Asia Trip 2011 - part 3 - Bhutan still

Wednesday
On the schedule for the meeting they had yoga at 6:30 every morning, I figured I’d give it a try so I got up early and went there, plus I was jetlagged so I was wide awake at 5. It was really cool, and apparently I did really well, even for a non first timer. That day there was a trip to Punakha on the schedule it’s a town about 2 hours from Thimphu, where we were. The other road was really good, right? well this one was the opposite, it was really curvy (not a lot you can do there) but also really bumpy, so it was pretty annoying it was hard to sleep and relax but oh well.

Out first stop was the 108 stupa monument that we heard about the day before. It was huge and really cool; imagine all those people working hard to build something that big, all that hope and all those good intentions together in the same place.

Across the street was a Temple, we went up some stairs and then were told to take our shoes off and make sure not to take any pictures inside. I was about to enter my first Buddhist temple. There were 3 giant statues, the one in the center was of Buddha, as it was in every temple we visited in Bhutan, two other giant statues to its left and right, the silent was impeccable, everyone was really nice and respectful, and there were 2 or 3 priests there sitting welcoming us all. Every wall was covered with beautiful and colorful paintings done by hand with incredible detail. Some of the people sat down and meditated, and I decided it would be fun to try, it was very cool.
Unfortunately no pictures were allowed inside any of the temples in Bhutan, I did take pictures of Buddhist temples in other countries but they were not in the same style.

During the ride one of our guides was telling us about one of his “side” projects that he works at with the government, they have started a series of self sustainable farms. That’s right, tour guide by day, leader of sustainable development by night, that seemed to be a general trends though, it seemed that all of our tour guides were really well educated people who were working on really interesting things for the development of the country with the government but somehow it was still profitable and interesting for them to work as tour guides.

We finally arrived at Punakha where we ate lunch, it was really good (though, again, really spicy) but the area was really hot, and all we had were fans, no A/C, but oh well. After eating and hanging out for a while we went to the Dzong. Many years ago, Zhabdrung, who was the person who brought Buddhism to Bhutan, laid down to spend the night right next to where 2 rivers meet. He had a dream that night about a place where a lot of people would live very happily. The next day he described the dream to the people he led and decided to build a Dzong, it’s a mixture of a fort, town, and a temple. Supposedly this was built exactly as he had dreamt it with no blueprints or planning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punakha_Dzong#History

It was really cool, the amount of work the put into details is incredible, ever single wall is hand painted and the paintings themselves are amazing. This Dzong is one of the most important ones in Bhutan; they keep their most sacred relics there, including the world’s tiniest statue of Buddha, which is carved from a vertebrae of Zhabdrung. All the relics are housed in a building where few people are allowed, this is also where the king has a second, private crowning ceremony.

It was really impressive and different. I felt really lucky and honored to be able to visit a place like that.

We drove back, got home exhausted and went to bed.

Thursday
This was the day that my dad was going to give his presentation, but there were presentations all day

I went to yoga again in the morning, but this time my mom and sister decided to join us too, which was awesome, although Maria almost fell asleep during the relaxation we did at the end. We went to the Chorten Memorial; as you walk in you see a little area to the left where they have these spinning bells the idea is that inside they have prayers to the god of love and compassion written and by spinning it a lot of times while you pray you cleanse yourself of your sins and accumulate blessings for you and your loved ones. The memorial itself works the same way excepts you’re the one who spins; the main building is in the center of the memorial and it houses statues of Buddha and other deities, all day you’ll see people walking around the main building praying with the same objectives, we walked around 3 times (make sure it’s clockwise while looked at from above, or it will have the opposite effect), while our guide told us about the place. Most of the people you see there are old people who don’t work anymore so they spend all day praying, but he said that around 6 am you’ll see a lot of young people who work in he city go there and walk around for a while before they start their day.

