in the office, but it is unlocked, so we open the door and retrieve it and taxi back down, waving to the girls on their way home. "Goodbye, babee!" they call to Halle as our taxi grinds past, laboring down the steep curving road towards Paro.

Frog Funerals and Grocery: A Tour of Paro

Paro is an agricultural town. Its airport and the several hotels in the town make it only slightly less of a typical Bhutanese village, and I have read in the guidebook that the tin roofs here (out in the countryside they would be wood shingle, held down with round river stones) indicate the prosperity of the town. Being a wide valley blessed with a wide, shallow, milky river of pure snowmelt, it is a good location for the production of the local variety of rice, "red rice," so named because of its rusty husk that turns the rice pink when cooked. I also read that the government of Japan has sent consultants to help develop the rice agriculture here, and as a result the Paro rice paddies are very well constructed and managed. In late June the rice is about 6 or 8 inches high and bright grass green, and the paddies look like a crazy quilt of lush green velvet when seen from above. The paddies are bisected by a single one-lane (but two-way) road, almost directly below our hotel, which connects the hill (site of the penlop's palace) and the town, one main street of shops and hotels, buildings, cement alleys, and innumerable stray dogs.

In vertical Bhutan, as Don says, there is always a long way, and a short way, to wherever you want to go. The long way will be paved, more or less, and passable by vehicle, pedestrian, cow and dog. The short way will be a footpath, barely wide enough for one, used by people, cows, and dogs. Yes, it will be a shorter way, but with steep switchbacks and kept in place only by the frequency of foot traffic. We take the short way down from the palace to the paddy road, single file, carrying our umbrellas and raincoats because rain is always imminent. Crossing the paddies, avoiding the swerving boxy taxi-vans who signal their approach with a Road-Runner like "meep-meep," our kids notice a large number of flattened frogs on the road, who evidently misinterpreted the meep-meep and met their doom. This distresses Jacob, who eulogizes them with the American national anthem and a short prayer for their frog souls.

At the end of the paddy road, we reach one end of Paro's main street, marked by a small unfenced green where bony cows are wandering, grazing. It is mainly what are here called grocery shops, some with names (in Dzongka and English) and others only numbers (Shop No. 57), and all of them one small room with wooden-shuttered windows open to the street so you can see the wares piled on the shelves in the back. The wares are brightly-packaged crackers and biscuits from India, cooking oil, powdered milk, bottled juice, bags of dried banana chips, sodas, candy, shoes, candles, incense, school paper, rice, baskets of chilis, and the like. The shops seem indistinguishable to me, with almost no specialization. Here and there a different category emerges: the handicraft shop, which does not sell food, but fabric, carvings, offering bowls, ceremonial masks; and I see the occasional shop advertising an internet connection or a "B-Mobile" phone card. We stroll the street, talking to the children and the shop owners that we meet. People know a smattering of conversational English, sometimes are quite articulate and talkative. We learn Bhutanese hopscotch from a group of girls who are playing it in the street, using a piece of the orange clay dirt as a chalk. We take a digital picture of them and show it to them, to their amusement. We shop for Bhutanese clothing for Jacob and Halle in one shop, lingering for a long time to talk to the shop owner. Jacob now owns a lovely vertical-striped gho and plans to wear it often.

The sidewalks are cement, with open running sewers alongside, and they are full of buzzing flies; each shop, however, is granted a government trash barrel painted with the words "Use Me" on it. Dogs run everywhere or sleep where they please, even in the road. Children play in the alleys with whatever is handy: a partly deflated soccer ball, an empty plastic water bottle. Halle is surprised to see a toddler dragging a piece of uncoiled wire as a toy. "She won't hurt herself on that poky thing," she tells me, recognizing with the unremarkability of what would be totally unacceptable in our culture.

Palace of the Paro Penlop

Bhutan has never been colonized by a Western power, nor has it ever changed hands much among its nearby Asian neighbors, because of the general inaccessibility of the land. There were some battles with Tibetan invaders and part of western Bhutan was federated under the control of Tibetan lamas by the 16th century. It was not united into a single nation until the turn of the twentieth century when the current ruling dynasty, the Wangchuks, came to power and managed to bring the various feudal regions under a single Buddhist monarchy. The current king is the 4th of this dynasty; King Jigme Signye Wangchuk ascended the throne in 1972 at the age of 16 when his 44-year old father, Jigme Dorji Wangchuk, passed away. In medieval times, gigantic fortresses were built across the country, many by a revered Buddhist saint named Sabdrug Rinpoche. These dzongs still serve as the major cultural, religious, and administrative centers in modern Bhutan. Local leaders were penlops, literally "lord-teacher," and some of them became quite powerful, among them the penlop of Paro, whose gracious three-story home overlooks the Paro valley, almost at the same elevation as the imposing dzong which is on the opposite slope. Penlops are still an important title in Bhutan; the king's son, the Crown Prince Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuk, was recently installed as the penlop of a region in the center of Bhutan.

