A Bright Shining Lie

Based on LH from KY's recommendation, I recently read A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan.

The book won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for a reason -- it was unbelievable. I use the word unbelievable for two reasons. First, Sheehan's writing is spectacular. Whenever a non-fiction book is a page turner you know the author is a good writer. The book had such a compelling narrative that one could easily mistake it for fiction. The second reason I say the book was unbelievable is because it is mind boggling to read about the absolutely insane policies/rationales/strategies of the US government and military leading up to and during the Vietnam War. As an American, I like to hope that our country knows what it is doing especially when it puts people's lives at risk. This book paints a picture that couldn't be farther from that hope.

Grass Skiing & Grass Sledding

(PICTURE: Grass Sledding)
I'm gonna shock you with something: It doesn't snow much in Vietnam.

You might be saying to yourself, "I didn't think it ever snowed." Well, I thought that too when I first got here but supposedly it has snowed in Sapa. However, that's clearly not the norm.

As a skiier, I wish there was more snow. Luckily though the Vietnamese are quite innovative and don't let the lack of snow stop them from skiing. Recently Huyen and I went to a resort with grass skiing and grass sledding. The "hill" for skiing was about twice the size of a speed bump so we decided just to go sledding. Check out the video of grass skiers and a grass sledder. The music you'll hear was what was pumping out of the stereo systems at the resort:

More Signs I've Put On Weight

(PICTURE: Look at that gut! Maybe I should wear bigger shirts.)
Not to keep harping on this but I'm getting chubby!

Three times in My Tho I had to get off an elevator because it started to beep. THREE TIMES!!!

Also the Habitat people asked me what shirt size I am. I told them large. They gave me an extra large. It was a hint that my shirts are perhaps getting a tad too tight.

Finally, as of writing this, I got my fourth flat tire on Huyen's motorbike. That's four flat tires in a month and a half. Do you know how many flat tires I had TOTAL last year? 3 ...yup, the same amount of times the elevator told me to get off because I was gonna break it.

Two Reasons To Donate To Habitat For Humanity

Here's two reasons why building a house for a needy family is totally worth the time and expense:
(PICTURE: The children who will be living in the house I helped build last week.)

My Habitat team finished working on the house and they sent me this picture:
It is pretty amazing that two weeks ago there was nothing but dirt where this house was. That's pretty cool.

Habitat For Humanity: Day 3

By the third morning all of us had blisters on our thumbs. An average person would have called in sick with such an ailment, but this crew was not average by any means. We pushed forward and continued to build the house.

Day 3 was all about laying brick. Everyone was given a tutorial on how to lay brick and then was put to work. The homeowner, who I've mentioned is a real life construction worker, was at least five times faster at laying brick then the rest of us. His rows of bricks also looked a lot neater than the rest of ours.

(PICTURE: Thy, my main habitat contact and Than, our habitat foreman.)

Right before lunch two local officials came to the site and presented me with a certificate and a letter. The certificate is from The Tien Giang Union Of Friendship Organizations and is for "Building the house for the poor people." The letter says, "Dear Benjamin August, on behalf of the Tien Giang Union of Friendship organizations. I would like to express heartfelt thanks for your recent contributation of time to the volunteer building house in My Tho City from September 13rd to September 24th* 2009.
Together with another volunteer you offered helpful and exciting hours of building house for poor people. We are grateful for energy, enthusiasm and dedication you bring to your role as a volunteer.
Once again, thank you very much for your efforts and contribution of time for the Tien Giang Union of friendship organizations to help make our community better and better."

Although the certificate says I built till the 24th, I actually only built till the 16th. This is the same certificate everyone else got who built to the 24th. It's like I got a diploma after freshman year in college!

It was really hard to leave the build after just a few days. In 72 hours we had made so much progress on the house and I wish I could have stayed till the end. However, it just wasn't in the cards this time with my schedule. The experience though was absolutely fantastic. Working with great people for such a great cause is rewarding to say the least. I'm hoping that next year when I'm back in Vietnam I'll be able to organize a team build with people living in Hanoi.

I'd like to just say thanks again to the team at Habitat For Humanity for being extremely helpful and organized. I'd also like to thank Thomas and Elizabeth, the team leaders, and all the other members of the team, for letting me join their build. Finally, I'd like to once again thank the 70+ people who donated money towards the upcoming building of our house. Thanks again!

