Blessed Rainy Day

Pictured above: the torrential rains and lightning-filled storms of Blessed Rainy Day

The 23rd of September is the last day of monsoon season in Bhutan, and is known as Blessed Rainy Day. The night before, you're supposed to leave a bucket out and then take a bath in the morning with the night's rainwater. This ritual cleaning supposedly will wash your sins away. Due to Blessed Rainy Day being more like Blessed Picnic Day, the only rainwater bath I got on Thursday was when I scooped a thimble's worth of water out of the concave top of a mushroom and wetted my hair.

Jon and I went hiking to a nearby monastery. More pictures of the beautiful place I live in, aren't you jealous, blah blah blah.

Above picture by Jon, I think.

Most monasteries have solar panels since the power lines don't go to the tops of mountains.

Picture of the Thimphu valley. Picture by Jon.

A Celebration to Vishwakarma

So the Thimphu Tsechu was going on all at Tashichoddzong (Wikipedia has some wicked pics of the place) the whole weekend, but the real party was on the streets, where the machine workers of Bhutan were celebrating the Vishwakarma Puja. Vishwakarma is the seventh son of Brahma, and is a mechanical genius who even made several flying machines. In his honor, on Friday every construction site and machine shop took time off, built either an altar or a small temple to get down in, and partied like mad crazy. Hella Bollywood. Saturday morning everyone piled into the back of the umpteen construction trucks driving around Thimphu and just went around cheering and pumping their fists. One Christmas-tree like truck after another, just loads and loads of mostly Bengali men shouting uproariously at you.

You can read more about the Vishwakarma Puja here, here, or here.

The Hike to Cheri, Pt. 2

Some odd number of weekends ago, Jon and I wanted to get out of the city. So we decided to go to Tango and Cherri, two monasteries near enough to drive to but far enough out that we could ignore the lit, wired, developing, back-alley-borough-rat's-nest of a settlement to the south

My notes from that time in the wilderness are hastily scrawled, and my sweat bled out most of the ink, but I can make out some things:

"filming Ms. Bhutan competition, #14 cute, all look better in real life than on television"

So we didn't escape civilization at all. In fact, we didn't even escape people we know. While examining a rock which contains the Zhabdrung's riding yak's tongue (hidden there as a treasure), Jon and I met three individuals who turned out to be the Prime Minister's secretary (Jesus, this is a small country) and two teacher's who were friends of Daniel's. We find this later fact out when we walk into Cherri (at this point our camera ran out of battery and died, sorry) (past the cutest mountain goats/baby-deer-look-alikes you've ever seen. Again, sorry) and into a hospitality house set up by the monks and see Daniel. It turns out the entire teacher population of Ugyen Academy had come for a quick vacation at Cherri.

This actually turned out to be a gigantic stroke of luck. Besides seeing a friendly face, it turns out that one of the Ugyen Dzongkha teachers had been a monk at Cherri earlier in life and thus had an in there. We got the super-duper-special-not-for-white-people tour. First thing we got to do was we got to be in the lhakhang while the monks were meditating. Each monk was reading a different chant, but somehow they all came together at the end, and then began a crazy call-and-repeat session led by the head monk, a man with a voice like a gravel truck struck with fire on the day of Pentacost.

From there, we walked up three flights of stone stairs covered in tiny neon green fern-like plants, past an angry rooster to a secret temple marked "RESTRICTED AREA ACCESS TO BHUTANESE NOT IN FORMAL DRESS AND FOREIGNERS WITHOUT A LETTER OF PERMISSION FROM THE SPECIAL COUNSEL FORBIDDEN". We were then let into a pretty conventional-looking lhakhang, with one exception: over in the corner there was a permanent sign with the words "Man Meditating Do Not Disturb" pointing to a small room off to the side where from you could hear chanting and beating of a drum. According to Jon, and I have probably got this wrong, the man inside is a rinpoche and an incarnation of some Really Important Religious Figure. Anyway, the walls of the room did not go up to the ceiling, and through a window-like cut you could see a statue of the Zhabdrung wearing Moses's beard. See the above link for a description of Zhabdrung; those wikiers do a better job than I.

(Side note: See K1. Then see K2, K3, K4 and K5. Notice a difference? One of them has a beard. And is shoeless. For the life of me I cannot understand why these baller fashion trends have not continued or been revived.)

So, yeah, pretty cool. Afterwards, we walked past what according to another sign was the Zhabdrung's walking stick (an 80-foot cypress tree) and paused to wait for the others as the wind caught a line of prayer flags hung over the valley and lifted them slowly, majestically into the air. Jesus, this country.

