Haute Cuisine
Sit on a plane long enough, this starts to look great!The flight to Los Angeles dips down out of a liquid blue sky into that gross sepia yellow Summer fog perennially smothering the California coast,...
View ArticleDeath by Itinerary
Osaka is leaden grey and so is the Fancy airport terminal.this flight is just crazy longMercifully, there’s free wifi and a set of plugs to recharge the laptop and the phone. Hideously, my layover is 6...
View ArticleSleep, Eat, Leave
On the plane to Bangkok finally, I watch a movie and read my book and treat myself to a glass of wine until Thailand reaches out with mysterious patterns of lighting on the land: straight lines and...
View ArticleThe Queen Mother and monks in passing
arrival in ParoSome monks in orange prison garb wander by. Wait, that’s not right. (Their robes are actually a gorgeous orange). We’ve been sitting in the airport for a while now, waiting for the plane...
View ArticleEverest?
It’s a few hours to Kolkata, which I’m determined to spell that way forever in deference to the Bengali. Expecting dense smears of slum, I see only palm trees and puddles and diffuse development, a...
View ArticleMothers, Fathers
Punakha is famed for its Dzong or castle. It is massive and beautiful, strategically located at the union of the Mother and Father rivers, accessed from a cantilevered bridge over the Mother. Wide...
View ArticleYakkity Yak
Hotel Vara, Lobesa: view from my balconyThe bus leaves early, the drive to Trongsa easily 8 hours on a single lane highway handling two way traffic. Rising slowly through deciduous forests along a...
View ArticleConstruction
Today we’re visiting construction sites: restoration projects, historical expansion projects, new construction, whatever we can find and barge in on.We start at another monastery, this one expanding...
View ArticleDelay
We are scheduled to fly back across the country to Paro, but the 10am plane is said to have diverted to Kathmandu. Since this is in the opposite direction from that flight's origin in Paro, we assume...
View ArticleEast and West
Invited to see a new hotel opening soon as part of a school for hotel management, I'm driven to a site dominated by a huge stone building punctured by irregular windows and somewhat encumbered by huge...
View ArticleBuddha Day
We spend the next day in Trongsa Castle. Its Buddha’s birthday, so merits are worth a million times their usual value. Kindness pays today! I’m helping little old ladies up stairs, I’m handing out bits...
View ArticleDrinking it all in
We’re up at 4:30 am at my insistence that we experience the site at dawn. The valley is such that your first experience of the sun in the morning is not facing east but facing west, the light...
View ArticleMusic
Inspiring musical performances at 4:05am, 4:45am and 5:30am from the dog in the alley outside my hotel room window, with a dramatic chorus of his compatriots shortly thereafter, offer yet another...
View ArticleAlmost
Driven to Paro from Thimphu to catch my plane to Bangkok, I couldn't help falling asleep on the hour long trip. Not very good company for the driver. I managed to compress all of my augmented...
View ArticleSomeone else
Forgot about the time change last night: it was 7pm before I got outside and I wouldn't have gotten to the awesome coffee downtown in time to enjoy it. Instead, I wandered around the neighborhood and...
View ArticleGoodness
Got up at 5 this morning, no jet lag, on fire about this project. I grabbed my first latte in 2 weeks (don't tell me I don't suffer for my craft), and then a few tentative sketches in my notebook from...
View ArticleTwo heads not better than one
Above and to the east of our site lies the Tharpaling Monastery that gives our company in part it’s name. We spend the day there, the event a bit of a pilgrimage for the rest of the group.The hour...
View ArticlePast Present Future
We start the day at the National Library, which turned out to be way more interesting than expected. As a repository of its past I expected the usual and very stuffy vault of books, but we found...
View ArticleGross National Happiness
On the way to Trongsa, we stopped in at a primary school in a small town along the way. Despite the admonishment to dress appropriately, we invited ourselves in (politely!) for a visit.The buildings...
View ArticleLokk it's Sunday-He's back again
3:34 PM 8/2/2015It's sunday..Time goes by way too fast.i think back to last summer and it seems like it was only a mere few months ago..People might say that one's memory gets like that as they get...
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