(This is going
to be part 1 of 2 - 3; we'll see how it goes. Also, I apologise for
once again neglecting posting here. I'll try to be better at posting
regular small stories, and not just occasional, massive reports. But
for now - )
I’M BACK FROM BURMA, BABY!
I loved it. I’ve got severe sunburn, at least twenty mosquito bites, half a dozen blisters, and a skinned thigh, and I did something mysterious and regrettable to my right foot; I managed to rip my trousers, broke my bag, and God knows what I did to my Andropad, which has taken to only displaying a sad little web of jagged lines. And I spent most of Thursday lying down and groaning faintly with the second-worst case of food poisoning I’ve ever had. And I don’t even care. I smell like ADVENTURE and also bug spray.
I was there with my friend P. for a week – her second trip, my first. I really like the feel of Rangoon. It reminds me of some of the other cities I’ve visited in this region: it’s sort of a blend of Kathmandu and Bangalore, with a mix of shiny new urban amenities and tucked-away backstreet neighbourhoods where people live in run-down traditional buildings and conduct most of their daily lives out in the street. The pace is relaxed, people are friendly, and a lot of the physical culture – food, clothes, smells, languages – is oddly but comfortingly familiar, given the amount of time I’ve spent working with people from Burma on the border. To be honest, I was a bit worried about finally visiting Burma; it would have been unsettling if I'd finally seen the country I've been working on for more than a year now, and hadn't felt any connection to it in person, or had actively disliked the experience. But (as Liz reminded me when I was fretting) you can't pass judgement on a place just from a brief visit, and the day-to-day experience of being somewhere doesn't necessarily mean anything about your relationship with its politics and its people in a more abstract way. Luckily, though, I ended up enjoying the hell out of it. :)
Right now, there’s a flood of Westerners into Rangoon (NGO types, businesspeople, backpackers, and even folks on package tours), but our presence is still new enough that the typical reaction of people on the street is just, “Oh, hey, look, a honky,” rather than anything more intense or demanding. (The best instance of this was when a guy cradling a chicken as if it were a pet and I ended up staring placidly at each other, each of us clearly thinking, “Well, there’s something you don’t see every day.”) Unfortunately, rush of tourists + lack of existing facilities = staying in Rangoon is incredibly expensive right now – we’re talking close to Western prices (although the places you can stay are rather better than you’d get in the States). I understand that things are a little cheaper in the few places foreigners are allowed to go outside of the city (like Bagan and Mandalay), but we stuck to Rangoon. And I’m glad we did – there’s definitely enough of the city to fill a week!
We arrived on Sunday afternoon, and some of P.’s friends met us at the airport, helped us find our hotel and get settled in (the hotel won me over instantly by giving us glasses of orange squash when we checked in, because I can be bought pathetically easily for free food), and warned us away from the lousy exchange rate at the hotel, taking us instead to a shaded portico under one of Rangoon’s busiest street markets, where a fat, sleek man in a lungi examined our dollar bills minutely (they won’t accept any that have even the slightest tear or crease) before giving us kyat for them. And then P.’s friends took us out for Arakan food (Arakan being one of Burma’s many ethnic minorities).
WARNING: The next few paragraphs may be highly disturbing to animal lovers. If you don’t want to read this section, look for the next bolded statement, and I’ll tell you when it’s safe to come back.
And that’s how I ate jungle cat.
I just want a couple of things on record here: 1) I didn’t order it; our friends ordered everything for us and only explained the dishes when they arrived, and 2) JUNGLE cat, not domestic kitteh. (Then again, given that jungle cat is bordering on being a threatened species, that probably makes it worse…) I did feel conflicted about it nonetheless. But since it was there anyway, and my eating it or not wasn’t going to do anything to affect the continuation of the practice – and since I didn’t want to offend our hosts – I had a bite. I guess curiosity got the better of me. Yes, I am aware of the irony.
In addition, we had some gorgeous grilled squid, fish cakes in sauce, salad with sesame dressing, and something our hosts only identified as “bird”. It was all really good. Arakan food tends to be spicy and oily, something that puts a lot of people off, but that I love.