Habitat For Humanity: Day 2

(PICTURE: The heaviest load Marla had to wheelbarrow.)

I woke up on the second morning feeling pain in approximately 29 different places. The most irritating place though was the heat rash that I had on my right bicep. I showed Katie, the designated medic from my group, the rash and she brought me over to see Marilyn, the medic from the other group/real life nurse. Marilyn bandaged up my bicep and I was good to go...despite being mocked by a few people for having inadvertently shown off my totally awesome bicep.

There was a lot to be done on the second day:
- Removing the wood planks from the foundation.

(PICTURE: Me doing basically nothing as Katie crow-barred the hell out of the wood planks. My sleeve is rolled up because Marla, a Harvard graduate from both undergrad and business school, told me that it would help my irritation. She said it was the way girl lacrosse players wear their uniforms. You can't argue with that.)

- Building columns...which meant more cement making.
(PICTURE: Ian and Sheila were doing 99.9% of the lifting on this one.)

- Bending rebar. Don't feel bad if you don't know what rebar is. I had no clue prior to this build. Click on the link to read about it. Basically it is the meal put inside columns to help strengthen the columns.

- Removing nails from wood.

- Sanding wood.

- Filling in the foundation with dirt.

- Pounding the dirt to make the foundation stronger.

(PICTURE: A dirt pounding tool.)

- Putting up scaffolding.

(PICTURE: The end of Day 2. Progress is being made!)

The one problem with the build was that we were building during rainy season. It rained for a little while on the first day and then just down-poured on the second day. Here's a little video of the rain coming down on the family's old house as well as some shots of our site:

Habitat For Humanity: Day 1

In fourth grade I ran for Mount Pleasant Elementary School student council president. I gave a speech that started off something like, "As we all learned from Lethal Weapon 3, a building needs a strong foundation. Well, just like a building, the school needs a strong foundation." I think a building was blown up in that Lethal Weapon hence the reference. If this horrible speech wasn't bad enough, my competitor, Noah Lichtman, did a rap. Yup, he kicked my ass and I won the default prize of student council treasurer. If I learned one thing from myself that day it was that I should never reference Mel Gibson in a political speech. If I learned a second thing, it's that a building does indeed need a strong foundation.

On the first day of the build, my group laid the foundation for the house. This basically required a heck of a lot of cement making. To make the cement was a very scientific recipe: 5 buckets of dirt, 8 buckets of gravel, one bag of cement mix and then enough water to get a mud cake-ish consistency.

(PICTURE: Paul from Arizona and Amy from Bermuda even out the foundation.)

After about fifteen minutes of shoveling ____ (insert rocks, dirt, combination, etc.) one starts to realize that there are muscles in the back and arms that one hasn't used since, well, perhaps ever; one doubly realizes this the next morning when they wake up.

(PICTURE: Sherry from Washington and Katie from Colorado fill up the gravel bucket.)

In the morning when we arrived at the site, I noticed something right away -- our materials were quite far away from where we were actually building. The majority of our bricks and piles of dirt were at least 40 yards from where we needed them to be. I was surprised at this since in theory the truck could have dumped the supplies right at our build site. The explanation was that the alley was too narrow for a truck to go down, but having lived in Vietnam for a while now, I didn't buy it. I've practically seen a bus drive on the sidewalk in Vietnam so I think they just dropped our stuff far away so we would have to work harder and sweat more. Well, if that was really the intention it worked. We basically spent the afternoon lugging wheelbarrows of dirt to the site. In case you're curious, when using a wheelbarrow you also start to realize there are muscles in your triceps area you haven't used since, well, probably ever.

My favorite thing about the first day is that the soon-to-be homeowner was working right besides us. The man happened to be a construction worker which meant he was basically the point-man while building. We would hand the man our buckets of cement and he would pour them into the frames he had constructed. By the end of the day -- despite a good two hours of waiting out the rain -- we had finished pouring all the cement for the foundation.

(PICTURE: Our progress at the end of the first day. The man wearing green in the home owner.)

Some other highlights from the first day included:
- Sweating an obscene amount while handling concrete mix. I'm lucky I was able to take my shirt off at the end of the day.
- Visiting a chocolate "factory" while it rained. There was a farmer nearby who grew a fruit used for chocolate. He then made chocolate bars which he sells to supermarkets. He even showed us a chocolate magazine he was featured in.
- Managing to go a few hours before getting a blister on my thumb and a heat rash in my bicep/armpit area.

