27. november

Sunday - nice and quiet. I had breakfast in my room, worked for an hour or two before I decided to go and see the big Buddha today. I tried to phone Carsten to ask if he wanted to go but found out that my prepaid phone card had expired - they are only valid for 2 weeks apparently! So before going anywhere I asked the guy in the reception where I could charge my cell phone and he said just up the road. I found the place easily (it was the only shop in the street), bought 4 cards of 6,5 kr. (a little less than 1 Euro) each and charged my phone with 2 of them. Great - back in business!
Then I found a cab and agreed on a price: 40 kr. (5,5 Euro) to go up there, wait for me to take a look around and take some pictures and then take me back to Thimphu again. The big Buddha statue also called the Buddha viewpoint is 6 km (3,7 miles) from Thimphu - up the mountain and there is a fantastic view of the whole Thimphu valley from up there. It amazed me to see how long Thimphu really is! I have only seen a very small part of it! The statue itself is still under construction and because there was a lot of wind today it was very dusty up there. My boots got this red/brown colour from the dust instead of their normal black colour! They say the statue is 50 m (164 feet) high and when it is finished there will be 3 temples up there. I think it will be very nice. The cute little driver - I was a head taller than him - giggled all the way so I guess the price was too high, even though it felt cheap to me. Hopefully he will have a nice day with his family with the money :-)

Coming back to Thimphu I went to see if the 8Eleven sold beers - yes, local beers. One of my colleagues is a beer enthusiast and would like to taste some local beers ;-) I hope I will have room for some in my suitcase on the way home! I found one of the beers he had mentioned - lucky! I also bought some safety pins - I am going to use them tomorrow so my kira won't fall off! It has been a while since I had some nice licorice or anything sweet for that matter so I looked around and found some seeds with chocolate on top - interesting! I also bought some peanuts with sesame. When I came home I couldn't wait to taste the little seed dudes with chocolate - what a downturn. The "chocolate" wasn't chocolate at all - just part of the seed. So still no sweets! Wow, I am getting very healthy here ;-)

After my trip I decided to take it easy for the rest of the day, which I spent reading my Ken Follet book - it is such a good book and hard to put away, I still had 100 pages out of the 450 to go. I thought I might as well finish it so I could start thinking about other things again! So I did.