In the 1980s, the Paro penlop's house was turned into a hotel (renovated 1997) called the Gantey Palace, and this was our first destination, to drop off our bags. We walk through a gate and down a flight of stone steps into a garden. A large chorten (a sealed room-sized sanctuary for sacred texts, about 25 feet high with an elaborate roof) dominates the garden. One then passes through a long building, one room deep, housing a wooden reception counter, and from there into a stone courtyard made up of two-story buildings on three sides and the palace itself, a looming large rectangular building, wider at the base than at the top, with narrow high windows. Our rooms are reached by an extremely steep hewn wooden staircase to the second floor of the reception building, where we have two twin-bed rooms with lovely views over the rice paddies, the town of Paro and the Paro River (Chu) beyond.

There is not a single unadorned surface at Gantey Palace, and this is somewhat typical of older buildings. The paneled walls are painted, with an image in the center of each panel, and the trim is painted several colors, as is the beams and the ends of the beams are adorned with designs, and the furniture is elaborately painted, and the ceiling is a dark red with dark blue beams. The proprietress permits us to go in and see the rooms in the palace, which are higher-ceilinged than ours and have the feel of a much older building. There is a prayer room/ treasure room with a large altar and statue of the Guru Rinpoche, the man who brought Buddhism to Bhutan, with the original murals on the walls showing the life and heroic exploits of the Guru.

The Western-style bathrooms are quite new, although we have arranged for a "stone bath" and are not sure what to expect. In the evening after we return from our Paro sightseeing, the proprietress shows us through a gate at the back of the courtyard, into a stone-strewn yard where a simple wooden shed has been built, with a corrugated tin roof. In the shed are four tubs that look a bit like canoes with the ends cut off, made of thick cedar planks, and beyond the shed is a fire heaped high with large round river cobbles. In each tub, a cedar plank drilled with holes divides the interior into a large section, big enough for an adult to sit (or two children!), and a smaller section, big enough to hold a dozen hot stones which heat the water mighty quick to a good steaming temperature. The man tending the fire lifts a stone, rinses it, with dramatic steam and hissing, in a small tub, and then drops it into the small section, prior to our clambering in and soaking. He had filled all four tubs and we, in our swimsuits, sat and enjoyed our *really* hot soaks. The stone baths made us so tired and relaxed we could hardly stay awake during dinner. There is no menu, we are just brought serving dishes of what has been cooked for the evening, and everything was delicious: cream vegetable soup, teeny thin fresh asparagus (grown here in abundance), spinach with cream sauce, white rice, stir fried cabbage and carrots, and some kind of cooked chicken (a bone in every bite). We sleep very soundly, the sound of the barking packs of wild dogs is very faint across the rice paddies.

Auspicious Days, and Otherwise

The Kuensel, the weekly 10-page national newspaper, carries a column of astrological determinations for the week ahead. It appears that if I followed them, I wouldn't travel much, and heaven help me if someone dies in my house on tuesday night. But I could conduct frequent rituals. Here's the rundown:

Saturday 6/25: The elements of earth and fire combine to make the day favorable for daily offerings. Not favorable to conduct rituals, construct statues, consecrate new structures, preach, marry, build stores, give away wealth, wear new ornaments, and roof houses.

Sunday 6/26: The elements of water and water combine making it a good day to perform rituals, draw mandalas, roof and shift houses, wear new clothes, seek medical treatment, construct canals, and sow seeds and plant trees. Not a good day to saddle horses and mules and go on long journeys.

Monday 6/27: The element of earth and fire combine to make it a good day to conduct rituals. A bad day to contruct statues, consecrate new structures, become a monk, preach, wear ornaments and new clothes, marry, roof and shift houses, and traveling.

Tuesday 6/28: The elements of fire and water clash to make it a bad day to do anything other than make daily offerings.

Wednesday 6/29: the elements of water and wind combine to make it a favourable day to conduct rituals, draw mandala, enter new house, set up stores, discuss new things, and sow seeds. A bad day to construct statues, consecrate new structures, roof house, take the dead out of the house and take infants outdoors.

