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!!!

Cheney For President!

I need to interrupt the final Myanmar posts for a moment. If Myanmar taught me anything it's that we can't have a repressive junta for a government in America. We need to have a true patriot in office. A true lover of freedom. Frankly, we need Dick Cheney! Check out Dick's new fantastic website and join Dick's twitter page.

8 years was not enough!

The Internet

I mentioned before how dreadfully slow the internet was in Myanmar. Besides the fact that my blog was inaccessible at internet cafes, it would have taken hours to write one blog entry. Be thankful for your connection wherever you are that you're able to watch this:

Tanaka

They took my sunscreen at the Bangkok airport because it was too big (don't worry, mom, not the one I bought in America. One I had bought in Bangkok.). This was unfortunate because Huyen's little bottle of sunscreen ran out after a few days and in case I haven't made this clear, Myanmar is HOT. We went to every pharmacy in Bagan and nobody had sunscreen. It was okay though, we decided to become locals and put on tanaka.

One thing you notice right away in Myanmar is that 99% of the women and probably 60% of the men wear mud-like cream on their face. We were told that it is called "tanaka" and that it: a) works as sunscreen b) makes your skin lighter c) cools your body d) makes you look younger. To the people of Myanmar it is the all-in-one cream.

Huyen and I decided to give the cream a shot. Huyen put it all over her face and looked like the Wicked Witch of The West.

I put on the cream and just looked idiotic. Luckily I sweated off the cream in a couple of hours.


Unluckily by sweating it off I got FRIED:

Perhaps the cream does work.

Bagan

(PICTURE: Bagan at sunset.)

Without a doubt, Bagan was my favorite place in Myanmar. The place was awesome and ranks up with my favorite sites in the world. Scattered over 42 square kilometers are thousands of temples, pagodas and stupas. Supposedly there were over 4,000 structures but due to earthquakes there are now only 3,000+. Regardless, everywhere you look you see temples.

Huyen and I arrived in Bagan around 2pm, rented bikes and headed out to get a taste of the area. We almost immiedately came upon a few empty pagodas and started to climb them. Here's me on my first pagoda:

Once I climbed to the top of that pagoda I realized that it was perhaps the smallest and most pathetic of all the 3,000+ pagodas. In the distance I could see so many more impressive ones.

The thing to do in Bagan is to find a temple and watch sunset. The first evening we were there it started to rain and the fast approaching lightning seemed like it would be a bad mix with climbing tall pointed structures. On the second night we went to the most popular sunset pagoda. Huyen and I made friends with some local kids who we bought sunflower seeds for. Befriending them allowed us to be the only tourists not harrassed to buy postcards. (PICTURE: Huyen and the local kids. Ignore the stuff on Huyen's face. That is tomorrow's blog!):

On the third night in Bagan, Huyen and I found our own pagoda and watch sunset by ourselves. It was pretty spectacular. We tried to capture the coolness of the moment by taking reflective sunglass picture shots. I think Huyen's is pretty cool.

Some other memorable things were riding through a local village and finding the spot in the river the locals played/bathed in:

In the morning, the female novices collected alms along the main street near our guest house.


On the first night we asked a local where the locals eat and he told us about a Myanmar salad shop. We ended up eating there three times in the next 72 hours. It was amazing. Here's the before and after shot from a meal where we ordered enough for four people...and finished it all (no need to post a comment about wondering why I didn't lose weight on the trip).

Mandalay Odds and Ends

Here's a few odds and ends from Mandalay:

The menu screen for our television in our hotel room was set for Vietnamese. It was the only Vietnamese person/place/thing we saw in Myanmar.

My absolute favorite street food was in Mandalay. I happen to love Indian breads so what could be better than hot naan being made in front of you? We soaked up some delicious curries with the bread...more evidence that my stomach is becoming a rock in southeast Asia. Who can eat street curry without becoming sick (yeah, yeah, yeah...we'll all have a good laugh when I have a gigantic parasite extracted from me in a few months)?

Nearly every restaurant/hotel/building had a generator in it for the constant black outs. I don't know much about generators but perhaps the power would go out less in the country if there weren't millions of generators soaking up energy. But again, I know nothing about generators so perhaps that is an idiotic thing to say.

Here's a picture of my favorite road-side toilet. Trust me there is no irony in that statement. That said, I'm pretty sure the porcelain urinal serves no purpose and I could have just peed in the hole behind it.

One afternoon Huyen and I went to a market and bought a bunch of fruit. We bought a grapefruit from a lady who jokingly put the skin on her head. I took the skin from her and put it on Huyen's head which caused all the vendors to laugh hysterically. One of the vendors then called for her daughter to come outside to see the amazing joke I had done. The daughter -- six years old tops -- walked out and immediately started to cry when she saw me. She then took off her sandal and THREW IT AT ME. I think having a sandal thrown at me is officially the first thing that George Bush and I have in common besides our nationality.