Highlight

Today was splendid. I slept for 10h, woke up fresh and happy. How could you differently! After breakfast we went to the National Museum. They had to renovate the old building and they moved the objects to the new one. Now the renovation is almost finished but not open for visitors. But the interesting stuff is already back there. Not very logic so instead of craft and other treasures we were looking at pictures where officials from India were visiting the King. Tnezin just said we should imagine the nice stuff, that would be a reason for us to come back. Actually the room with the information about flora and fauna was interesting. Maybe if we are reallly lucky we gonna see one of the snow leopard like they did last year. Who knows!
After the mueseum we went to the Dzong. Dzongs were fortresses against enemies, often Tibetan. Nowadays it is one side a monastery and on the other here in Paro is the court and the official stuff. Going into a Dzhong you have to wear long sleeve, the Bhutanese have to wear a scarf over their traditional dress. The king has a yellow one, the prime minister an orange one, the memebers of parliament have a blue and the head of the district a red one. There are twenty Dzongkhags, districts in Bhutan, the country being a similar size to Switzerland (roughly 39’000qm). It counts 800’000 people. They are a parlamentary constitutional monarchy. About democracy our guide Tenzin said that he doesn’t like the promises given before the election and not kept after. He kind of doesn’t mind just having the Monarchy. He told us that in the last election the prime minister promised free WIFI throughout the country. In the eastern dialect Wi means cow and Fi means house. I can imagine the disappointment.
After visiting those two sites in Paro Tenzin decided to bring us up to Drakarpo, a temple that the guru rinpoche flew to, like to the one of Tigernest and the one we gonna visit tomorrow. I will ask Tenzin again about the story to get it right. what i remember is that he flew from the temple from tomorrow (Kila) to Drakarpo, where he either split a rock (Kar means rock) or he landed here because he saw a white stone (Kar means white). As Tenzin says, there are always to ways to tell a story. We went up there by foot, a very nice journey and from up there a wow-ish view. Believers are circling the temple clockwise to get merit. We were told that if for exampme you kill your parents, you should walk 108 times around a temple and then you are forgiven - and, Tenzin added, you have go to jail.
We are very lucky having him as a guide. We were dropped off at the town and we went for another coffee, went shopping and then back to the palace for a royal diner. I am fully on holiday mood.Read more