Thursday 6/30: The element of earth and water combines to make it the best day of the week. A very good day to conduct rituals, draw mandalas, wear ornaments and new clothes, shift house, construct oven, seek medical treatment, adopt domestic help and sow seeds. Not a good day to take out the dead, hoist prayer flags and sell jewelry.

Friday 7/1: The elements of earth and wind combine to make it a good day to conduct rituals and circumambulate chortens. Not favourable to consecrate new structures, join monk body, preach, marry, go on long journeys and conduct funeral rites.

Cloud Kingdom

We found the Druk Air counter in the Thai airport right next to the signs for Air Madagascar and Turkmenistan Air... that's the level of carrier we are talking about. Druk Air is the only airline to service Bhutan in or out. There is one airport (in Paro), and one airline (Druk Air). The northern border with Tibet is closed, and the only other way into Bhutan is over land from the Indian border town of Puntshoeling in the south of the country. The Druk Air flight makes one refueling stop on its route, in Rangoon, Myanmar; Dhakka, Bangladesh; or Calcutta, India, depending on the day. On the day we flew the scheduled stop on the 6:50 am flight (the day's only flight) was for Calcutta (listed as Kolkata), and about 3/4 of our flight were men from India who availed themselves of this service. I spoke to the South African white woman behind us in line, headed for her first trip backpacking in India; she was wearing loose Indian clothing and had a sparkly bindi applied to her forehead, and she told me she was flying Druk Air because it was the cheapest ticket into India from Thailand. The budget-minded passengers bound for India were nearly all carrying duty-free bags, bags wrapped in strapping tape, bulging luggage, etc. Our boys wanted to change into Bhutanese robes at the gate (called gho) so they could arrive in Paro in proper style, which caused great amusement among the Western-dressed Bhutanese men waiting for the flight.

From previous Druk Air flights we knew that the airline owned two airplanes and alternated them (or, as Don sometimes says, flew one and used the other one for parts). Thus we were delighted to see that Druk Air had expanded its operation and now owned a brand-new Airbus A319. The flight attendant told me they had been using it for about 7 months. The flight crew have lovely British-English accents, with an audible "t" in "fastened" during the seatbelt instructions. The airplane was sparkling clean inside, and we did not, as in previous times, have to stand on a scale with our luggage to make sure we met weight requirements just prior to boarding; this had been handled at the checkin counter. Even in a new plane, however, the flight was turbulent. The pilot would come on with a pleasant, polite sentence about how the plane would be entering a spot of turbulence, and we would be roller-coasted along for a while, the flight attendants grimly clutching the meal cart and continuing to serve food, and then it would be fine again. Turbulence makes me think of too many movies about planes going down... I don't like it. The kids say "whee;" they are too young or too adventurous to pick up on my well-disguised worry. I start that very un-Mormon practice of reciting words to keep calm... first I went through the names of the parts of the women's clothing in Dzongka, as it seemed as soothing as the mantra Om Mani Padme Om (Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus - does not flow as well in English, does it?)... Kira, Teygo, Wonju, Koma, Japtha, Kabney... then I tried the Lord's Prayer... then I tried the words to the hymn we sang in Bangkok on Sunday, which used to be called "When in the Wondrous Realms Above," which ends each line with "Thy will, O Lord, be done." Because, really, if it was the will of the Lord that the brand-new Airbus A319 should go down somewhere in Bangladeshi waters, with a Mormon family, some saffron-robed Buddhist monks, some Sikhs and an unspecified number of Hindus and Buddhists aboard, then so be it. But I also knew that many people were praying us to Bhutan, and that helped literally lift the wings, I think, and bring us through without any incident.

Our route took us north-west of Bangkok, into Burma, passing north of the capital Rangoon, then over the coast of Bangladesh, and into Indian airspace after only an hour and a half. Another half hour brings us down through the clouds into the green and palmy carpet of Calcutta, where we land at a grim-looking airport and the Indian passengers stand up and start unpacking the overhead compartments long before we have reached the gate, despite the polite and timid pleas from the Bhutanese cabin crew to please remain seated. After they nearly empty the plane of passengers, leaving only those of us continuing on to Bhutan, a bright red "Indian Oil" refueling truck drives up next to the wing and a team of what I imagine to be petrol engineers climb out and proceed to refuel the plane from an underground tank, while the pilot looks on and kicks the plane tires, and the Calcutta ground crew unloads the Calcutta baggage onto the Druk Air luggage carrier: a green tractor painted with the words "Druk Air," to which is hitched three livestock trailers to hold the bags.

