28. november

Monday morning and no sunshine! Oh well, workday anyway ;-)

My male counterpart, Karma Dorji, came to me this morning with a mouth mask on his face and complained about having a bad cold. He looked sick, too. So he had to go home - no meeting today then. I hope he gets well fast - I need some sparring.

At lunch I went back to Khang to get a sandwich and I met Mr. Kaka and the sweet girl, whose name is Ms. Sonam. They are both spoiling me - serving me a big bottle of water every time they see me and nice tea (they know I like to take the water with me ;-)) Sometimes I am wondering if I am the only guest her? It happens that there are one or two other people in the restaurant but it certainly isn't very often! I am the only one there most of the time. Today I saw the doors of the vacant rooms in the hotel were open so I peeked to see how many there were. All the rooms on the 3.rd and 4.th floor are vacant - except from mine! I know the tourist season has ended but I still wonder if one guest, me, is enough to pay the salary for all these people?

Back to work after lunch I worked hard - as Carsten said to one of the meetings with the Ministry: "It is a lot to ask one person to do in 4 weeks - the Ministry is squeezing the lemon." And the lemon is me! Anyway, I am confident that I'll get the job done (always an optimist some would say ;-)) But I'll certainly do my best.

The lift at the hotel is still out of order - if I remember right it only worked for the first few days Lasse and I were here. I guess it is ok with the stairs now that I have got used to the thin air - and if we were to have an earthquake I will rather be on the stairs than in the lift! And they do have earthquakes in Bhutan sometimes. In September there was a big one - some say 6,2 others 7,2 on the Richter scale! People were so scared that they didn't dare to sleep inside their houses at night but drove around in their cars and slept in them as well. One person died and many lost their houses and are still living in tents. They say the government and the King are building new houses - because the people's happiness is so important here. That is wonderful I think - I hope they all get a house before the winter gets much colder.

I also had my dinner at the hotel today - again I was the only guest - and Mr. Kaka asked if I would like to watch the news while eating. I certainly would - I knew the Egyptian election was in progress and as my daughter is working in Egypt I would very much like to see that violence and fights and the like did not happen in Hurghada. It seemed ok :-)

I have a television in my room and sometimes I watch CNN or BBC and I've realized that they have a lot of channels here - as many or more than I have at home! I asked Mr. Kaka if they used subtitles or if they synchronize the movies into Dzongkha, the Bhutanese language? He said they use subtitles like we do and that many children watch Disney movies like The Lion King and learn a lot of English from it. I bet that is true :-)