Okay, you can start reading again!
P. had some other friends to meet with on Monday, so I headed out on my own to explore. I took a stroll from our hotel along the back streets, where Westerners are still rare enough that everyone stares openly, and if you encounter another Westerner, you do that funny little, “I see you are a honky! I, too, am a honky!” nod that no one in Thailand does anymore. Along the way, I came across this little pagoda (Buddhist temple – what we’d call a wat in Thailand):
Which contained the world’s most fabulous former abbot:
My destination was Shwe Dagon Pagoda, which is, and I don’t say this lightly, MASSIVE. You ascend hundreds of steps to reach a complex of shrines and monastic halls that’s more like a village than a temple.
The closest thing I ever remember seeing was Sri Meenkasi temple in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India, although that was even huger – it felt like a small city. Unlike Hindu temples, though, Buddhist temples don’t tend to be arranged in layers around an inner sanctum; there’s usually a central stupa, and there may be an inner courtyard and an outer courtyard (where you get people selling souvenirs and devotional goods like candles and flowers), but within that, the arrangement of shrines feels a lot more haphazard.
And the worship is more individual and casual, as well. Here and there, you’ll see people pouring cups of water over the Buddha statue representing the day of their birth, or bowing down in front of individual shrines, but you’ll also see them eating, drinking, and napping out of the sun.
It was inside one of the shrines that I ran into a middle-aged local guy in a lunghi, who showed me around that shrine and a couple others, patiently explaining the identities of the statues (mostly famous Buddhist monks and mystics from the Burma area, all of whom reached great ages) and pointing out that the pretty fan-shaped pool in one of the sanctuaries was supposed to be shaped like the Buddha’s footprint. He also asked me the usual questions: where was I from? Was I travelling alone?
After a minute, he looked me up and down approvingly. “You are very fat!”
Thank you?
Actually, it always cracks me up when people from Burma do that, because they absolutely don’t mean any harm by it. At worst, it’s a neutral observation, like, “Oh, you’re very tall!” At best, it’s actually a compliment – “You’re clearly doing well for yourself! Good for you!”
After a few shrines, he placidly waved me to a shaded corner. “It’s too hot.” We flopped out on the cool tiles, and he asked to see my palm.
“You will live very long,” he murmured, then turned my hand, curling it to count the lines along the edge. “But spinster.” Suddenly worried he might have upset me, he asked, “You like spinster? Is it okay, spinster?”
I laughed. “Yeah, it’s okay! No problem! As long as I live long!”
In the next shrine – a cool, circular building with an elaborately carved teak Buddha – I met a young student from one of the nearby villages, who had come all the way into Rangoon to make merit at the temple on behalf of his family. He told me he was very interested in studying English, and we ended up talking about Buddhist tradition, and then about our respective countries. “Obama came to visit Burma. It was very good for our country, sister,” he said, then added wistfully, “I think your country is very rich.”
“Very rich, but also has many people who are very poor.”
He nodded sagely. That’s not exactly a foreign concept to people in Burma, either.
I also ran into a solemn-faced young man from Arakan State, who had once been a tour guide there before the current conflict between ethnic Arakanese Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims dried up tourism for the foreseeable future. “Many people,” he said, “tour guides, boat operators, hotel owners – they are leaving because they have no more work.” He showed me a hidden-away observation post, where you can look through binoculars at the very tip of the enormous golden stupa, and see that it’s studded with diamonds, and completely covered in bells. It’s rather cool to have a secret view of something that’s technically in plain sight.
Afterwards, I took a stroll around the gardens, and along the edge of the park, and discovered Happy World:
(Enjoy your nightmares, kids!)