Maria Jose noticed there were 4 statues of white lions so we asked our guide about them. Apparently someone really important felt there was an evil spirit threatening him at some point, so he decided to call guru Rimpoche (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padmasambhava) and ask for his help. The spirit knew of guru Rimpoche’s power so he hid in the forest, but guru Rimpoche was not going to let that happen. They planned a big festival in the town, knowing the spirit would not be able to resist and show up. Sure enough, the spirit showed up in the form of a white lion so as not to be recognized, Guru Rimpoche found out it was him and with the help of the people subdued him and turned him into a protective deity of the region. Now the white lion is a very popular deity in the region around Thimphu, you see statues and paintings of him in houses and temples.

They wanted to take us to the art school, but it was closed because classes were already over, so we went to the little shop they have setup to sell their products which was really cool.

Our next destination was the Termalinca hotel, where we were going to see my dad’s presentation and also he wanted Maria Jose and I to say a few words. On the way there I asked our guide about Buddha, what his story was and why he was so important. My memory fails me but I’ll write what I remember and hopefully won’t offend anyone or look too much like a fool. He was born out of an armpit, which indicated from the beginning that he was special, he was a prince, and once, while hunting he pierced several trees with one arrow, another event in his life that indicated his uniqueness. As a king he was very caring of his people and visited them a lot. He saw a lot of suffering and started thinking about how to fix that. He mediated a lot…and after many years, achieved enlightenment. In itself enlightenment is a mysterious thing, but as a Buddhist achieving it is your ultimate goal and there are several paths that you must explore in a quest for personal and spiritual improvement.

We arrived at the hotel, and listened to a talk about cruelty-free silk, a few highlights were scaring elephants of their workplaces by using bees initially (in south Africa, I think) and then just by using the sound they make when attacking; getting spiders in a state of sleepy happiness using milk and something else, to make them produce very regular and high quality silk, and genetically modified silkworms. The person showing the project had asked the day before at another presentation what Buddhist philosophy said about genetically modified organisms, the person in charge gave a really interesting answer along these lines;
“I don’t know officially, and I have no authority to tell you what the official position is, but I’ll happily tell you how I, as a Buddhist feel about it. In this case where the means is not clearly objectionable, it depends on your goals and your state of mind, are you doing it to become rich and satisfy yourself? are you doing it to provide more and better products at a better price for more people and make their lives better?”
I thought that was perfect.

My dad was next and he gave his talk which went great, then he called Maria and me on stage so we could do our thing; everyone was really happy to see a family involved in something like this (he mentioned my mom and she stood up too) most of them told us at some point that they had wished they could take their families with them to the event but they thought it was too crazy, so they were happy to see that it could be done. After doing our little number a lady approached me, Damchae, she told me that she was really happy to have seen me up there, that she had a son who was a Buddhist monk and who had just returned from 3 years of meditation in the mountains, he is about my age, and she would love to arrange a time for us to sit down, have some coffee and just talk about stuff. AWESOME!
We scheduled it for that evening, ate lunch and then continued our tour around Thimphu. We went downtown, walked and saw the little shops, we saw a lot of people wearing the Gho’s which was cool, and we experienced a little bit of what everyday life in Bhutan is.

We started going towards the big Buddha statue (169 ft. tall), but found out it was raining up there, and since construction is still going on it’s very muddy and dirty so we took some pictures from far away and went back. We later found out that there was a dinner planned for that day, so I called Damchae, and moved my meeting with her son, Jamyang, to Friday.

Dinner was good, and then bedtime.

Asia Trip 2011 - part 2 - Bhutan

Tuesday

After the longest trip ever to get there, we started our descent to the Paro airport in Bhutan, it was really cool to see how the pilot had to maneuver between mountains, to land, it must be really difficult or at least it looked like it, he had to make some sharp turns all while descending and then ther it was the airport.

It was incredible the architecture of the airport was typical Bhutanese, everyone we saw was wearing the traditional gho the view was incredible mountains all around, with little houses and temples popping up randomly. During entry there was a problem with my sister’s visa because her gender was “N” the guy told me to go find our travel agent (you can’t enter Bhutan unless you have a specified plan with a travel agency, I think) and so I walked all by myself past immigration, baggage claim customs up to the point where the cabs would be, found the guy with the sign that had our names on it, and then we walked back to immigration, no one stopped us, no one asked us anything. He talked to the officer, made a phone call and within 3 minutes we were good to go and drowned in apologies from them.