Habitat For Humanity

(PICTURE: Letter of thanks from habitat.)

Habitat For Humanity's motto is, "A world where everyone has a decent place to live." Thanks to the 70+ donors who sent me money, one family will soon have a better place to live in Vietnam.

I say "soon" because the money that everyone donated did not build the house that this and upcoming blogs will be about. The money we collected will go to build a new house for a family in a few months. Habitat will be sending me updates about the family who will benefit from our donation. As Habitat keeps me posted, I'll update the blog.

As much as I would have loved to build the house that our money will go to, the timing just won't work out since I'll be in Japan. Frankly though, it's a good thing that I don't build the house since habitat will be hiring contractors who I'm sure will do a better job than I ever could. Oh, one other cool thing about the house that will be built with our money: I'm 90% sure it will have a sign on it that says something like, "Donated by Benjamin August and Friends." Next time you're in Vietnam you can go and see the house that we helped to build!

I must admit, besides being told how much money was needed for a house, I was kind of naive about the whole Habitat process. This past week opened my eyes to how it all works as much as it did about home building. The group I joined was led by Thomas and Elizabeth, a very nice married couple who have done many builds before. As the team leaders, Thomas and Elizabeth had been in contact with all the people on the trip for quite some time. I felt a little bad jumping on their team build but they were more than accommodating. The rest of the team were individuals from around the world who, besides a pair or two, didn't know each other until the day they met up at their hotel. The group was filled with smart, friendly and dynamic people from various backgrounds and countries. Granted I was only with the group for four days, but I was extremely impressed by everyone. I guess that is what you should expect from people who are willing to use their vacation time and hard earned money to build someone else a house for two weeks.
(PICTURE: Team Elizabeth and Thomas. Habitat gave us these hats on the first day...I think I was one of two people to actually where it during the build.)

On the first day of the build, the group was divided into two teams in order to build two different houses. The group I was with built a one story house for a family consisting of a grandmother, her son, and his two children. Apparently the man's wife had left him and he was raising the children by himself. The family was living in a straw/thatch house right next to where we were building them their new house brick house. After seeing the neighbors house which was made of metal sheets, I made a comment that it was like the story of the three little pigs: there was the straw house, the metal house and soon to be a house made of concrete and bricks...

(PICTURE: The family's thatch house on the left. The foundation for their new house is on the right.)

Hoai's Wedding

Each Vietnamese wedding I've been to has been slightly different. Hoai's wedding was by far the most interesting and fun one I've experienced yet. Let me break down the day for you.

6:30 AM: Went to the hotel's all-you-can-eat buffet with Huyen's family.

8:00 AM: Tan, Hoai's fiance, and his family showed up at the hotel to collect Hoai, her family and me.

(PICTURE: The groom collects the bride.)

8:01 AM: I started to profusely sweat under my suit.

8:30 AM: Took a motorcade to Tan's family's house. The alley his family lives down was quite muddy because it's rainy season. Tan had placed concrete blocks in the alley the day before that we could step on.

(PICTURE: Luckily the bride didn't have to wear her train till later.)

8:50 AM: The official wedding ceremony started. Speeches were given by family members, poems were read, incense was burned to honor ancestors, envelopes were handed out and gold jewelry was given to the bride.

(PICTURE: The parents of the groom and bride pay their respects to the groom's ancestors.)

8:52 AM: My shirt officially reached the soaked level from sweating in a room with thirty people that had no AC.

9:30 AM: The two families celebrate the nuptuals by eating lunch together.
(PICTURE: The two family's eat together. This was one of three tables set up in the living room. I was at the table with all the male elders.)

9:32 AM: I realzed that every member of Tan's family wanted to chug a glass of beer with the foreigner at the wedding. Oh, and they wanted to do this individually.

11:30 AM: Went back to the hotel to take a nap.

12:00 PM: Took a nap in a room with Huyen's grandpa, father, brother and brother-in-law. I was the only one who had his own bed...and yup, we were all in our boxers.

2:00 PM: Was woken up by Huyen's nephew.

(PICTURE: Wedding Parking.)

4:00 PM: Wedding guests start to show up at the hotel on their motorbikes. There were 400 wedding guests.
(PICTURE: Guests place checks in the heart shaped box as they walk in.)

