Burma at Last, Part II: Everything Is Broken

(Part 2 of 3)

You see, I've been giving these posts names that are twists on the titles of famous books about Burma (with The River of Lost Footsteps by Thant Myint-U inspiring the title of the first post), but I didn't have to change ANYTHING about the title of Emma Larkin's Everything Is Broken to get it to fit this post.

 

More below the cut:

 

 

Tuesday had kind of taken its toll on me:  I’d twisted my foot, somehow, so that putting pressure on it wrong sent stabs of pain along the bones; my skin was fried; the zipper on my bag was busted; I was blistered and mosquito-bitten and generally feeling a bit sorry for myself when I woke up Wednesday morning.  But I’d arranged to go out all day on Wednesday with our local guide, so I dragged my sorry ass down to the local supermarket – which had a shop, I kid you not, called Fatherland – and loaded up on plasters and sprays and the oddly specific SPF 81 suncream.  When I got back, the guide was waiting in the lobby.

“I hurt my foot yesterday,” I whinged.  “Can we go slow today?”

He grinned maniacally.  “Yes, we walk a lot yesterday.  It’s good for your health!”  And he swatted my thigh with a rolled-up newspaper.  Yeesh. :)

We strolled through one of the strange, mixed neighbourhoods that dot Rangoon – huge new hotels run by the South Korean government and chichi Japanese food stores (including one called “Kawaii Foods”)...


B-but senpai, the rare species of anime fangirl can only subsist on the most kawaii of uguu foods, desu!

... interspersed with beautiful, but run-down, old buildings with rusted wrought-iron grates and long ropes hanging down from the upper stories, with clothespins attached to hold money on the way down, or bags of food from street vendors on the way back up.  (Margaret tells me you can see something similar in Istanbul.)  On the way, a taxi came careening out of nowhere and nearly took out my guide, who stared angrily after it and muttered, in Burmese, “Go f*** your mother.”  Now, that’s one of about four Burmese phrases I actually know, so I had a huge grin on my face… until I realised that, yeaaaaah, he’d probably be really embarrassed if he knew I understood him. :D

From there, we grabbed a city bus – GO GO GO! – allllll the way out of town, to the famous River Pagoda.  On the way, my guide started talking – in hushed tones at first, then more confidently as we left the city limits.  About politics:  “Not everything has changed, but Myanmar people are very well satisfied with Aung San Suu Kyi.”  About foreign investment – this office bloc was owned by the Japanese, that one by South Korea, and further out were areas where hundreds of local people had been forced out to make way for Chinese-run mega-development projects.  And about history.  I commented at one point that the university we passed was very far from the city, and he murmured, “After ’88, the government spread the universities very far apart.  It’s to keep the students from ever coming together again.”

It was an interesting experience to ride the bus that far out of town, especially as we kept running into commuting schoolkids (going home for lunch, going back to school, leaving for the day, etc.).  At several points, younger people would offer my guide a seat – which isn’t unheard of in the West, certainly, but what struck me here was that there was no fuss about it, no, “Oh, are you sure?”, just a quick smile and nod.  It was the natural order of things.  And often my guide would, equally smoothly, reach out to take a package from someone who was standing and hold it on his lap for them.  (At one point, he actually started rifling through a young schoolteacher’s bag to show me things like a typical Burmese lunchbox, which admittedly did open up the question of whether this was a cultural difference or a case of my guide being a jerk. :))

The River Pagoda is pretty in itself, but it’s really more the experience of visiting it than the temple buildings themselves that’s worthwhile.  You see, the pagoda was actually built on a rock in the middle of the river.



It can only be reached by boat (and tourists can only take the tourist speedboat; apparently, they don’t want to be responsible if your stupid honky butt falls off the local boat :)).



You then leave your shoes in the boat, because the entire rock is sacred and your feet need to be bare out of respect.  The remarkable thing is that, despite its location, the pagoda has apparently never flooded – even when the villages on either bank, which sit much higher, were almost swept away.  Farfetched legend?  Marvels of ancient engineering?  Divine protection?  Who knows – but I’d give some credence to the second one, given that Angkor Wat has also been built so that it never floods (seriously, look it up).



One of the main attractions of the River Pagoda is the chance to feed sweet popcorn to the ABSURDLY HUGE AND FEROCIOUS fish.  I’ve been to temples where worshippers drop some fish food for the koi in placid, picturesque lakes.  This was not that.  These things were prehistoric and fierce, with flattened heads like manta rays’ and nasty rows of teeth, and they were swarming on the windward side of the rock, causing the murky water to boil.  I rather liked it; if you’re going to get good karma out of fish-feeding, there should be some danger involved. :)


Vague but appropriately ominous image of fins...

The other cool thing about the River Pagoda is the murals on the walls, depicting the punishments for different sins in Buddhist hell.  (Which you may remember from my magical mystery tour through Bang Saen.)  These aren’t nearly as graphic as the Bang Saen statues; in fact, they’re rather beautiful.  My guide pointed out each one, and explained the sin involved, like murder or lack of respect for your husband (which gets smacked down pretty harshly, I have to say, although from the illustration, ‘lack of respect’ seems to translate to ‘chopping his head off with a huge scimitar', so that’s fair enough).  At the end of the row, he pointed to a panel showing corrupt government officials being stabbed or buried alive or encircled by thorny vines.



“You know how the government kills the students, kills the protestors?” he whispered to me.  “This is what will happen to them.”

After the River Pagoda, we took the bus back over the Bridge of Alligators (apparently, there were once alligators in that part of the river, but boat propellers have driven them all off).