I also found the awesome Maha Wisara Pagoda, with a circular inner sanctum (unusual for Buddhist temples, as I said), decorated elaborately as a kind of world tree, with the constellations picked out in lights on the ceiling:
That night, we met up with P.’s friends again for – guess what? – more Arakanese food, including seaweed salad and cold jellyfish (tastes good, but I’m not nuts about the texture, I have to say), and some strange shellfish the size and shape of a walnut whip: you have to suck on one end until the meat pops out, and don’t even bother, guys, because every conceivable joke about this has already been made. :) Oh, and avocado shakes with sugar. Which… yeah, taste about as strange as you’re imagining, but are surprisingly addictive.
We were at a big, popular outdoor restaurant, and towards the end of the meal, a troupe of dragon dancers (because this was still the tail end of Chinese New Year) rolled up in the back of a truck, and about five of them got out and ran straight up to the kitchen staff. There was an intense conversation of about ten minutes, and then the dancers left with armfuls of whole coconuts and huge grins on their faces. When they arrived back at the truck, there was a mighty cheer, and the whole troupe drove away, drumming ecstatically as they went.
I just… what?
On Tuesday, P. and I headed out to explore the city together, starting with a stroll down by the docks. It was nice, because tourists clearly never go down there; the dock workers and the women selling noodles and betel nut (packets of which are sealed with lime – not the fruit, but the chemical – in Burma) by the side of the harbour gave us some odd looks, but smiled back if we smiled, and generally left us alone. P. pointed out that the river, with its choppy brown waters lined with palm trees and the endless rows of workers carrying sacks of rice by hand onto low barges, probably matches most Westerners’ mental pictures of, say, Malaysia or Thailand much better than those actual places do.
We got some amazing fresh pineapple, sprinkled with lime (the fruit, this time) and salt, from a roadside stall, then jumped over the harbour wall (well, P. jumped, I sort of… climbed down her) and struck out towards the centre of town and Sule Pagoda, the major downtown temple. On the way, we stopped at a lavish Chinese temple that was decked out for New Year:
We got a bit lost along the way, but fell in with a young Burmese guy in stylish sunglasses who was going in that direction, and he offered to show us. On the walk, he ended up telling us most of his life story: he was an orphan who’d lived in a monastery for eight years, and now was studying Burmese poetry in university. “I have written over a hundred poems in the Burmese language, and someday, I hope they will be translated into English – to spread all over the world!” He eventually led us to one of Rangoon’s main streets, where P. and I sat and watched people get on and off buses for a bit. This sounds odd, I know, but here are a few things you have to understand about buses in Rangoon:
When we got tired of being mildly sadistic voyeurs :), we walked down to Independence Park. You see, when P. was in Rangoon last year, Independence Park was closed to the public and kept under heavy armed guard. Now, it’s open – for a fee. So you can have your independence now, but you have to pay for it. :)
Still, it was nice to sit in the garden and enjoy the shade. On the far side of the park, I got my palm read again – properly this time – and apparently, I’ll be married and extremely wealthy within five years. If I offer the Buddha five candles and a white umbrella. Or something.
From there, we went to tour around Sule Pagoda, which has the same kind of magnificently spangled shrines (some with disco lighting!) as Shwe Dagon, but is smaller. It’s also less full of tourists from other parts of Burma, being the city’s everyday temple, while Shwe Dagon is more of a pilgrimage site.
And there, we ran into the same guide who had taken P. and her friend around Rangoon last year. He’s a spritely, scholarly old man in a bright purple lungi, and he is unmitigatedly awesome. He immediately showed me how to offer water at the shrine representing the day of my birth – I was born on Monday, which means that my animal is the tiger and my planet is the moon. (Animals for other days include the dragon, the elephant, and the one P. is irate about being stuck with – the guinea pig. :D) You pour five cups – for the Buddha, dharma (rules/scriptures), sangha (monastic system), your parents, and your teacher – over the head of the Buddha statue, than an additional five over the head of your guardian animal. Our guide told me as I went, “For Christians, this is like the Jesus, the Bible, the bishop, your parents, and your teacher!”
After that, P. asked our guide to take us somewhere interesting that would still let us get back in time to meet a friend for dinner, so he brought us up to the shore of Inya Lake, where we walked along in the baking heat while he told us how student protestors had been gunned down on that spot in 1988 as they desperately tried to jump in the lake to escape.
