The People You Meet:

I enjoy meeting people when I travel. The opportunity for conversation with an extended meeting. Finding out how they've lived and what they think. My extended meetings will take place once I'm in Bishkek.

There are also the chance meetings. I met Mike, a retired military person who's from Texas but now lives near Atlanta and is going to Tashkent to see an Uzbek women he met through the Internet. He was there about a year ago. The paperwork to enable her to travel to the U.S. has taken longer than he expected.

I met the odd business traveler--with some sort of investment firm who is traveling to Delhi, India; Korea, Hong Kong, back to Korea, Minneapolis and finally back to Atlanta. This entire trip is a quick one...11 days for all of those cities...and his only luggage was a pretty big carry-on bag.

I met the guy from Canada, who in a Political Science Ph.D. program at U of Florida, also going to India but to gather dissertation data.

There's Alex and Alex--husband and wife with variations of the same first name. She's from Moldova and he's from Uzbekistan--where they're in transit to visit his family. They both live in the U.S., in Springfield, MO, after immigrating to the states 8 years ago for her and 11 years ago for him. Alex speaks Russian so she was helpful in getting a person to move us through the transit-with-no-visa line.

Lastly, I met Steve...one of the millions of American citizens working on our behalf to ensure we can live safely. Steve's a "nuke hunter". He's made over 30 trips to Russia on behalf of the U.S. government in an effort to locate and secure nuclear materials. Some of the material is from dismantled nuclear weapons. Other materials comes from medical or other research facilities. There's always a risk that someone with money and the desire to hurt someone will steal or buy this sort of material, whether to make a nuclear weapon or create a dirty bomb. We had a great conversation about national and world politics--including Pakistan....a scary place now that the country may be imploding. Sunday was Veteran's Day and I'm proud of the sacrifices veterans have made but I also think about the millions of others who put themselves in odd circumstances in an effort to keep us safe.

Not to sound too much like Forest Gump but when you travel, you never know who you'll meet.