The sound of a siren dug its way into my work trance today. Actually, it didn’t take much. A siren is such a rare sound here. I think this was the first ever in my entire time in Bhutan. I ran to the window, trying to work out whether it was a police car \/ ambulance \/ fire engine or a car alarm or shop or something entirely new, but I saw nothing to give it away.<\/p>\n
Traffic noise is nothing new. The Bhutanese subscribe to the Indian school of ‘honk for any occasion’, but here it has meaning. The traffic isn’t so dense that the sound is lost amongst the horn jungle and people are absent minded enough to need it. Honking here is like the sound of bird calls at dawn. They say, ‘I’m here. Who else is around? Are you OK?’ I wish I could get into the habit. As I drive down the road – main street, highway, quiet mountain road – parked cars pull out in front of me with no warning. Why should they bother looking to see if anyone’s there? I would have honked if I had been.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, I have a hard time giving up my western school of ‘honk to tell someone how pissed off you are’ and I’d only hit the button if I was ready for a fight. Even worse, when others honk as they come up behind me on my bike, it puts me in the mood for a fight. Then I need to unclench my jaw and think of Bhudda.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The sound of a siren dug its way into my work trance today. Actually, it didn’t take much. A siren is such a rare sound here. I think this was the first ever in my entire time in Bhutan. I ran to the window, trying to work out whether it was a police car \/… Continue reading Siren<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1824,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions\/1824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}