On the way, my guide pointed out a procession of barges sitting low in the water – “You see how they almost sink?  They are bringing sand from the river mouth for construction.”  Rangoon is in a frenzied state of construction now that puts Chiang Mai’s mushrooming hotels and condos to shame.  Crossing the river back into the city, you can get some fantastic views of downtown – it’s a strange mix of beautiful and muggy and filthy, in a way that reminds me, once again, of Nepal.

We went to see the reclining Buddha, stopping first so that I could get some fresh parathas with sugar from a street vendor (bread!  BREAD!).   (Clearly, bread grips me more than would a muddy old river - above - OR reclining Buddha.  That's one for the Tim Rice fans!)


Street outside the reclining Buddha temple

Now, the main thing about the reclining Buddha of Rangoon?  It’s HUGE.


I mean DAMN.



The Buddha's feet are adorned with astrological symbols.



Shrine for those of us who are Monday-born to pay homage to our guardian animal, the tiger.



And shrine where those who are Friday-born can pay homage to the majestic guinea pig.  I took this one just to annoy P.




The courtyard is also overlooked by an antique clock tower from the British colonial days.



As we left the temple, my guide turned to me and said proudly, “Now we will proceed to my township!”

This was, in a lot of ways, my favourite part of the trip.  My guide lives in a nice suburb about an hour outside of central Rangoon by bus.

We arrived mid-afternoon, and spent the next couple of hours sitting in a bar by the market crossroads, drinking a Burma-brewed lager I’d never heard of (I think it was just called ‘Myanmar Beer’, encouragingly enough), eating fermented tea leaf salad and chicken wings, and feeding chicken to the very striking, well-behaved dogs, whom my guide treated like family – possibly a little too like family.  (“Feed some to my son!” he told me, stroking one dog’s neck, before pointing to me and instructing the dog, “Go see your elder sister for food!”)  We ended up shooting the shit about everything, from Buddhist precepts to the importance of monogamy.  “Even if another woman is beautiful, my heart is only for my wife,” my guide told me earnestly.  He also asked when each member of my family was born, and wrote out the name of each of us painstakingly in his copperplate handwriting, followed by the days of our birth and our lucky numbers, planets, directions, and guardian animals.  He was distressed that I didn’t know whether my father was born in the morning or the afternoon (since the time of day matters if you’re a Wednesday baby), and made me promise to inquire and email him as soon as I found out.  On the other hand, the fact that my brother was born on the same day of the week that I was delighted him (the guide, not my brother) – it’s apparently good luck.


Local township betel vendor

When we’d eaten an obscene amount of bar snacks, I went to meet some of the young students my guide tutors in English.  That was… weird.  I was seated on a massive armchair, like visiting royalty, with the room’s sole fan pointed right at me, and subjected to a bizarre recitation.  Smiling, my guide would say something in Burmese, and the students would rattle off the English translation, very loudly and without stopping to breathe.  This went on for about fifteen minutes, and was mostly phrases designed to help the students make a living working with the new flood of English-speaking tourists:  CAN I HELP YOU?  DO YOU WANT THE POST OFFICE DO YOU WANT THE BANK?  WHEN YOU GO TO THE TEMPLE DO NOT WEAR THE SHOES DO NOT WEAR THE SOCKS DO NOT WEAR THE SLIPPERS!  Weirder still, these were interspersed with random rules for living:  DO NOT SMOKE THE CIGARETTE IN FRONT OF YOUR PARENTS!  IF YOU BREAK YOUR PROMISE I WILL NOT ACKNOWLEDGE YOU I WILL NOT HELP YOU!  Whenever they paused, I would compliment their English, hoping that would convey that I’d gotten the point, because being performed for like that was pretty uncomfortable (for me and for the students, I imagine), but the compliments just seemed to encourage my guide to start them off on another round of Conversational English For Dealing With Stupid Foreigners.

Eventually, though, we let the students go back to their dinner, and wandered a little further through the suburb.  (The streets were almost pitch black, but here and there a shop was still open, or a lone man sat on his porch, playing and singing a ballad in the dim light.)  At my guide’s house – a traditional, slightly elevated construction of teak and bamboo – his wife gave us dinner.  (And I do mean gave us dinner.  Like many hostesses in Burma, she refused to eat with her guests.  It’s not a very comfortable custom for me, and it puts the guest in a slightly dicey position:  you want to eat enough to show enthusiasm for the food, but not so much that you aren’t leaving your hostess with enough for her own dinner later.)

During dinner, my guide showed me what was clearly a prized possession:  a DVD of photos of all the foreigners he’d guided over the years.  In his time, he’s been a taxi driver, a concierge, a hotel employee, and an official tour guide; now retired, he takes visitors around now and again in exchange for donations.  Many of his charges seem to form lasting bonds, returning again and again and sending him photos of their lives and travels.  There were also family photos on the list.  His wedding.  He and his wife travelling for their anniversary.  He and his wife sitting in chairs, quite formal, the dog curled up at their feet.  He and his wife in chairs with the dog on his lap.  He and the dog in chairs, with his wife standing awkwardly in the background.  Him holding the dog.  Dog in a dress.

Misty-eyed, he pointed to one of the myriad dog pictures and told me, “She is my daughter.”

Ooooookay.

Apart from that, though, it was a fantastic day; I definitely saw more of Rangoon than I ever would have on my own.  My guide insisted on accompanying me back to the hotel, where we met up with P. and recounted our various adventures.  Smiling, my guide patted me on the shoulder.  “I am well pleased with my daughter.”

I was very moved, and only later realised that he was putting me in the same category as the dog.