Punakha Dzong
Otherwise known as 'the palace of great happiness or bliss'. The Dzong is beautifully located at the confluence of the Pho Chhu (male) and Mo Chhu (female) rivers, with each flowing on either side of it. It is the second largest Dzong (a fortress used for military, religious and administrative purposes) in Bhutan, located in the Wangdue-Punakha valley.
One of the purposes of travel is to find a little bit of yourself. Sometimes when you learn about another culture in their environment, you find you have a reaction to it. It is said that one can consider themself a Buddhist if one accepts and follows the four hallmarks or truths, which are meant to be taken literally and not in a mystical way:
All compounded things are impermanent. All emotions are pain. All things have no inherent existence. Nirvana is beyond concepts.
I read this on an in-flight magazine before landing in Paro, and two of those truths are what I was reminded of throughout the trip and since.
'All compounded things are impermanent'. A good example of this, that the magazine used, is how the cells from a seed grow and eventually has the ability to form flowers. Different elements compound - sunlight, nutrition, weather - for a while to form a flower, which then serves its purpose and eventually falls off and no longer ceases to exist in that form. I don't know why that example hit me so hard, knowing that the death of all things follow that principle. Although the truth is not only to understand it for the glass-half-empty side of it, it is imperative to also appreciate that things do come together to form beautiful things, albeit even if it is impermanent.
As for the other, 'All emotions are pain', like my travelling partner Shikha said, you don't need to be a Buddhist to know that to be the truth.