Nowadays, the slopes leading up to the lake are peaceful and beautifully manicured – eerily deserted in the sun, but once you reach the pine groves at the end of the promenade, you can hear guitar music and see loads of young students flopped out in the shade.
We happened to be there on the day of an ethnic festival, showcasing the food and crafts of the various ethnic minorities of Burma. Including, as it turned out, the ethnic honky tribe: as soon as P. and I sat down on a bench, we instantly became the star attraction. One young woman from a group of about thirty students asked if she could have her picture taken with us, and before we knew it, ALL of them were queuing up to sit down, drape themselves over us (this is a Burma thing, at least between women, so I wasn’t taken by surprise), and throw a peace sign to the camera. And then do it again in different configurations. And then once more for luck. Somehow, it kept getting funnier as it went. I’ve been pulled into strangers’ vacation photos before (mostly in India), but never quite like this. “And here, at the ethnic festival, we encountered the Honky people, in their traditional costume of obscure print t-shirts and livid sunburns…”
After we left the festival, our guide beckoned to us, and started leading us up the side of the lake.
“Wait, where are we going?” P. asked.
He glanced back at us. “Aung San Suu Kyi’s house.”
YEAH.
It took us almost an hour – by which time my feet were screaming and I looked like a lobster – but it was worth it just to say we did it. The house itself isn’t terribly exciting, because you can’t see much; you can peep around the edge of a closed gate (bedecked with NLD flags) enough to catch a glimpse of the house and car, but that’s it.
We also passed the new American consulate, which is, I can say with all my heart… hideous. It’s a concrete monstrosity that looks like the 70s threw up. I would show you, but let’s just say that the guard was, erm, less than happy when I tried to snap a picture. :)
That evening, P. and I met up with a friend of ours from Chiang Mai, M., who recently moved to Rangoon to join her boyfriend. It was awesome, because I’d forgotten how much fun M. is. (And she, in turn, was so relieved to be able to spend the reserve of horribly inappropriate jokes she’d been saving up for months, unable to tell them to any of her polite, strictly correct friends in Burma!) We started out by going for – what else? – Arakan food, finding a tiny restaurant down one of the side streets. It turned out to be their opening night, so they were delighted to see us. We started with bowls of Arakan noodles (spicy vermicelli with chunks of onion bhaji), and then went by the incredibly sophisticated method of, well, ordering anything we saw someone else eating. :) We ended up with more spicy noodles, huge salads, and a gorgeous green chicken curry soup, and M. made friends with the owner – it turns out that the restaurant is his turning-lemons-into-lemonade move after he lost his work visa in Singapore, where he’d been for years. Judging by the first night, I think he may have a success on his hands.
Afterwards, we sat on plastic chairs pretty much right in the street, in front of one of the noodle shops, and drank Myanmar Beer with straws as we grilled M. about her new life. It’s exciting, but nothing is as easy as in Thailand, she told us. Motorbikes are banned inside Rangoon, so transport mostly means taxis, unless you have a Burmese speaker with you; rent is through the roof; even getting food is a bit more complicated. “The street food is sometimes fine, but sometimes it really, really isn’t. Did you notice how some of the meat has that nice, shiny glaze on it? Yeah – cooking oil is really expensive, so some vendors melt plastic bags into it to make it last longer, and make the food prettier.” And M. has her boyfriend, who’s a local, to help her; she said that she can’t imagine trying to navigate the system if you were moving to Rangoon on your own.
But for all that, she’s enjoying it. It’s a bigger, livelier place than Chiang Mai, with access to certain things you can’t really get in Thailand (Indian bakeries!). And Rangoon is starting to open up. I remember M. surveying the street, and saying, “What’s great isn’t so much that you see so many people out late – it’s that so many of them are women.” She gestured with her bottle. “Look at those two girls – they came home from work and just decided to go out together, and that’s safe. And over there – the woman in the short skirt. It’s happening. It’s slow, but it’s happening.”