It’s easy to see that one of the reasons this is possible is because there are fewer people to manage, and enough well trained government officers to handle it. Maybe in this case it would seem to mean that the higher amount of government/person helped, but that of course cannot be generalized.

The drive to our airport was breathtaking; it was a unique mixture of good development and tradition keeping, a brand new road, with little traffic being cleaned by groups of people who, somehow looked happy while picking up trash from the road. Lots of family owned traditional farming on the sides of the road, and of course the mountains all around us. The river was incredibly clean, we drove by it for a really long time and it looked impeccable the whole time. Our guide told us the trip used to take 2 hours before they rebuilt the road, when they started construction the King personally visited the workers and asked them to please work on it really well and efficiently because it was really important, apparently they did so and the road was finished really quickly.

Our hotel was really nice, maybe too nice given the fact that a lot of the people’s houses are very rural and traditional, but maybe the idea behind it is “this is what we need, and this is what the tourists need”…who knows, maybe I’m just trying to justify it :p. No plastic bags in the hotel…I can’t remember any in the whole country actually, but maybe I’m just forgetting. Although they did say during one of the talks about trying to reduce the amount of plastic used.

We went to Hotel Termalinca where the talks were going on, I guess this is a good time to explain why we were here in the first place. Bhutan’s government has put in place a development measurement tool called GNH – gross national happiness – one part of this is concerned with sustainable development and policies that are in agreement with log term preservation of the environment. Both my dad and godfather have been involved in projects related to this, and so my godfather organized a fundraiser for several projects in this field, a lot of investors from the world were invited and my dad (and through him, my mom and sister and I) was invited to invest (haha, right) present the Las Gaviotas project from Colombia (look it up it’s really cool) and talk to some people to see if they can set up something similar in Bhutan, since they have a lot of pine trees.

The first event we got to see was some “hang-out time” with one of the queen mothers, there are 4 in Bhutan, the current king’s mom and her 3 sisters; they’re each in charge of one major project. She talked a lot about the building regulations and how they are some restrictions with respect to how much they need to stick to the traditional style, and how they make sure they’re earthquake proof, and other things.

She told us about this monument that she was in charge of, the 108 stupas in 2003 after a lot of attempts at peaceful talks, the King decided they had to go to war in the North of Bhutan. In her words, the King is not a King to sit in his office and direct direct the soldiers through a telephone, but he went out there and fought among his men, everyone in the country was really worried about him, so the queen mother started a monument consisting of 108 stupas, 108 is apparently a really important number in bhuddism, to pray to the gods for his safety and that of every soldier, everyone contributed, one of the guides in our group later told us he spent 3 days helping there. The war ended in victory with 11 Bhutanese casualties, the King was safe.

The next talk was about operationalizing GNH. The reason Bhutan is special is because they are working very hard to control the way the country develops. They came up with this ideal called Gross National Happiness which ideally would be able to measure development in a more complete and accurate way than other indicators used in the world. The basic concept comes from thinking that happiness is the ultimate desire of every citizen and therefore it must be the main purpose of development. Measuring happiness seems to be thus the most appropriate way to measure development, as opposed to GDP or other methods.

It is obviously really hard to measure the happiness of a country, but they decided they would try really hard but in 2008, they finally made the transition of turning GNH from a an abstract philosophical goal to a measurable concept. This is awesome.

There are 4 pillars to GNH:

-sustainable and equitable development

-preservation and promotion of national culture

-environmental conservation

-good governance

To measure this they use 72 indicators in 9 domains, they didn’t talk about every indicator but they did focus on a few so here are some the domains and some of the indicators in each

Psychological well-being

Some of the things they measure here are stress, compassion, calmness, generosity, frustration, selfishness, jealousy, frequency of prayers and meditation, and consideration of karma and suicide, among the population.

