Arrived in Bhutan

Yesterday morning, I arrived in Bhutan. For the flight to Bhutan, I had to getup at 3:40am because my flight left at 5:50am. Flight to Bhutan took maybe four hours and the landing process in Bhutan was kind of scary. As you might know, Bhutan is a mountainous country - so you have to build the airport in the mountains. The wings of the airplane almost touched the mountains - I got really scared. But in the end, we landed safely. Immigration procedures went smoothly and Els (the project manager) picked me up at the airport. We went to the hotel where I was staying for the first night and then to the NIE Paro.

At NIE Paro, I met a ton of folks. It was really nice to get in touch with them and learn about the project that I'll be working on. I start getting a feeling for what it'll be to work on this project but I still cannot 'take' it into my fingers; I'll need a bit more time to get a real feeling for the project.

After having returned to the hotel, I walked down to Paro (my Hotel is a little bit above Paro) - was a 15 minutes walk. A young boy was coming up to me and communicated with me in almost perfect English. I was really surprised. Walking around town, I was easily recognizable as a foreigner; the only guys not
wearing a traditional dress. After having returned to the hotel, I got a really good meal and right after the dinner, I went to bed. What else should I have done: I was extremely tired (slept about 5 hours from Sunday morning to Tuesday evening) and there was no electricity ;-).

Yesterday morning, we drove to Thimphu; the capital. Was about a two hours drive and I realized really fast why I'm NOT allowed to drive a car in Bhutan. But I'll write about that a bit later on.

Yesterday, I had a bunch of meetings at the Helvetas office here in Thimphu. All the initial face-to-face meetings; organizing visa stuff, and just get an introduction into the projects.

Sorry for this chaotic post - that's about how my life currently looks like. All the best from Bhutan.