I’M BACK FROM BURMA, BABY!
I loved it. I’ve got severe sunburn, at least twenty mosquito bites, half a dozen blisters, and a skinned thigh, and I did something mysterious and regrettable to my right foot; I managed to rip my trousers, broke my bag, and God knows what I did to my Andropad, which has taken to only displaying a sad little web of jagged lines. And I spent most of Thursday lying down and groaning faintly with the second-worst case of food poisoning I’ve ever had. And I don’t even care. I smell like ADVENTURE and also bug spray.
I was there with my friend P. for a week – her second trip, my first. I really like the feel of Rangoon. It reminds me of some of the other cities I’ve visited in this region: it’s sort of a blend of Kathmandu and Bangalore, with a mix of shiny new urban amenities and tucked-away backstreet neighbourhoods where people live in run-down traditional buildings and conduct most of their daily lives out in the street. The pace is relaxed, people are friendly, and a lot of the physical culture – food, clothes, smells, languages – is oddly but comfortingly familiar, given the amount of time I’ve spent working with people from Burma on the border. To be honest, I was a bit worried about finally visiting Burma; it would have been unsettling if I'd finally seen the country I've been working on for more than a year now, and hadn't felt any connection to it in person, or had actively disliked the experience. But (as Liz reminded me when I was fretting) you can't pass judgement on a place just from a brief visit, and the day-to-day experience of being somewhere doesn't necessarily mean anything about your relationship with its politics and its people in a more abstract way. Luckily, though, I ended up enjoying the hell out of it. :)
Right now, there’s a flood of Westerners into Rangoon (NGO types, businesspeople, backpackers, and even folks on package tours), but our presence is still new enough that the typical reaction of people on the street is just, “Oh, hey, look, a honky,” rather than anything more intense or demanding. (The best instance of this was when a guy cradling a chicken as if it were a pet and I ended up staring placidly at each other, each of us clearly thinking, “Well, there’s something you don’t see every day.”) Unfortunately, rush of tourists + lack of existing facilities = staying in Rangoon is incredibly expensive right now – we’re talking close to Western prices (although the places you can stay are rather better than you’d get in the States). I understand that things are a little cheaper in the few places foreigners are allowed to go outside of the city (like Bagan and Mandalay), but we stuck to Rangoon. And I’m glad we did – there’s definitely enough of the city to fill a week!
We arrived on Sunday afternoon, and some of P.’s friends met us at the airport, helped us find our hotel and get settled in (the hotel won me over instantly by giving us glasses of orange squash when we checked in, because I can be bought pathetically easily for free food), and warned us away from the lousy exchange rate at the hotel, taking us instead to a shaded portico under one of Rangoon’s busiest street markets, where a fat, sleek man in a lungi examined our dollar bills minutely (they won’t accept any that have even the slightest tear or crease) before giving us kyat for them. And then P.’s friends took us out for Arakan food (Arakan being one of Burma’s many ethnic minorities).
WARNING: The next few paragraphs may be highly disturbing to animal lovers. If you don’t want to read this section, look for the next bolded statement, and I’ll tell you when it’s safe to come back.
And that’s how I ate jungle cat.
I just want a couple of things on record here: 1) I didn’t order it; our friends ordered everything for us and only explained the dishes when they arrived, and 2) JUNGLE cat, not domestic kitteh. (Then again, given that jungle cat is bordering on being a threatened species, that probably makes it worse…) I did feel conflicted about it nonetheless. But since it was there anyway, and my eating it or not wasn’t going to do anything to affect the continuation of the practice – and since I didn’t want to offend our hosts – I had a bite. I guess curiosity got the better of me. Yes, I am aware of the irony.
In addition, we had some gorgeous grilled squid, fish cakes in sauce, salad with sesame dressing, and something our hosts only identified as “bird”. It was all really good. Arakan food tends to be spicy and oily, something that puts a lot of people off, but that I love.
Okay, you can start reading again!
