- GSM coverage exists within atleast Paro (airport) and Thimphu (the capital, pronounced "ti-em-pu") but in the 900Mhz band. My Nokia 6620 tri-band is only useful for 850/1800/1900Mhz, dam. Bangkok had a 900 network. A few of my fellow conference attendees say Skype is useless with the latency. I'm debating to buy a phone downtown and just swap out my SIM (I've already verified this works), hmm.
- The country has 6Mbps symmetric homed back to Hawaii via Intersat. six megabits!, in theory some US households have this am mount of pipe in their basement.
- Apparently two classes of Goa's (traditional robe-like dress for men) exist, one made out of synthetic fabrics from India and one from traditional wool? local fabric (being much more expensive). Most men wear this outfit complete with dress shoes of varying quality and long dress socks (usually dark in color). Besides the military forces and airport officials, it's unclear who's exempt from wearing this.
- Previously the government ran the only authorized "Bhutan Tourism Corporation", but privatized to local agents a few years ago. Now one exists called "Bhutan Tourist Corporation", nice.
- iPhoto (even the latest version) is slow and very lame when you fill with hundreds of pictures, crashes a lot.
- The hotel came complete with fresh fruit (very sweet mini tangerines, some apples), the shower is hot (even if the tub is cheap plastic, not fiberglass and has bumps on it), decent restaurant (serving traditional food, Indian and Chinese - I'm addicted to the cheese dumplings).
Addicted to what?
Are you punching this in on your phone or something?
Posted by: Matt Westervelt | July 21, 2005 at 12:10 PM