The second leg of the flight is much shorter, a 50-minute (!) flight from Calcutta, though the turbulence is worse in places and my dire imaginings change from distressing water landings to fog-wrapped mountain crashes. But the sky as we climb fills with the most unusual-looking clouds. American children draw clouds, as I did, as scalloped blobs, sometimes with flattened bottoms. Bhutanese religious art (which is the only kind of art there is in Bhutan, really) depicts clouds as swirly, rounded stylized flowers in the air, and the clouds outside the window, sitting on the green mountains below, had that look to them. Clouds above, striations of clouds alongside, and these living entities with beautiful spherical protrusions below--we were creatures of the clouds. The approach into Paro is thus a mythical experience, like descending out of (or into??) heaven. You can't see what's below you until you break out of the low-lying clouds to see very steep hills on all sides, into which are carved flooded green rice terraces, with no flat land in sight at all. The Paro valley widens enough to accomodate an airstrip, but the mountains on all sides require the plane to come in low, so that it looks like the wings could touch mountain on both side, but it's just an illusion--then to make a dramatic banking turn and a stomach-dropping quick descent onto the runway. And then the sun appears out of nowhere and all is windy and bright as we come down the steps onto the tarmac in front of the stunningly beautiful traditional Bhutanese-style building that is the new and enlarged Paro airport. Our trip through the customs desk is uneventful, and we gather our luggage, declare nothing at customs, and change our leftover Thai baht into Bhutanese Ngultrum (about a 1-1 exchange from baht to ngultrum, while 43Nu is 1US dollar).

Where Muzak Goes to Die a Slow Painful Death

In the comedy, What's Up Doc, there is a running gag in the fictional San Fransisco Hotel Bristol that whenever the elevator doors open, pieces of Cole Porter songs float out, piano-muzak style, which lasts only until the doors close again. At times in our Bangkok Hotel, the Royal River, I started to feel like I was part of a similar running gag. They seemed to own one Muzak tape (I'm sure it was a tape, not a CD), for the benefit of their European/American clientele, which had been retired many years ago from faithful service in the U.S., with sweeping string arrangements of popular songs from the 1970s. We would be eating, say BBQ'd prawn, to the piped in sounds of "You Light Up My Life," or "How Deep is Your Love"... ordering mango juice to the tune of "Yesterday"... or waiting for the elevator to the theme from "Love Story." What was even more amusing what that the hotel employed a violinist for dinner entertainment, and he knew all the songs too, and played them when the tape went on break, so that we would not be without our beloved favorites from the Carpenters. I hope they got a good deal on the tape, since I'm sure it was happily offloaded by some company.


Other charming things seen in Bangkok... I am sure you have seen the widely circulated email list of foreign signs slightly mis-translated into English. Here are a couple I jotted in my notebook while we took in the sights in around the city:

--A fancy building on the banks of the Chao Phraya River had it sign translated as the Moral Uplifting for Benefiction Foundation. I'd love to see their annual report.

--At the Temple of the Golden Buddha in Chinatown, on a glass money collection box: "Please Donate For Help the Elephant."

--And in the shoe removal room of the Vinanmek Teak Mansion, advising us to report rude staff: "If a reception of officials are impolited or unimpressived, please give the suggestion by contact Mr. Somboon..."

The Princess of Prawn (Now with photo updated 6/29)

Well, we can't get our laptop to "hear" the wireless hotspot network that is reputed to live in the corner of the lobby where these two internet connected computers live. So I can still post text but not any of the tons of lovely digital photos we have taken so far. Those will have to come later. We are flying out of Bangkok this morning and will be leaving the hotel while it is still dark. Halle says she will miss it. I know everyone has had a terrific time here.

Saturday 6/25 I wrote about most of the day, and then after I logged off we went to dinner at the hotel's buffet. It was a bizarre combination of Western and Asian foods, served outdoors in the wilting heat. You have to wonder about the meat sitting out there, dontcha? Some of us had "Mongolian barbecue," that famous Thai speciality, obviously, where you choose your own meats and veggies and they stir fry it for you. They also had raw seafood sitting there and they would BBQ your choice on a large grill. Halle asked for a BBQ'd prawn, a gigantic thing almost like a small lobster, with head and antenna on. Go figure, I knew she liked shrimp but it seemed a bold choice for a five-year old. After she ripped apart and peeled the first one, she liked it so much she went back for seconds and then thirds. The highlight of the evening was that the buffet also had a tin cooler with well-frozen ice cream so we all had a scoop before a sprinkling of rain drove us inside.