P. had some other friends to meet with on Monday, so I headed out on my own to explore. I took a stroll from our hotel along the back streets, where Westerners are still rare enough that everyone stares openly, and if you encounter another Westerner, you do that funny little, “I see you are a honky! I, too, am a honky!” nod that no one in Thailand does anymore. Along the way, I came across this little pagoda (Buddhist temple – what we’d call a wat in Thailand):
Which contained the world’s most fabulous former abbot:
My destination was Shwe Dagon Pagoda, which is, and I don’t say this lightly, MASSIVE. You ascend hundreds of steps to reach a complex of shrines and monastic halls that’s more like a village than a temple.
The closest thing I ever remember seeing was Sri Meenkasi temple in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India, although that was even huger – it felt like a small city. Unlike Hindu temples, though, Buddhist temples don’t tend to be arranged in layers around an inner sanctum; there’s usually a central stupa, and there may be an inner courtyard and an outer courtyard (where you get people selling souvenirs and devotional goods like candles and flowers), but within that, the arrangement of shrines feels a lot more haphazard.
And the worship is more individual and casual, as well. Here and there, you’ll see people pouring cups of water over the Buddha statue representing the day of their birth, or bowing down in front of individual shrines, but you’ll also see them eating, drinking, and napping out of the sun.
It was inside one of the shrines that I ran into a middle-aged local guy in a lunghi, who showed me around that shrine and a couple others, patiently explaining the identities of the statues (mostly famous Buddhist monks and mystics from the Burma area, all of whom reached great ages) and pointing out that the pretty fan-shaped pool in one of the sanctuaries was supposed to be shaped like the Buddha’s footprint. He also asked me the usual questions: where was I from? Was I travelling alone?
After a minute, he looked me up and down approvingly. “You are very fat!”
Thank you?
Actually, it always cracks me up when people from Burma do that, because they absolutely don’t mean any harm by it. At worst, it’s a neutral observation, like, “Oh, you’re very tall!” At best, it’s actually a compliment – “You’re clearly doing well for yourself! Good for you!”
After a few shrines, he placidly waved me to a shaded corner. “It’s too hot.” We flopped out on the cool tiles, and he asked to see my palm.
“You will live very long,” he murmured, then turned my hand, curling it to count the lines along the edge. “But spinster.” Suddenly worried he might have upset me, he asked, “You like spinster? Is it okay, spinster?”
I laughed. “Yeah, it’s okay! No problem! As long as I live long!”
In the next shrine – a cool, circular building with an elaborately carved teak Buddha – I met a young student from one of the nearby villages, who had come all the way into Rangoon to make merit at the temple on behalf of his family. He told me he was very interested in studying English, and we ended up talking about Buddhist tradition, and then about our respective countries. “Obama came to visit Burma. It was very good for our country, sister,” he said, then added wistfully, “I think your country is very rich.”
“Very rich, but also has many people who are very poor.”
He nodded sagely. That’s not exactly a foreign concept to people in Burma, either.
I also ran into a solemn-faced young man from Arakan State, who had once been a tour guide there before the current conflict between ethnic Arakanese Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims dried up tourism for the foreseeable future. “Many people,” he said, “tour guides, boat operators, hotel owners – they are leaving because they have no more work.” He showed me a hidden-away observation post, where you can look through binoculars at the very tip of the enormous golden stupa, and see that it’s studded with diamonds, and completely covered in bells. It’s rather cool to have a secret view of something that’s technically in plain sight.
Afterwards, I took a stroll around the gardens, and along the edge of the park, and discovered Happy World:
(Enjoy your nightmares, kids!)
I also found the awesome Maha Wisara Pagoda, with a circular inner sanctum (unusual for Buddhist temples, as I said), decorated elaborately as a kind of world tree, with the constellations picked out in lights on the ceiling:
That night, we met up with P.’s friends again for – guess what? – more Arakanese food, including seaweed salad and cold jellyfish (tastes good, but I’m not nuts about the texture, I have to say), and some strange shellfish the size and shape of a walnut whip: you have to suck on one end until the meat pops out, and don’t even bother, guys, because every conceivable joke about this has already been made. :) Oh, and avocado shakes with sugar. Which… yeah, taste about as strange as you’re imagining, but are surprisingly addictive.
