Getting Started in Samtse

Today was my first weekday in Samtse and I tried to get started. In the morning, we had a meeting with the folks that are involved in distance education. David and his wife arrived yesterday night in Samtse and they joined us for the meeting. I'm pretty excited to get started and interact with the people around here. Currently, I'm still forgetting all the names - just a lot of stuff is going on. I have the feeling that there is a pretty good team for distance education established down here in Samtse. I'll come back to that later on - as soon as I have the big picture.

After the meeting, we (David, David's wife - whose name I haven't yet gotten..., Namgay, and another guy from NIE (again whose name I wasn't yet able to remember...)) went to shop. Shopping in Switzerland or the US is pretty boring; you see from the beginning what is available. Shopping in India (we crossed the border to shop) is a real adventure. There is no way of knowing what will be available. It's a matter of hours to find the thing that you actually are looking for. I have no idea how I should by stuff without the help of folks from NIE Samtse. So let me give you an example: This morning, I had already a ton of ants in my kitchen. All over the bread, the rice, the pasta - just every possible place. It's kind of obvious because I didn't have real closed containers for the food - only plastic bags. So one thing that I had to get today was closed containers. Not an easy thing. In the end I ended up with two containers that were originally planned to store food - and with about four containers that contained sweets in their former life. But hey, it works out!
I'm getting hungry and it's getting dark; so I'll be back during the next days. And by the way: Meanwhile, I have made the ants leave...