Culture preservation and diversity

Here they try to measure how many people and how often people speak Bhutanese (this makes sense because the king decided to make English really important in schools a while ago, now 85% of the population speaks in English, the goal is 100% by 2015), how often people practice the national games (archery is the national sport…badass), discipline, knowledge/participation in national traditions and festivals.

Time use

The main idea here is that people should ideally work 8 hours, sleep 8 hours, and then have 8 hours every day of leisure time. I thought that the leisure time was too vague, I mean I guess it could go from spending time playing with your kids to waiting stuck in traffic. But they did some research and found that most people were pretty close to those 8-8-8 goals.

Community Vitality

How much help is available from your neighbors, and how safe people feel, at the homes and in the streets.

Good governance

They measure how true it is that they have freedom of speech and association, also discrimination and equal pay for equal value of work. I thought that was really interesting obviously equal pay is ridiculous, but equal pay for equal value, THAT’s where it’s at.

Education

They said they needed to live up to 2 different standards. They wanted to make sure the education the government offered was up to conventional international standards, after they made sure that was achieved, and ONLY after, they started working on living up to GNH standards. They decided they needed to introduce meditation in schools and then showed us a video of a bunch of kids saying how awesome it was and how much they liked it and thought it was a good idea…except for the last kid, who said “I think it’s stupid and boring now I’m going to go play soccer” we all laughed.

The other 3 domains were Ecology, Health, and Standard of Life.

complement to GDP and others as development indicator

They specified that the goal is to add to, and not to replace other development indicators, which are good just incomplete. For example in Japan, they said life expectancy is 90, but it’s necessary to see what kind of life people have from, say 80-90. If they’re just laying in bed being sick for 10 years that’s not development.

They also gave us an example of how they use it to make decisions. They were debating on whether to have Bhutan join the WTO, initially and after hearing from a lot of them 19 of the ministers were for and 5 against. Then they examined it using GNH criteria, in short, they saw that it would raise stress, and material well being, as well as decrese equality, so the votes changed to 19 against and 5 for.

In 1961 the government had to undertake ventures because the private sector was too weak to do it, but then between 1982 and 1992 they went through a lot of privatization. Debt is about 60% of GDP, and the role of the government is seen, as much as possible, as a policymaker and regulator, not as a participant in the market. Unemployment is a little under 4%, and also they have policies to encourage the added value to natural resources, i.e. not dig and sell for other countries to process, but have the process happen in Bhutan.

Whenever the Government undertakes projects that have to use the land of some citizens, the idea is to provide to every family affected 1 job guaranteed plus 10000 units worth (about 400 dollars a year)

The last thing in the guy’s presentation was some words from Buddha

Buddha said:

Never commit wrong doings

Accumulate good

Watch out for your mind (educate yourself, and don’t let people corrupt you)

Another interesting thing to mention is how people feel about the government in Bhutan, the 4^th king (the current is his son, the 5^th) was apparently really awesome, every time he comes up in conversation you can almost see the love and respect in everyone’s face, he’s the one who came up with GNH, and created the parliament. I heard at some point that the royal family is extremely rich, but there is no tax money that goes to them, still they spend huge amounts investing in projects and works for the people and the country.

That evening we had dinner at a hotel with all the people in the event, they hired some local artisans to sell their stuff and to work in front of everyone, it was really cool. The food was delicious but really spicy, so my parents couldn’t enjoy it a lot.

Then…bedtime J

Asia Trip 2011

Venezuela

We had a 17 “layover” in Venezuela, before leaving we asked the consulate in Bogota about whether we needed a visa to get in the country or not, they told us we needed one to leave the airport but it took 10 days and like 30 bucks per person, so we said screw it.

We arrived to the airport in Maiquetia, pretty tired at midnight, we decided it was worth a shot to try to go through immigration. We wait in line, get to the point where the officer is:

-Hello we’re here in transit for 17 hours

-Where are you going to spend the night?

-We would like to get a hotel, so it’s kind of up to you.

-Ok, have a good night welcome to Venezuela.

