MAY 1st MY FAVOURITE PLACE: Chele La the highest road pass in Bhutan is certainly one of my favourite places in the kingdom but my truly happiest place is anywhere we are hanging prayer flags and that’s what we were doing on Saturday morning here
MAY 2nd CLOSE-UP: Today is Teachers’ Day in Bhutan and the irony of it being a public holiday for all except teachers who must compulsorily attend a celebratory gathering is not lost on me. However, most teachers are turned out in the finest national dress and formal boots wearing their medals for years of service proudly pinned to expensive silk ghos and tegos
MAY 3rd MUSIC: Usually it’s a student who beats the drum at the end of assembly so the students can march military style off the assembly grounds but today the Dzongkha Lopen did the honours
MAY 4th CITY LIGHTS: The Thimphu Dzong is one of the most impressive in the kingdom and it is right downtown. The way it is lit up at night makes it the most impressive of all the city lights in my opinion
MAY 5th LOVE: We have had a bit of a tough time recently and the love of these two has been what has brought me back to myself and made me smile and laugh again. Thank you both for the joy you bring into our lives. An archive shot taken when we were leaving Bhutan in 2017
MAY 6th MORNING ROUTINE: Every weekday morning and every other morning we are at school, as we were last Saturday and Sunday, we circumambulate the chorten in the park adjacent to our school
MAY 7th FRIENDSHIP: This is obviously an archive shot and a photo of a photo but one of these friendships has endured for one-year shy of fifty years and the other is not much less
MAY 8th BUSY STREET: The traffic circle often referred to as just traffic in Thimphu is the busiest intersection on the busiest street in the country but it still doesn’t have traffic lights. It’s is manned by liveried traffic police by popular demand. Traffic lights were found to be too impersonal by the local population when they tried to introduce them
May 9th FRAMED: This portrait of HM the King of Bhutan hangs near the entrance to our school and students must bow to it as they enter the school campus. Each classroom also has a framed photograph of the entire royal family. The monarch is beloved by all Bhutanese and many others who know of his benevolence
MAY 10th CLOCK: The centre piece of Clock Tower Square, which is the public amphitheatre and gathering point in Thimphu city. It’s always the correct time twice a day every day
MAY 11th CUPS: Being in temporary residence this is the sum total of all the cups we have. The stainless-steel mug come travelling coffee maker, which we use for a drip filter coffee when we are on the road and which we have had for over 30 years, my special keep cup which gets daily use at school and there are actually three of the yellow ones which came with the apartment we are living in
MAY 12th OPEN DOOR: Managed to capture this delightful little monk coming through the open door at Pangri Zampa Monastery this morning. He even came up and asked me ‘give me one photo’- meaning take his photo and grinned even wider when he saw himself in my phone
*This one was selected for the fab Four on Facebook taken on the day and I think it is my favourite photo of this stint back in Bhutan
MAY 13th COLOURFUL UMBRELLA: One of the 8 auspicious symbols of Buddhism - just as an umbrella protects from the sun or rain this symbol is thought to protect people from suffering
MAY 14th EYES: The eyes of a tiger in a painted wall mural at the entrance to the main hall of the Pangri Zampa Monastery and School of Astrology, where we visited on Sunday morning
MAY 15th WEATHERED: Another of the eight auspicious symbols of Buddhism - the victory banner. This one is in a very weathered state and we walk past it every morning on our way to school, but I really do like the aesthetic
MAY 16th STREET SIGN: We are now so busy in this final few weeks at school that this again is an archive shot taken in Bhutan when we returned to the capital in 2011. We were disappointed to see that it no longer exists when we visited there again in April, as we wanted to replicate this shot
MAY 17th MIDDAY: At midday today, I was on a field trip with class five and six. We visited the Folk Heritage Museum and engaged in many traditional practices and sports
MAY 18th A SHOPFRONT: On the main street in Thimphu there are still a couple of these old-style hole-in-the-wall shops with the wooden steps embedded in the wall so that small children can climb up and see what is for sale. They most often sell sweets and snacks and pan and I really love them and the gentle, smiling shop owners who run them
MAY 19th EVERYDAY OBJECT: In Bhutan a butter lamp is certainly an everyday object and we see hundreds of them in many places all over Thimphu
MAY 20th IN MY BACKYARD: We live in an apartment and don’t have a backyard but I spend so much time at school that it sometimes feels like I live there. This was in the ‘school’s backyard’ today. There will be an international symposium held in the compound and these tents were going up at a rate of knots
MAY 21st DEPTH OF FIELD: My new Tibetan singing bowl featured in a narrow depth of field with the view from our apartment as the backdrop
MAY 22nd LINES: The view from our bedroom window with the lines of concrete, bamboo and formwork of the construction next to us framed in the mirror finish of the building opposite
MAY 23rd NOSTALGIA: Today is a public holiday and we took ourselves to Semtokha Dzong and hiked back to Thimphu, then decided to treat ourselves to a Thali lunch at a place we thought might be owned by parent of a child Ian taught in class 4 in 2017. Sure enough, it was and the mum called his former student now studying in class 10 for a virtual catch up and a chat
MAY 24th FURRY FRIEND: I got up close and personal with this yak a couple of weeks ago. Yak yak yakkity yak
MAY 25th GEOMETRIC SHAPES: This type of mandala is made up entirely of geometric shapes and I believe they represent the infinity of the universe and time. I could be wrong so please correct me if that is the case. This one was on the wall of the Semtokha Dzong, which we visited on the public holiday for Parivirvana on Thursday this week
MAY 26th SERENITY: Whilst many find the sounds cacophonous, I think they take me to a pensive contemplative place that feels like serenity …. We went to this monastery this morning inspired by this prompt and it made my day.
a short clip for the bigger picture
MAY 27th STILL LIFE: of an orange-loving school teacher
MAY 28th STREET CORNER: Not a very salubrious one given it’s a remand centre but a very typical one in terms of Thimphu ambience
MAY 29th PINK AND GREEN: The pink and green of the flowerbeds on our school campus
MAY 30th PEOPLE WATCHING: we are on a field trip at the Royal Takin Preserve and I have been little people watching all afternoon.
A takin- Bhutan’s national animal
MAY 31st WOOD: This tepee was part of the playground at the Royal Takin Preserve when we took classes 4,5 and 6 there yesterday and a lot of the younger children enjoyed playing in it and around it
THE PROMPTS
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