4:30 PM: Wedding festivities start. People sing songs, fireworks are lit, and another wedding ceremony takes place on stage. Oh, and people come trickling in to the catering hall. So many people that Huyen's family and I don't have a place to sit together.

5:15 PM: Huyen and I finally get a seat at a table with her grandpa and uncle. We proceed to eat, drink and be merry.

5:45 PM: Friends of the bride and groom start to sing songs for everyone. There is no band so the friends and family are the entertainment...until...

6:00 PM: A magician comes out and dazzles everyone with tricks.

The end of this video has all the magic you could ever ask for at a wedding...

Wedding Dresses

(PICTURE: Wedding dresses on the right, party dresses on the left.)

In America, a bride's wedding dress is a pretty big deal. Okay, yeah, that's a gigantic understatement. It's a huge -- and hugely expensive -- deal.

In Vietnam, brides want to look just as beautiful as American brides want to look. However they don't freak out about their dress nearly as much. This is what I learned when with less than 24 hours to go before the wedding, Huyen asked me if I wanted to go pick out a wedding dress with her and Hoai. Let me repeat that again: With less than 24 hours to go before the wedding we went to pick out a wedding dress!!!

I went to the shop with Huyen and Hoai and helped to choose the dresses she would wear the next day. She needed three different dresses. First she needed a traditional red Ao Dai for the morning ceremony.
(PICTURE: Hoai trying on the Ao Dai.)

Next Hoai needed her white wedding dress.

Finally, Hoai need a ballroom dress for the rest of the party after tying the knot. For this one she asked my opinion...and then thankfully went with the one she liked.

(PICTURE: Hoai in her party dress at the wedding.)

We spent about thirty minutes in the shop. Yup, ten minutes per dress.

Now if you aren't shocked already at the process of getting a wedding dress, let me blow your mind with this stat: the total cost of renting three wedding dresses, having hair and make-up done on the wedding day, AND all the pictures/album/videos costs....

...get a figure in your head...

...divide it by a lot...

...and then some more...

It costs (at least in Hue): $168.26.

It's Better Than On TV

(PICTURE: The Nguyens at Lan Co Beach.)

A couple days before we left for the wedding, Huyen mentioned to me that we could take a day trip to the "nicest beach in the world." Apparently someone wrote in a Vietnamese publication that Lan Co Beach was the best beach on Earth and well, clearly people believe it.

Huyen and I were going to take a motorbike to the beach but at the last minute, her mother, aunt, grandfather, sisters and nephew decided to join us. We called up a car and had a driver bring us about 50 kilometers to a resort on the beach.

When we got to the beach, I saw something that I will never ever forget. When the first wave came, Huyen's mother and aunt FREAKED OUT. They both sort of yelped and ran away from the water and up a few feet towards the resort. I figured they didn't know how to swim but couldn't imagine they'd be so scared of drowning my just having water rush over their feet. Well, it turns out this was their FIRST TIME SEEING THE OCEAN!

I couldn't believe it when Huyen told me this information. I guess I just take it for granted that anyone who is over ____ (pick an arbitrarily low number) has seen the beach at some point in their life. When I asked Huyen why it took her mom to the last moment to join our trip she said, "My mother said she had seen the ocean on TV and didn't need to go." After playing around on the sand for about an hour her mother, aunt and grandfather all agreed that the real thing was a lot better than the beach. If Lan Co Beach is really the best beach in the world, it's not a bad one to see for your first time.

Hoai's Wedding Part I

(PICTURE: The two families meet before the wedding.)

On 9/9/09, Huyen's sister Hoai got married in Hue. I have so many stories to tell from the four days we went away but I'll try and condense them to just a few blogs.

To get to Hue we had a few transportation options. We could take a bus (16 hours), a train (14 hours) or fly down (45 minutes). If Huyen and I were going alone we would clearly have flown since I'm more than willing to pay the extra $3 to fly. Yes, it was just $3 more to fly compared to a sleeping compartment on a train. However, Huyen and I weren't traveling alone since her mother, aunt, grandpa, sister and nephew were all coming with us (her father and brother were taking a bus the night before the wedding). Huyen's mother gets extremely motion sick which ruled out taking a bus. She also is scared to fly which clearly ruled out taking a plane. Thus it was me and the Nguyen's taking the train.