There were a few interesting things in the airport, a lot of advertising for socialism, the slogan “homeland and socialism or death” and a picture with big government projects, and the slogan “with socialism, the big milestones are done by YOU”

We got out of the airport and this cab driver approached us offering us to take us to a really good hotel and exchange currency. The official rate is 4.3 bolivares for one dollar, but he was offering us 7.5, apparently dollars are really hard to get for them, and so this black market comes up, the weird thing is that even at the unofficial rate things are pretty expensive, so using the official rate is really ridiculous…we went the unofficial way. Anyway the taxi driver was saying a lot of weird things and talking really fast, and messing up his conversion rates, so we really thought he was trying to scam us, also anytime anyone else came to talk to us he was like “hey these are my customers, don’t get in the way”…so we were pretty scared. But in the end it all worked out quite nicely, he took us to a hotel, where he talked to the manager before we got a chance and told us what the rate was. It turned out he was a really nice guy and was really helpful, he was just really aggressive approaching people and a little hyper.

We asked him to pick us up the next day so we could see the city for a while before we went to the airport at 5. He told us that since checkout is at noon at the hotel, we would be downstairs at 11:30, he also made sure to tell us that we had to check out at noon or they would charge us an extra night…like 3 times. Next morning I woke up at like 10:30, went outside and saw him there sitting waiting for noon to get there, and so we talked for a while. I wanted to ask him about Chavez and socialism, so he said that he’s the best president Venezuela has ever had and that he’s done a lot of great things for the people and the country. However he started teasing the parking lot guy and the manager of the hotel about it, and everytime he asked they got serious and replied something like “How I feel about Chavez is my problem not yours, and I don’t want to talk about it”, then the driver made fun of them.

Oh and at one point my mom sat in the restaurant and pulled out some work stuff, he started telling her how if she was traveling and on vacation she shouldn’t do work.

We asked the driver to take us to Caracas (about 20 mins away), and for some reason he just really didn’t want to go, he started saying that we didn’t have enough time, and it was raining in Caracas, and it was Sunday so everything was closed so there was really nothing to see there, we insistd a few more times but he just wasn’t going to have it “I’ll take you to this really cool place along the Caribbean shore, trust me you’ll like it a lot more”. During lunch he pretty much told us what to order and as soon as we got the chicken, he poured guacamole all over it and grabbed a piece.

He was a cool guy and after the shock and the scary part the night before, we decided to just have fun with it and see how much he would do.

Frankfurt

The flight to Frankfurt was not bad. The entertainment was good, Maria and I watched Tangled together, there was some Gnomeo and Juliet, Rango, Modern Family… The food was good and they got Maria some coloring books. Maria behaved awesomely, it’s incredible how good she is for a 7 year old, yes, there was a lot of entertainment but still she behaved really well for a 7 year old in a 10 hour flight. Oh at some point a baby started crying and somebody yelled “somebody give that baby a bottle”, jerk.

Kolkata

Nothing too exciting in Frankfurt or in the flight to Calcutta, same movies, which was awesome and Maria really liked. In Calcutta everyone was bloen away by Maria Jose, pretty much everyone who saw her stared for a while and smiled at her, I guess we were the weird ones there. She went to buy some kit-kat and I gave her the money to pay, the guys at the store were really happy and smiling at her a lot, when she said “thank you” the guy asked her what her name was and how old she was, and gave her a second bag of candy for free! Everyone in India was really cool my mom needed to get a hold of people in Colombia and a guy offered us his cell-phone to try to access the internet and to try to make a phone call, just like that. Security at the Kolkata airport is weird and pointless, you can’t get into the airport unless you have a ticket, then you get into a waiting area and you CAN’T check in until like an hour before your flight, which sucked for us because of of our 8 hour layover. After that it was all good, we checked in, got through immigration (lots of Indian decorations in the immigration room, that was awesome). And as soon as we got on the plane to Paro we were in Bhutan territory…

Oh wait, up to here, Maria Jose was keeping a little journal where she wrote every country we were in and for how long. She kind of forgot about it when we got to Bhutan.