A Brief History of Contemporary Sikkim The history of Sikkim parallels that of Bhutan in many aspects. Like Bhutan, Sikkim was a geographically isolated Buddhist kingdom that was never colonized by the British or any other country. Bhutan has remained an independent country, though it...
How much can a tourist learn about a country in five days? First impressions count. One can draw conclusions from even a short visit that merit more research perhaps through a future visit. Having just spent five days in Bhutan. . .
This week marks my second visit to Dubai following an initial visit two years ago. Susan is traveling with me this time. We are being hosted in Dubai by my dear friend, Dubai resident Lajo Gupta, who is originally from India, and is the daughter of the great Indian music master, Ali Akbar Khan. . .
How much of Istanbul can one see in a short two-day visit? Actually, quite a bit, when logging over 20,000 steps/day on my FitBit. When we first planned our Viking River Cruise, I told our friends Bill and Linn, who were traveling with us, that we would be so close to Istanbul while visiting the Balkan countries, that we must add it on to our trip. And so, following our Danube River cruise, we flew from Budapest to Turkey, arriving in Istanbul the evening before Election Day. . .
Our recent Viking River Cruise was a quick visit to five countries in six days, including Bulgaria, Serbia, and Croatia, as well as the embarkation and disembarkation cities, Bucharest, Romania, and Budapest, Hungary. In each port, we would load onto buses and be shown the city or the countryside. Such a compressed trip can turn into a blur when trying to remember the details. This blog will be an attempt to summarize my most vivid memories. . .
In this post, based on what I learned during our Viking River Cruise from Bucharest to Budapest, I will attempt something very difficult: to explain the history of the Balkan countries in a short essay. This journey up the Danube River has been an amazing history lesson. I’ve learned that the Balkan situation is even more complicated than the Middle East, because the Middle East crisis escalated mostly in the last century, whereas the Balkan region has been at war for more than a millennium. . .
When I took Latin in high school, I learned the acronym FRIPS for the five Romance languages, derived from Latin: French, Romanian, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. So here we are in Romania, and I can recognize half the written words. I didn’t know much about Romania before. In my five days here, I have learned a lot. My naïve preconception was that Romania was inhabited by gypsies and peasants. Wow, was I wrong! We traveled a bit in the province of Transylvania and saw some older traditional houses. But the residents had every modern convenience. So let me declare, Romania is a modern, sophisticated, highly developed, relatively affluent country, not at all like the outdated memories of its Communist decades. . .
Norway used to be one of Europe's poorest countries. This was certainly true until after World War II, when the northern part of the country had to be totally rebuilt due to the Nazis' policy of total destruction as the German military made their retreat southward. The Norwegian people showed a commendable national spirit of sharing the burdens of reconstruction, that "culture of equality" that I described in my previous blog. Norway aligned itself with the other Scandinavian countries, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland, in establishing a welfare state that provides a high quality of life to all, regardless of income. That high quality of life is based on: free education through the university level, free healthcare for all, a highly developed public transportation system (roads, bridges, tunnels, trains, and this Hurtigruten water taxi service), and an extensive energy industry.
Last week, Susan and I attended a one-day regional conference in San Francisco, hosted by the University of San Francisco Medical Center in their brand-new facility, which just opened this past February. More about the conference in a minute…But first, what’s wrong with American healthcare?
Our parents’ generation all remembered where they were when Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941. I was in high school in Columbus, Georgia, when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963…at Florida State University when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in 1968. On September 11, 2001, I was in Reno, Nevada, with my wife Susan, and a nurse friend, Rosemary, who was visiting us from Oregon for the purpose of recording guided imagery meditations with Susan’s and my music. . .