Before the train took off Huyen told me that it is known that a day doesn't go by without a train hitting someone on the tracks. I thought this was an exaggeration until ten minutes into the ride our train hit TWO MOTORBIKES AND A CAR (or a car into two motorbike, or a motorbike into a car and another motorbike. It wasn't very clear). Thank goodness nobody died but it was a pretty scary incident to say the least. All of a sudden our train came to a screeching stop and right next to our window a huge crowd gathered outside. There must have been at least two or three hundred people within two minutes of the accident. On the left side of the train were people with flashlights looking at the motorbike that was caught between the train and the tracks. On the right side of the train was a car that had smashed into the front of someone's house. After ten minutes apparently everything was okay and our train took off again.

(PICTURE: Giving Viet Huong a shoulder ride on the train.)

It sucked that we weren't flying to Hue but at least we had a bed to sleep in...so I thought. Huyen's family decided to only buy three seats in a sleeper compartment and that the rest of the people could sit on the chairs and possibly swap with the people in the beds at some point. Well, of course the older people ended up getting the beds which meant the rest of us were gonna have a long ride ahead of us. After a few minutes of sitting in the seats, Huyen and her sister snuck us into a six bedroom compartment that had only one person in it. I rolled my eyes at this and felt pretty terribly for the tourist in the compartment when Huyen's nephew Viet Huong started to climb on the bunk beds and kick the bed of the tourist. Luckily for that guy a train worker threw us out of the compartment within fifteen minutes...

...ten minutes later, in pure Vietnamese style, we had our own private compartment after Huyen's mother slipped the train worker ten dollars for all of us.

The one advantage of the train is that there are amazing views outside the windows. However, the most amazing thing I saw was inside the train: when it was time to go to bed, Huyen's 70-something grandfather scaled the bunkbeds and climbed up to the highest bed (there were three beds per side). I watched with astonishment as this man flew up the beds like Spiderman. I really hope when I'm 70-something I can still climb like he did...although that's probably not gonna happen since I had a hard enough time getting into the second level bed.

(PICTURE: Huyen with her mom, nephew and sister. Her sister didn't get much sleep.)

The following morning we arrived in Hue and were greeted by Huyen's sister and her fiance Tan. We all freshened up at the hotel and then went to Tan's house to meet his family. While we ate fruit and drank tea, Hoai and Tan handed everyone their wedding invitation. This was just one of many many things that was different than an American wedding. Usually in America we mail out our wedding invites. In Vietnam, not so much. In fact, more often than not, there are no wedding invitations. Usually Huyen is called on the phone and invited to weddings a few days prior to the ceremony taking place....but of course, this could all just be something Huyen told me because I wasn't really invited to the wedding.

(PICTURE: My wedding invitation.)


On our second day in Hue, Huyen's family and I did some sightseeing to different king's tombs. Seeing the tombs was great because I missed all of these sites the first time I was in Hue and it was fun to see how enthusiastic Huyen's grandfather was about the history of his country. Even more amazing was the opportunity to take funny pictures with statues:

A Nice Letter

I make fun of myself all the time on here so once in a while I get to toot my own horn. I received this really nice email the other day from one of my former students. It made me feel pretty darn good:

Hi Ben! How are you??? I'm Dai TRang- your student in pre-intermedate class which your last class you had taught before you came back USA. I'm sorry for I haven't kept in touch with you for a long time. I'm so so so sorry. DO you remember what I wrote in my first literary composition i gave you? I wrote that my biggest dream was go to USA to study. I always think that it's just my dream and never becomes true. But you know, there was a marvellousness happended to me. i had got a schoolarship 100% to study in high schol in USA in 1 year. After that i wil get others schoolarship to study in university in USA too. I can believe that i could do it. It will be exciting. I wanted to study in USA because of the way you taught us. YOu see, in vietnam, the teachers are very serious,unfriendly and keep space with their students. Opposite them, you are so friendly,easy, understand your student,always change the menthod to teach. Your class was very fun and made me interested in studying English. So I think that, all teachers in USA are like you and study in USA will be my new trial. But I afraid of Americans cann't understand what i say and so do i,I can't understand what they say in English!!!!!!! So what do you think I should do to improve my English. I did a lot of ways and now my speaking skill is better and i can speak english more confident.

