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Saturday, November 26, 2011

Doors

See the door?
Not so unusual here in Bhutan. The latch, I mean.
All the doors in our old apartment were like that. Yes, that includes the inside ones too. You could lock them from either side. Well, some of the bolts did not quite line up, so it took a bit of pushing and shoving.
People could also lock you inside your house. That happens sometimes.
Something like that happened to Elaine and Terence when they were in their hotel room in Thimphu. That was a slightly different problem. That door had a handle. It fell off while they were inside. They called up room service. They came up promptly to the room to help, closing the door behind them. Then they had to call out to passers-by below to get someone to come up and let them out.
Our new apartment has Yale locks with handles on all the doors. The kind that you can lock by pushing a button. Just pull the door behind you, and it is locked tight. We had these in the Family Mansion. Not on all the doors though ... just the outside doors, and the toilets. There was a spare key somewhere on the back porch for when we locked ourselves out of the house by mistake. Now, I cannot remember where exactly. I could not remember 30 years ago either, but managed to locate it in the end. The toilet door did not have a key. When it got locked with nobody inside, I had to climb through the window. Dad could remove a couple of the shutters and that gave me enough space to squeeze through. I was a tad smaller then. Good at climbing trees.

Here, all the doors have keys. The keys are in constant use because that wee knob gets pushed accidentally, then the door is closed, locking it. The Bhutanese members of my family are still not used to the door handles.
"Stop slamming the door," Mum always used to call out.
I did not know why. I was not aware of what I was doing.
Now I am. If you pull the doors sharply, you don't have to turn the door nob.
It makes a lot of noise though.

If only they could turn the door knob.But I should not complain. They look after me very well.


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