My Life as Forrest Gump

You remember the movie Forrest Gump starring Tom Hanks? It's about a dim-witted guy who has a knack for stumbling into the middle of historically siginificant moments and coming out ahead? Well, I feel that I'm going through a "Forrest Gump" period of my life. Just this August I was fortunate enough to have a front row seat to the Beijing Olympics. Today, I met the newly coronated King of Bhutan. It was in a stadium with tens of thousands of people in the crowd and dozens of foreign dignitaries present. That happened about five hours ago and I'm still stunned. I'll have to gather my thoughts before I can do justice to that moment with pen and paper. Right now, all I can say is, "Wow!"
In the meantime you can read
this Reuters story about your favorite dim-witted guy who has a knack for stumbling into the middle of historically significant moments.

Bhutan quick hits

I'm extremely jetlagged at this moment and will jot down a few notes. Please forgive any grammatical errors and typos.
-While stuck in a plane on the ground in Dhaka, Bangladesh, one of the flight attendants texted a friend to find out about the U.S. election. At that point, Obama was ahead.
-We turned on the T.V. in our hotel room to find out that Obama had won. It was a great to watch the euphoria erupting. This was one time I kind of wished I wasn't on vacation and at home. The election was a huge topic of conversation here in Bhutan as well.
-Stray dogs are a nuisance in town but the government has taken a very progressive approach to solving the problem. They have built a dog sanctuary where the strays are taken. There are employees and volunteers that feed the dogs and a vet that checks in on them.
-We tried to see the King today, but so did about 5% of the population of Bhutan. We were turned back as the hall where the King was receiving people was packed full. Some Euro tourists were rather ugly about not being able to see the King but even some government officials were turned away. There were simply too many people. We will see the King tomorrow at a public ceremony in the stadium here in town and will attempt to pay our respects to him and offer a scarf on the ninth.

From There to Here

You know those old black and white movies where a long journey is depicted by drawing lines on a map between major world cities as a proxy for the actual flights taken? That's how I felt getting to here. From San Francisco, we flew 14 hours to Hong Kong. We walked from one end of the HK airport to the other. We passed gates with destinations such as Addis Ababa, Milan, Port Morseby and Dubai. If you can find all of those cities on the map, then I tip my cap to you. From HK, we flew to Bangkok. The highlight of that leg was seeing myself on TV. Cathay Pacific has video entertainment on board and one of the programs featured highlights from the Beijing Olympics. During the clip of the USA v. Spain men's basketball gold medal game, I caught a glance of myself sitting on a bench taking pictures. What a surprise!
From Bangkok we flew to Paro, Bhutan. However, there was a quick layover that was not on our itinerary. We stopped in Dhaka. Where is Dhaka? I didn't know for sure either. Our approach to the landing strip did offer some clues. It was marshy, low-lying land. The little, two-story buildings were densely packed together. My guess? Bangladesh with India being a second choice. Sure enough it was Bangladesh. Had to confirm it with the flight attendant. I felt like such a typical, geography-illiterate American asking such a dumb question. For shame. At least there is the upside of saying I was once in Bangladesh for an hour. From Dhaka, we landed in Paro which has one of the most dangerous airport landing strips in the world. We had to dodge mountain sides and our final approach included a hard right turn at about 3,000 feet and a path that seemed to scrap pine trees with our wings. Since I'm writing this we obviously landed safely. Our car ride from Paro to Thimphu was about an hour long and the road was lined with school children waving flags to welcome the VIP visitors who were coming for the King's coronation. Thirty-four hours after leaving our apartment in San Francisco we finally unzipped our luggage.