Word: thimphu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Party), which is seen as the more royalist of the two--comes as Bhutan grapples with its shifting place in the world. Squeezed between giants China and India, it has slowly opened up over the past few decades. There still may not be a single stoplight in the capital, Thimphu, but there are Internet cafés. Bhutan's royal leaders are prodding their tiny nation into the rushing stream of globalization. "The concerns of the nation are the same--everyone is aware of them," says Dorji Namgay, an engineer, during a visit to his home by Lyonpo Ugyen Tshering, then...
...Bhutan, by contrast, had no television then, no daily newspapers, only medieval buildings. Its capital, Thimphu, basked in a stainless quiet in which everyone wore traditional, medieval clothing (as they still do), and fewer tourists arrived in a year than pile into Disneyland in an hour. The young King Jigme Singye Wangchuk was pursuing a policy of "Gross National Happiness" which said that peace was as important as plenty, and immaterial needs were at least as important as material. There is a point of diminishing returns in development, he was suggesting (in terms that more and more people now heed...
...first law of modern life is that everything is as impermanent as an image on a screen; the only form of continuity (the Buddhist monks in Thimphu or Kathmandu might have told us) is change. Suddenly, Nepal, haunted by violent Maoist insurgents on the one hand and an autocratic King on the other, is the country that is difficult for tourists to enjoy, its streets silent after dark, its character less free and easy than stuck and stricken. As for Bhutan, its citizens can now take in Sex and the City on TV, watch foreigners check into Aman luxury hotels...
...full kira when it occurs to me that hey, it’s rather breezy back there. Sure enough, I reach my hand around and I feel bare thigh. Apparently I pulled too much material to make the pleat in front, because I am mooning the good people of Thimphu. In a panic, I grab frantically for the edge of my kira—but what only this morning was a cloth with huge, unmanageable edges, is now miraculously devoid of any edge. I cling with sweaty fingers to a random hunk of cloth, trying to yank enough...
...through alpine valleys, we passed clusters of wooden houses decorated with paintings of flowers, the inevitable dragons and, on either side of the door, huge penises. The phalluses, Tempa, our guide, explained, are meant to startle: families paint them to distract any evil spirits thinking of entering. We reached Thimphu in the late afternoon. Home to just 40,000 people, the capital scarcely qualifies as a city. Brightly painted facades and narrow lanes stretching up to the wooded slopes of giant mountains reinforce the feeling of a medieval mountain village. King Wangchuck rules his people from the imposing Traashi Chhoe...