We were at a big, popular outdoor restaurant, and towards the end of the meal, a troupe of dragon dancers (because this was still the tail end of Chinese New Year) rolled up in the back of a truck, and about five of them got out and ran straight up to the kitchen staff. There was an intense conversation of about ten minutes, and then the dancers left with armfuls of whole coconuts and huge grins on their faces. When they arrived back at the truck, there was a mighty cheer, and the whole troupe drove away, drumming ecstatically as they went.
I just… what?
On Tuesday, P. and I headed out to explore the city together, starting with a stroll down by the docks. It was nice, because tourists clearly never go down there; the dock workers and the women selling noodles and betel nut (packets of which are sealed with lime – not the fruit, but the chemical – in Burma) by the side of the harbour gave us some odd looks, but smiled back if we smiled, and generally left us alone. P. pointed out that the river, with its choppy brown waters lined with palm trees and the endless rows of workers carrying sacks of rice by hand onto low barges, probably matches most Westerners’ mental pictures of, say, Malaysia or Thailand much better than those actual places do.
We got some amazing fresh pineapple, sprinkled with lime (the fruit, this time) and salt, from a roadside stall, then jumped over the harbour wall (well, P. jumped, I sort of… climbed down her) and struck out towards the centre of town and Sule Pagoda, the major downtown temple. On the way, we stopped at a lavish Chinese temple that was decked out for New Year:
We got a bit lost along the way, but fell in with a young Burmese guy in stylish sunglasses who was going in that direction, and he offered to show us. On the walk, he ended up telling us most of his life story: he was an orphan who’d lived in a monastery for eight years, and now was studying Burmese poetry in university. “I have written over a hundred poems in the Burmese language, and someday, I hope they will be translated into English – to spread all over the world!” He eventually led us to one of Rangoon’s main streets, where P. and I sat and watched people get on and off buses for a bit. This sounds odd, I know, but here are a few things you have to understand about buses in Rangoon:
- They are all run by different companies, so they have no consistent numbering;
- Your only hope of figuring out where the bus is going is the fact that the conductor leans out and shouts a series of stops at auctioneer speeds;
- They do not stop.
When we got tired of being mildly sadistic voyeurs :), we walked down to Independence Park. You see, when P. was in Rangoon last year, Independence Park was closed to the public and kept under heavy armed guard. Now, it’s open – for a fee. So you can have your independence now, but you have to pay for it. :)
Still, it was nice to sit in the garden and enjoy the shade. On the far side of the park, I got my palm read again – properly this time – and apparently, I’ll be married and extremely wealthy within five years. If I offer the Buddha five candles and a white umbrella. Or something.
From there, we went to tour around Sule Pagoda, which has the same kind of magnificently spangled shrines (some with disco lighting!) as Shwe Dagon, but is smaller. It’s also less full of tourists from other parts of Burma, being the city’s everyday temple, while Shwe Dagon is more of a pilgrimage site.
And there, we ran into the same guide who had taken P. and her friend around Rangoon last year. He’s a spritely, scholarly old man in a bright purple lungi, and he is unmitigatedly awesome. He immediately showed me how to offer water at the shrine representing the day of my birth – I was born on Monday, which means that my animal is the tiger and my planet is the moon. (Animals for other days include the dragon, the elephant, and the one P. is irate about being stuck with – the guinea pig. :D) You pour five cups – for the Buddha, dharma (rules/scriptures), sangha (monastic system), your parents, and your teacher – over the head of the Buddha statue, than an additional five over the head of your guardian animal. Our guide told me as I went, “For Christians, this is like the Jesus, the Bible, the bishop, your parents, and your teacher!”
After that, P. asked our guide to take us somewhere interesting that would still let us get back in time to meet a friend for dinner, so he brought us up to the shore of Inya Lake, where we walked along in the baking heat while he told us how student protestors had been gunned down on that spot in 1988 as they desperately tried to jump in the lake to escape.