Indoors there were two Thai weddings taking place in the hotel's two ballrooms. Each bride and groom seemed to have purchased the hotel's standard package: a huge 7-foot high heart made of roses, an ice sculpture, ballroom chairs swathed in white slipcovers, the cakes looked amazingly similar. We stood around watching photos be taken for a while. Halle said she wants to live here when she grows up.

Sunday 6/26 we got up a little earlier - Don's luggage had arrived in the night safely from its baggage snafu (not to China, in fact --of course!!-- it had sat in New York), so we dressed for church and assumed it started at nine. We got the doorman to write out the address in Thai so we could show it to a taxi driver, and we took a cab to the newer downtown part of the city and found the chapel on a quiet side street - luckily there was a sign at the corner, because the street was not labeled. Turns out that the reason we couldn't get hold of the branch president by phone was that he and the entire branch presidency were out of town, gone back to the states to visit family like many of the ex-pat families that make up the Bangkok English branch (so the poor High Priest Group Leader was conducting and in charge, and made it clear he wasn't going to accept tithing checks!) What was interesting about that branch was that it wasn't all Americans/Europeans working in Bangkok, but about half made up of Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese refugees who don't speak enough Thai to integrate into the Thai branches and so choose to attend the English-speaking branch. They hold a second sacrament meeting in Cambodian for the benefit of that group and then have combined third-hour meetings.

It was a fascinating setting in which to discuss the week's lesson, on signs of the second coming... the one that was on most people's mind there, not surprisingly, was that the gospel will be preached in all the world, and there was firsthand perspective there from people in diplomatic corps who have seen branches of the church begin to meet in countries where our missionaries are not currently permitted to preach or even travel, including Pakistan, Burma, communist Laos, and China. The overall feeling there was one of tremendous hope and optimism in establishing Zion as a place of refuge in every nation even though the folks who live here certainly are sensitized to the realities of the difficult and violent world we live in. Our kids were made very welcome in the Primary and the Primary president expressed regret we weren't moving there.

After church we took a taxi to the hotel where Don had stayed with Thompson and Forrest in 2002, a European hotel called the Swiss Lodge and we ate in their mostly-Western menu restaurant (specializing in fondue), then took the modern and swift Skytrain to the end of its line, the famed Mo Chit weekend market. Eight thousand venders, cheek by jowl, under rough corrugated roofs, and I don't know how many thousand people there - we held hands and plunged into the sea of humanity, peddlers, and wares. We bought some fabric and sarongs and flip flops and saw many amazing things for sale. Most of the family thought that the exotic pet section was the most interesting, with teeny street puppies and tree shrews... Don muttering as we passed the avian sellers "Keep away from the chickens, keep away from the chickens" (Asian bird flu, yikes)... but Thompson was apalled at the condition of the animals and wished he had money to free them all, especially the little chained-up squirrels. We waited out a fierce thunderstorm under the shelters and then grabbed a cab for the hotel.

Naps, more swimming, and then we found a dinner theater that had a Thai "traditional" (term used very loosely here) dance performance. Cheesy and touristy, no doubt, but the kids enjoyed it and the opportunity to see even a little of Thai folk performance - the tale with the Monkey King in full mask chasing the mermaid around the room was a favorite.

Monday 6/27 dawned very hot. We slept in, then took the public water shuttle down to the temple area and visited the Grand Palace complex with its two important Wats, Temple of the Emerald Buddha and Temple of the Reclining Buddha. These are just jaw-dropping in their immensity, complexity, beauty, and calm, while outside the gates touts try to convince you to go with them for "tours," inside the gates it is serenity and grandeur. It was tremendously hot, but inside the temples and eaved courtyards it was cool and relaxing. Jacob did some sketching, he wanted to figure out how to draw the stacked roofs with their upturned corners that are so distinctive here. We spent the afternoon at the Vinanmek teak mansion, a palace built by the king in the 1910s, an exquisite "Western-style" house executed without a single nail. Naps and swimming at the hotel, and then we went to a nearby cafe for Thai food and conversation.

Our read-aloud book here has been a simplified version of the memoirs of Anna Leonowens, the governess to the king in the 1860s whose life was made into the musical the King and I. Her original text was a favorite of mine as a kid, and although the simplified one isn't as detailed it is still fun to read about the very place where we are and to imagine it as she might have seen it.

Ok - that's enough for now, we will try to post once getting an internet account in Bhutan.