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Memorial Chorten: We made one last visit to the Memorial Chorten in Thimpu early on Saturday morning. We met a local Bhutanese who offered to take us inside and up to the top of the structure. He was very friendly and very excited at being Bhutanese and being Buddhist. Inside the chorten, we received blessings from a couple of the monks performing their prayers.
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Holy Buildings & Prayer Flags: Recognizing holy buildings and places in Bhutan is easy. Holy buildings are the only ones with yellow roofs, while the rest of the buildings have either green or red painted roofs, or are left silver. Temple rooms within houses can also have a yellow roof, but the remainder of the house's roof cannot be yellow. There is also a red banner filled with solid white circles running around the top of the outside walls of holy buildings.
Apart from the paint, the location is also surrounded by many prayer flags, which can also be seen throughout the country. Each flag contains a prayer for an individual or a group of individuals. Over time, the prayer is taken by the wind and weather as the flag slowly deteriorates, so the flags cannot be made of too sturdy a material, or the prayer will never be released.
We returned home and had one last meal with our hosts and said goodbye before leaving on our ride back to Paro and the airport.
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Flight Home: Our plane took off 2 ½ hours late due to fog in Delhi, where the flight originated. We landed at the new, 3-day old Bangkok airport with barely enough time to make our connecting flight, but sat on the tarmac for 45 minutes before getting to a gate to deplane. Boarding passes for our Lao Airlines flight were no longer being issued at the transfer desk, so we made our way to the gate and waited another 20 minutes to get transport to our plane, which was waiting for us and one other to board before leaving. Fortunately, we made the flight home, preventing us to have to wait a full day for the next flight.