Delay

I end up walking around, looking at trinket stores, stopping in at a weaving shop and chatting with the ladies before buying a small wallet from them. My client has suggested I wear the traditional Gho, and the result is that everyone does a double take when I walk by. It's a fairly functional garment, but I find it absolutely impossible to don alone. I'm told every time that I've done it all wrong, and then no matter where I am, public street or private room, have to take it off for reassembly. I finally started wearing shorts and a t shirt underneath just in case, and then discovered that's what everyone does. It wasn't in the instructions, people!

Just writing that gives me pause: sacred. Is anything really sacred anymore? I’m reminded of a moment in my youth, when I was admonished for mowing my aunt’s lawn in Harmelen, the Netherlands on a Sunday. It was a hand mower (no noise, hardly!), but mowing was forbidden on Sundays. Sundays were sacred! I could never quite figure out, however, if Sundays were literally considered sacred (my family was never very religious, my mother’s protestations notwithstanding…she married a Protestant after all), or if this was a form of community policing. I might disturb the neighbors. I remember the admonishment in any case as a real affront: I had in just a few years abroad fully absorbed both the work ethic and sense of freedom or perhaps entitlement demanded by life in the United States. It never even occurred to me that I myself, or at least my industriousness, might be an affront to the Sunday tranquility expected by the neighbors.

The peaks in Bhutan, in any case, are sacred. Climbing them would be an affront to…again the question: community norms, an actual religious belief, a practice born from experience that life stops at the treeline…? So many religious tenants taken on faith today apparently stemmed from the practical requirements of ancient life, it is easy to imagine a culture naming the peaks sacred in acknowledgment of the fact that they were deadly. Research for another day.

The plane ride is so unnervingly bumpy, they hand us our snacks as we disembark in Paro.

It's a 90 minute drive to Thimphu, and though we drove it on the first day in the country it looks and feels completely undiscovered. I don't recognize a thing and keep looking at a map to see if this is some other route, but there is no other route. Its possible the trip here from the US had put me in a hallucinatory state. Thimphu at least looks like a place I've been to before.

There aren't enough rooms in the hotel, so I get a room a few doors down from the main group. Its immediately clear that very few people wear a Gho here, so I put my regular clothes back on, take advantage of the free 20 minute chair massage offered by the hotel, and then get whisked off for dinner with one of the partners of the project that invited me here. At his home we drink way too much beer, the alcohol heavy "11000" type, chat about the project, munch on yak and chicken and asparagus and salad, top it off with ice cream (It's been weeks!), and then finally, hours after the ladies have retired, head back to the hotel.

...just pretending I don't need that windowsill to hold me up...