Nowadays, the slopes leading up to the lake are peaceful and beautifully manicured – eerily deserted in the sun, but once you reach the pine groves at the end of the promenade, you can hear guitar music and see loads of young students flopped out in the shade.
We happened to be there on the day of an ethnic festival, showcasing the food and crafts of the various ethnic minorities of Burma. Including, as it turned out, the ethnic honky tribe: as soon as P. and I sat down on a bench, we instantly became the star attraction. One young woman from a group of about thirty students asked if she could have her picture taken with us, and before we knew it, ALL of them were queuing up to sit down, drape themselves over us (this is a Burma thing, at least between women, so I wasn’t taken by surprise), and throw a peace sign to the camera. And then do it again in different configurations. And then once more for luck. Somehow, it kept getting funnier as it went. I’ve been pulled into strangers’ vacation photos before (mostly in India), but never quite like this. “And here, at the ethnic festival, we encountered the Honky people, in their traditional costume of obscure print t-shirts and livid sunburns…”
After we left the festival, our guide beckoned to us, and started leading us up the side of the lake.
“Wait, where are we going?” P. asked.
He glanced back at us. “Aung San Suu Kyi’s house.”
YEAH.
It took us almost an hour – by which time my feet were screaming and I looked like a lobster – but it was worth it just to say we did it. The house itself isn’t terribly exciting, because you can’t see much; you can peep around the edge of a closed gate (bedecked with NLD flags) enough to catch a glimpse of the house and car, but that’s it.
We also passed the new American consulate, which is, I can say with all my heart… hideous. It’s a concrete monstrosity that looks like the 70s threw up. I would show you, but let’s just say that the guard was, erm, less than happy when I tried to snap a picture. :)
That evening, P. and I met up with a friend of ours from Chiang Mai, M., who recently moved to Rangoon to join her boyfriend. It was awesome, because I’d forgotten how much fun M. is. (And she, in turn, was so relieved to be able to spend the reserve of horribly inappropriate jokes she’d been saving up for months, unable to tell them to any of her polite, strictly correct friends in Burma!) We started out by going for – what else? – Arakan food, finding a tiny restaurant down one of the side streets. It turned out to be their opening night, so they were delighted to see us. We started with bowls of Arakan noodles (spicy vermicelli with chunks of onion bhaji), and then went by the incredibly sophisticated method of, well, ordering anything we saw someone else eating. :) We ended up with more spicy noodles, huge salads, and a gorgeous green chicken curry soup, and M. made friends with the owner – it turns out that the restaurant is his turning-lemons-into-lemonade move after he lost his work visa in Singapore, where he’d been for years. Judging by the first night, I think he may have a success on his hands.
Afterwards, we sat on plastic chairs pretty much right in the street, in front of one of the noodle shops, and drank Myanmar Beer with straws as we grilled M. about her new life. It’s exciting, but nothing is as easy as in Thailand, she told us. Motorbikes are banned inside Rangoon, so transport mostly means taxis, unless you have a Burmese speaker with you; rent is through the roof; even getting food is a bit more complicated. “The street food is sometimes fine, but sometimes it really, really isn’t. Did you notice how some of the meat has that nice, shiny glaze on it? Yeah – cooking oil is really expensive, so some vendors melt plastic bags into it to make it last longer, and make the food prettier.” And M. has her boyfriend, who’s a local, to help her; she said that she can’t imagine trying to navigate the system if you were moving to Rangoon on your own.
But for all that, she’s enjoying it. It’s a bigger, livelier place than Chiang Mai, with access to certain things you can’t really get in Thailand (Indian bakeries!). And Rangoon is starting to open up. I remember M. surveying the street, and saying, “What’s great isn’t so much that you see so many people out late – it’s that so many of them are women.” She gestured with her bottle. “Look at those two girls – they came home from work and just decided to go out together, and that’s safe. And over there – the woman in the short skirt. It’s happening. It’s slow, but it’s happening.”
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