I'm still in Phuentsholing. I've been here now for 4 days. I came for 1 day, to work on the school magazine with KMT, a design company. The first day was beset by technological issues.
The designer was working on InDesign by Adobe. I was creating pdf pages for him in Microsoft Word. The computer I was given had Word 2003. His computer had Word 2007. My laptop has got Open Office on it (a big mistake not putting Bill Gates on my computer). The result was bedlam. Adobe and Microsoft aren't the best of friends, but putting 2007, 2003 and Open Office in the same room is like running a kindergarten with too much synthetic orange juice. Somebody should have stern words with Bill Gates, and Microsoft Word should really not be quite as useless as it continues to be. The simple act of moving things around on the page should work by now, surely.
Anyway, it's given me the unusual experience of working 9-5 in an air-conditioned windowless room on the edge of India and strolling to and fro work like any other commuter, except for the fact that I am clearly the only white man in this town.
When I first came to Phuentsholing/Jaigaon, I really felt like I stuck out and people were paying me a lot of attention. How much of this was caused by or imagined by me. Yes, I'm still looked at, but I don't feel it much at all any more. A friend of mine once asked me if I thought Easton, Bristol was a racist area. Errr, no - it's a place where different nations mingle quite happily. But you see, he carried a sort of cultural racist sensitivity, an inherent sense of difference, perhaps due to his out-in-the-stix Ozzy upbringing. I encountered a lot of this when I was in Australia, some of it pretty in your face stuff, compounded by an election that saw the victorious party making promises about keeping out refugees. This guy found it particularly difficult to walk back from the train station in his suit because everybody stared at him threateningly, he said. In truth I'd say they were either not staring at him at all, or they were looking at something other than the colour of skin - the colour of his character, you might say. They say people smell fear. I think they pick up on a projection of difference. Now I stroll happily through Phuentsholing and Jaigaon with a sense of belonging, and that is a good thing.
But I do wish I'd left this place by now. Time is ticking on my life in Pakshikha and I've got people there to spend time with, people I have affection for and have grown close to, people I will miss dearly, so being in this place of exciting craziness no longer holds the same allure. I thought I'd be out yesterday, but the working day stretched on til 6 again, and my lift home - a friend from Gedu - had some business to attend to this morning, so it was decided we'd stay another night. We passed the evening in the pleasant company of his soon to be ex-wife - the divorce is the business to attend to. It was a farewell meal, and surprisingly amicable, considering there's another ex-wife, and a current wife, and a current girlfriend. Does this sound bonkers? It probably should. They all know each other too. Imagine your ex-wife telephoning your current wife to tell her about your new girlfriend! Holy moly roly poly.
But things are a little different here. In the East it's not unusual to find women with multiple husbands, and I've met many men with children from women other than who they are with. It's wise to hold off on kneejerk judgements about things like this, but I dunno, people still seem to get hurt even if they are generally far more pragmatic about life here. Because there aren't many major urban areas in Bhutan and the schools are all spread out on isolated hillsides, teachers have particular difficulty staying with their spouses, especially if both of them are teachers. Families become separated fairly commonly. I have one friend who teaches in Pakshikha. His wife is in Trongsa training to be a teacher. Their kid is in Thimphu with his grandma. This is life and, even though the ministry does its best to keep people together, there isn't a great deal that can be done about it.
"Hello Sweden" - I believe that was the title of this post. So, I was having a gander at my 'stats' and was surprised to see the following results from this week:
It appears I am almost 3 times more popular in Sweden than I am in the UK. I've never been to Sweden, though I hear it is a lovely place.So...
Hello Sweden!!!
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