Back in Yangon
Trip Start
May 01, 2007
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179
209
Trip End
Jun 17, 2008
Yangon,
Myanmar
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Despite earnest effort, today I abandoned the tedious and epic Moby Dick and picked up a pirate copy of Burmese Days by George Orwell and quickly poured through the first chapter while sipping strawberry juice under the a/c at J'Donuts. In my opinion, aside from the a/c and the fact that I can write this now and you can read it on the other side of the world 3 seconds later, little has changed from the world Orwell describes in 1934 to Myanmar of today. From the betel chewing, to the wearing of longyis, to villages of nothing but bamboo huts, water buffalo, rice paddies, and horse carts, to corruption and treachery, to opium trade, to the exploitation of lumber by foreign powers and military rule, Myanmar sounds and feels, especially outside Mandalay and Yangon, like the Burma of 1934. Orwell could have easily ridden in the 1932 Chevrolet bus idling outside the Internet cafe right now, sipped a beer at the bar at the Strand Hotel where I enjoyed happy hour last night, and done business at any of the dozens of nearby colonial era buildings like the Custom House or City Hall
satellite dishes 2
. Sadly I also browsed through news websites today and I see that in many ways little has changed in the same period from what I just finished reading in From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman. In fact there exist a lot of the same issues: struggle for power and control of resources at a vicious tribal level in a nation artificially created by Western Europe after WWII. In one article I read on Al Bawaba, it mentions the possibility of the US going to war against Iran. What is happening? What are we thinking? What good can come from that? The more I travel, the more I read, the larger and more bizarre the world becomes.
I found my return to the Ocean Pearl not as clean as I remember three weeks ago. I ate breakfast next to a rather large, rather dead cockroach (Oh!? Is dead! No...it come with lettuce). That said, Ocean Pearl still has delightful staff and great value (a/c, en suite, 24 hour hot water, tile floors, battery and generator back up power), all for $10.
Thursday
Myanmar is definitely a trip. Just sitting here on the Internet is a trip. I'm across the street in Yangon from a place called 'Tokyo Donuts' where everything is in English
Happy Thingyan
. This Internet cafe is powered by a generator on the sidewalk that a guy wearing a longyi is filling with diesel from the black market. Happy New Year (Thingyan), Myanmar
Today is a quiet day in Yangon. Thank Buddha the water festival finally ended yesterday. Today, the first day of the Myanmar new year, everyone visits with family, businesses remain closed, and the streets of Yangon remain nearly empty, quiet and calm; a delightful today to be out strolling in the streets. Just before sunset the end of just about every side street had five monks seated in a line on plastic chairs facing a row of flowers with a small crowd sitting on on a ground cloth, facing them and praying. I spent the day (and the next) sampling beverages, pastries and air conditioning at various fast food joints and donut shops.
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Coming to Myanmar was an irrational decision that I'm so glad that I made. This place is so incromprehensible, beautiful, ugly, difficult, wonderful, friendly, harried, simple, crazy, poor, and enriched that there's no way I could
ever begin to pretend to know anything about the place without this experience. Wow. People really seem so happy here and just are wondefully friendly, more so than anyone else in any country I've been to except maybe Mongolia. It'll take me a lifetime to unravel anecdotes and impressions from here in a way that only Africa had previously affected me.
