Two days after departing LA and I'm not even there yet. I'm just boarding my flight to Dhaka, Bangladesh, on an airline called
Dragon Air. Dragon Air! doesn't that sound cool? Or hot...I guess...you know cuz of the Dragon's hot air...Anyway, I will have an hour to change flights in Dhaka, which I imagine is a small airport. Bangladesh isn't really known for it's fancy anything, except maybe bangles and hand painted bicycle seats, but no real tourism and it's very poor. Next will be a short flight to Kathmandu, and beddy bye in Nepal by midnight.
I landed in Hong Kong at 7 am this morning so I spent the day exploring the city. Did you know that Hong Kong means ‘fragrant harbor’ in english? It looks an awful lot like China town, and I noticed an awful lot of chinese people live here too. They are EVERYWHERE! They have a neighborhood here called Hollywood and another one called SOHO. But even those neighborhoods looked like chinatown. Weird. around 1 o'clock this afternoon I was trying to figure out where to eat so I approached an un asiany looking guy for advice. We got to talking about this and that when he mentioned that he used to work for Human Rights Watch. I couldn't believe it. Millions of people live in Hong Kong and I happen to approach the one guy who used to work for Human Rights Watch. Oh and Amnesty International before that and now he runs an organization that researches and documents labor
violations in China. Need less to say the Chinese Government isn't particularly fond of him. I mentioned what I do in my line of work then asked him a few questions about Tibet at which point he looked around and said "would you like to come back to my office for a cup of coffee" he had kind of a special look in his eyes like a "we need to talk privately" look. So of course I said "Sure!" Back at his office he made each of us a thick black cappuccino and brought me into the conference room along with one of his colleagues. We had a wonderful conversation and he had some amazing stories. He was working for HRW
during the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. He was the one monitoring the situation when government troops opened fire on pro-democracy protesters, killing more then 2000 innocent people. He was the one who wrote the official report on the incident. I didn’t realize it but most of the major news agencies had already left and he was one of only a handful of foreign journalists who witnessed the massacre. When I asked him if he was scared he just looked at me quizzically and said " No I wasn’t scared, I was raised in Glasgow!"
As we were leaving he gave me a big hug and we exchanged skype info. I love it when things like that happen. I don't think it was an accident.
It was one of those wonderful instant connection things.
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