You always is my best English teacher so thank you for helping me and makes me could reach my dream!!!!!

Best wishes,

Trang

P/s: I know i have many mistakes in this mail, i'm sorry! =)) I'm looking foward to seeing you soon.

A Trip In Pictures

You know you're having fun when you can't stop taking pictures. On our trip I took over 500 pictures. Here's about half of them...

Mary Travers

This is a sad moment for me. I just found out that Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary died. I grew up listening to Mary's sweet voice and still listen to her today. One of the first albums I gave to Huyen was Peter, Paul and Mary's Greatest Hits.

It's hard for me to think of the Civil Rights and anti-war movement without thinking of some of the songs Peter, Paul and Mary covered like "If I Had A Hammer", "Blowin' In The Wind", "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" and "The Times They Are A-Changing."

Rest in peace Mary Travers.

Myanmar: The End

Here's the final odds and ends from our trip to Myanmar:

Oddity #1: I've mentioned that it was hot more than a few times in my recent blogs. However, who knew that part of Mynmar was a desert! In Bagan there were cacti everywhere!

Oddity #2: There were these wooden chairs all over Bagan that were extremely comfortable. If I had the money and a place to put the chairs, I would have shipped a dozen of them to the states. These would make for amazing chairs for porches. Okay, that's not odd but these chairs rocked. What is odd is this woman transporting four of them.

Oddity #3: Under the category of things hanging from ceilings and banisters I have two example:

1. There were lighters always hanging from ceilings at tea shops. To me this is genius. Smokers don't need to carry around lighters or matches and shops don't need to worry about losing their lighters.

2. Many homes in Yangon had binder clips hanging from long strings attached to their windows/porches, etc. Basically instead of climbing down multiple flights of stairs, people would pull on the clips which would ring a bell in someone's house. The person in the house would then look out the window and pull up the string to grab whatever was attached. Often there were buckets attached to the string in case there were bigger things to pull up.

Oddity #4: There were American sized watermelons! The watermelons in Vietnam, are half the size of American watermelons.

Also in the fruit department: Myanmar had the best papaya I've ever tasted. I'm usually not a big papaya fan but the papayas in this country were absolutely delicious. Huyen and I ate one a day once we discovered how good they were.














Oddity #5: I read a lot about trains in Mynamar. The other day an anonymous person wrote a comment about taking the steam trains. Well, there were a few problems with this. First, I read that the trains are owned by the government so the money would go directly to the junta. Secondly, everyone said the trains were slower than the buses. Third and probably the biggest problem, WE SAW NO TRAINS! On one of our bus trips the highway ran parallel to the train tracks. We were literally 100 feet from the train tracks for 8 hours and not one train passed either way. I was convinced that there were actualy no trains in Myanmar until I saw this one on our last day there. This strain was going no more than 3 miles per hour and I'm pretty sure wasn't carrying any passengers.

Oddity #6: Perhaps the weirdest thing I ever saw was a Myanmar music video on a bus. As I've mentioned before, music videos on buses are the norm in southeast Asia. However, this one was strange because the lead singer was wearing a vintage Vancouver Canucks jersey. As a big hockey fan I recognized it right away and it just made no sense. I'm pretty sure nobody in Myanmar ever heard of the Vancouver Canucks (I'm still pissed they lost game 7 to the Rangers in '94). The only thing that made the jersey make any sense at all to me was when I saw this huge banner on the street in Yangon:

The banner is for field hockey but at least it is some sort of hockey.

Oddity #7: There are jars of public water all over Bagon. Who fills this water? And where is it coming from?

Oddity #8: I scream like a girl. While Huyen and I were riding bikes in Bagan we went to one temple that was completely empty. We decided to climb up to the top. We went into the temple and started to head up the staircase which was extremely dusty and covered in spider webs. Clearly nobody had been up it in a long time. Huyen, being the brave person she is, darted up the stairs. I followed her up and just as I was about to take my last step a mouse jumped out at me. I screamed louder than I'm pretty sure I've ever screamed. The mouse just came out of nowhere!!!



Oddity #9: I've also mentioned on occasion that the cars were all old and I'm pretty sure in junk yards at some point. Only once did we get in a car with electric windows. Many times though we got into cars with manual windows that were missing the crank. This taxi happened to have a crank which the driver handed to me when we got into the car. Gotta love Myanmar!!!