Then we walked back and, as we were leaving the trail, past the filming of an episode of the Miss Bhutan competition. While trying to figure out how we were going to conquer the 12 km back to Thimphu with the half-hour of sunlight we had left in Cherri's improvised parking lot/end of the road, an SUV drove up to us and stopped.

"Do you need a ride into town?" a woman's voice inquired.

Why, yes, we did (the teachers were going back to Ugyen not through Thimphu), so we hopped inside and proceeded to have a wonderful conversation about golf and the moral imperative of letting your children have their own lives with none other than the wife of as well as the man called Brigadier General Tsencho Dorji (he insisted on us putting his full title into the phone when we put in his phone number), who was at Cherri in order to bring tea for the Miss Bhutan Competition competitors and support his daughter (Miss Bhutan contestant #8) and who, holy crap, was quite well acquainted with our proprietor, the son of Brigadier General Tsencho Dorji's old boss and mentor, Major General Lam Dorji.

This country is so tiny. So tiny.

Khuru

Despite being a peaceful people, the Bhutanese have quite dangerous games. For instance, khuru. Khuru means "darts." There are three important differences between khuru and other countries' version of darts:

1. It is played outside with giant darts. I.e., khuru is lawndarts, not pub darts.

2. People play it quite drunk. I.e., khuru is pub darts, not lawndarts.

3. People run around and taunt each other right in front of the target.

We only had one teacher get within a few inches of being impaled, so the recent khuru tournament at Pelkhil between the Bhutanese teachers and the non-Bhutanese teachers went quite smashingly. Here is an example of a traditional Bhutanese game which did not go so well:

http://www.kuenselonline.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=15848

For those of you who are too lazy to click on links, a quick highlight: a Bhutanese government official was recently shot during an archery match; the arrow went 7 inches into his brain. His doctor's description of the condition on arrival at the hospital was, "...He was feeling drowsy."

More pictures!

Here you see a monk wielding an instrument of war.

Here you see an elementary teacher waving around a sharp object.

Pictures by Madam Ashley and Sir Jon Feyer.

Shamu is Delicious

Mario up there is holding the most expensive mushroom in the entire world, known as the Matsutake mushroom everywhere but Bhutan, where it is called the Sangay Shamu mushroom ("Sangay" being another name for Buddha, "shamu" meaning mushroom). It costs about $7 (US) for a kg in Bhutan. That's about 10x cheaper than the cheapest stuff elsewhere, and 300x cheaper than the top-grade stuff from the Japanese heartland. In fact, the price disparity is so great that each year there are Japanese people who fly into Bhutan (paying the tourist tax, mind you) just to go mushroom shopping.

It is quite tasty. A bit spicy in a not-hot way on top of the usual umami and mushroom-ness of normal mushrooms. Is it worth the price of sending your child to community college? Only if you're the kind of person who thinks that the difference between a premium bottle of wine and your average bottle is worth $300.

Four recipes:

Fried Sangay Shamu

Chop your Sangay Shamu up into bits and add them to any fried dish you're making, such as french fries. Note: This process will destroy the unique flavor of Sangay Shamu. Further note: This will also taste bad.

Sangay Shamu with Peanut Sauce

Make peanut sauce. Then cut up your Sangay Shamu into thin slices and pour the peanut sauce on them.

Sangay Shamu Mu-shu

Make a mu-shu dish. Add strips of Sangay Shamu at some point.

Sangay Shamu Datshi

Boil Sangay Shamu, chilies, garlic paste, and some onions for about 15 minutes, then add cheese. Let simmer for about 5 minutes, then stir. Also works great as the base of the Ngawang Yeshey.

Royal Tea

This is how a king acts. He arrives on time, in a shiny black SUV. His posse has been here for hours already, preparing sound equipment, making mental maps of the hallways, disappearing into the tree line.

The king does not shake your hand or ask your name. The king is here for the children. They are all silent, heads turned down, meeker than on judgment day. Kings are not dismayed or surprised by this. They have seen this many times. A man scuttles up to him, cradling a microphone in a cloth. The king picks it up without a glance towards the man. Kings walk slowly, languorously. They talk slowly, extremely slowly.

When a king is done talking to the children outside, they file inside while he wanders over to the ex-pat teachers. A king will ask you if you are married, if you like his country. He uses the word, "la", which conveys respect. He will look you in the eye as long as you wish. Without intensity, only calm. I do not think he perceives this as a threat. I do not think people ever threaten him.

Kings only talk to you while they are waiting for their tea to arrive, and their tea arrives in golden cups on silver platters.

When kings leave, they first pause to take group pictures. You stick your tongue out and cross your eyes in half of them.