LIVING IN THIMPHU

Judy and I have been living in Thimphu for almost 2 weeks now, in the two bedroom flat for the nurse anesthetist HVO program. The kilometer + walk to the hospital in the morning is all downhill and the reverse in the afternoon. The orthopaedic guesthouse is on the hospital grounds but suffers from the lingering presence of an offensive dead rat smell. Also being large and cavernous, it is not heatable with the available appliances. Days are sunny and pleasant, needing only a shirt and a fleece, but the nights are well below freezing and space heaters make no dent in the heavy cold.

Changangkha neighborhood
Though Thimphu is a small town with only a couple of major streets, it has taken us this long to get to know where we are and how to describe it to others. We have a map, but none of the locals, including the cab drivers, know the names of the streets. We have learned to give the general neighborhood, Changangkha, the name of an old fortress temple and monastic school, Changangkha Lhakhang, perched on the heights above us. But the best directive we have is DHL. For some reason everyone knows where the DHL office is located. Rounding the corner form the DHL office, our next coordinate is the dripping faucet that identifies our gate from the others. Not exactly a GPS reading, but it seems to do.

Streets are known by obscure names. Colloquially known "Swimming pool Road" is marked as Doebum Lam on the map. Doebum has nothing to do with swimming pools. Directions are given as up or down. The cardinal points of the compass mean little, since nothing lies in a straight line. Even the ups and downs curve most surprisingly.

Shop Number 7
Number addresses mean nothing. Business establishments are in "buildings". And somehow one absorbs these names in an organic manner. Names are another quirk. We were told about a nearby grocery, referred to by everyone as Shop Number 7. Easy as chips--a left and a right, up and up--can't miss it. After a bit of confusion, a helpful woman pointed it out: M/S Lhatshog General Shop and Imports. Yes, the same as Shop Number 7, but the number is nowhere written. The story: Shop Number 7 used to be down in the town where there was some attempt at order with numbering the establishments. When it moved up to Changangkha neighborhood, everyone still called it by the old name. No one knows the present one; I can't even pronounce it. Advantages of shopping at Shop Number 7 is that the walk home is all downhill and one can pick wild marijuana along the road.

Garbage pick upGarbage pick up is another unique cultural experience. A collection truck comes by Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings, honking its approach between 06:45-08:30. The distinctive horn blasts from the street, followed by the sound of doors opening and slamming, and slipped feet slapping down the stairs announce garbage pick-up. It is almost a community affair with neighbors meeting in the street in various forms of dressing. This seems to be the normal operating procedure throughout the city's neighborhoods.

Thimphu's DogDescriptions of Asian cities are incomplete without some mention of the dogs. Those in Thimpu, and throughout Bhutan, form a separate layer of society that shares the same space with humans, but functions on a completely other plane. They are a constant presence but the Bhutanese treat them as an unseen and unacknowledged underclass that is allowed to go about its business without interference. I walk to work when the few people on the streets and foot paths are cleaners and manual laborers, maybe a few school children, and of course the dogs. Curled up still sleeping in the streets or in hollows in the bush or in protected crevices in broken concrete or already about their business, they are the most obvious denizens of the city. Even in packs they are unthreatening and the only abuse they receive from humans is neglect. Unlike Nepal, I've not seen any physically mistreated. As a whole they don't look particularly disreputable, but many are skinny and the lactating females look particularly forlorn. A patch of sun in a monastery courtyard, the hospital driveway, or the middle of the road is bound to be decorated by a curled canine catching a few Zs so he can join his fellows for the regular nighttime chorus.

The Eviction.
At 14:30 today, 14 Dec, we found out that the owners of the flat near DHL have asked us to be removed so that a relative can stay here. The woman at the hospital is most upset at this abrupt change and we are sad to leave our cozy flat to move into the cold, cavernous ortho guesthouse. Neither of us is convinced the rat smell is completely taken care of and the whole eviction seems rather strange. We could understand if the neighbors had complained about the growing mountain of Druk 11000 beer bottles in a cartoon outside our door, but that doesn't seem to be the case. We will be too far from Shop Number 7 to make use of its downhill trip home, the garbage truck will no longer be a thrice weekly Olympic rush to the street, and we will no longer feel some affinity with DHL. The dogs will remain a constant to remind us that we are still living in Thimphu.