It's hot as blazes in Bangkok---it's that time of year---and you'd think the angry red shirts and indignant yellow shirts would give it a rest. But no. The red shirts are still camped out at Democracy Monument and threatening unspecified havoc unless the Abhisit government agrees to new elections. Face-to-face negotiations over the weekend went nowhere. A number of grenades have been hurled at government buildings with little damage and no serious injuries so far. The red shirt leaders say they can't imagine who is doing these bad things. No one knows what will happen next.
Joe's terrific pictures of Burma (below) made me wish I had quit smoking at age 26 instead of 46 so that I could have accompanied him on his treks among the Chin and Shan. What a superb adventure, and what a keen and eager soul taking it all in.
I did my visa run to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and a weekend in K-L, as the locals call it, is about right. The city is San Diego with mosques. There are said to be Islamic secret police keeping an eye on people, but I saw no evidence of that. On the monorail that loops around the city, the young people were voluble and easy-going. A teenaged girl in a Muslim headscarf kidded around with a boy wearing a T-shirt that said Beer for Brains. The Malaysians are often great-looking people. With a history of being on the main trade route from China to Europe, the former Malaya attracted large populations of Indians, Indonesians and Chinese, a real melting pot. At the National Museum, I saw a display extolling Malaysia's harmonious multi-ethnic society. Then my Malay taxi driver spent 15 minutes ranting about the perfidious local Chinese and their "monkey tricks." A highlight of the weekend was the Islamic Arts Museum. It made me want to book early passage to Samarkand, Tashkent, Baku, Cordoba.
Instead, we head home in three weeks. We have one last excursion to make, nine days (April 7-16) at the Jungle House resort that is owned by our friend Dick Sandler. It's in a rainforest near a national park in southern Thailand. We've been receiving reports of tropical rains in New England, so this will be good preparation for coming home.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Burma pictures
In my Shan outfit
This was my guide's grandfather with a grandaughter
This was one of four dancers we followed through the streets of Malamyine as they tried to rase money for their Hindu temple. They did the most incredible dances while balancing flowers and ceramic bowls of fire on their heads. A truck with blaring speakers led the way.
Novice quarters in a monastery
Malamyine monastery
Chin woman in Chin State smoking. The older Chin women still smoke opium regularly
We came upon these three Akah men who worked for the Shan army. They were digging out a mole hole to try and capture the mole deep inside. Presumably they were hungry. They gave up after their 10ft bamboo harpoon didn't reach it.
Many people believe that the Buddha's scriptures tatooed on their persons will protect them.
These sandals were provided in the bathroom of my guest house in very rural Chin State.
The whole family pitches in
It is customary for family and friends to make offerings to both the novice and the monastery at the time of a noviation ceremony. It can be an amazing public display of prosperity. It may also be a display of buying indulgence. Many of the stupas are kept up by the generals and their cronies.
I was told that this buddha represented the time when he abstained from eating before finding "the middle way"
An Akah woman in the market in Keng Tong
At this restaurant they gave you all these dishes and you ate what you chose to. If you finished anything, they replenished it. was about 105 degrees and not the light lunch I had in mind.
In Chin state the road was blocked by this typical truck. This looked like a rebel army, but in fact they were volunteers who were headed off to spend a month camping in the woods and rebuilding a road leading to their rural village in hopes of making their village more accessible. No help from the government.
We came upon this noviation procession. At the end were musicians and this fake elephant and dancer who hopped around to the music. Real elephants are preferred but not available for most because of the expense
This woman is cooking tofu crackers with heated gravel. We ate many things cooked both with sand and gravel. Peanuts, blah laab beans, rice crackers. We never had a spec of sand in anything we ate.
The water buffalo market in Keng Tong. These animals are mostly not eaten in this area as they are considered sacred because they help to till the rice paddies. The Chinese buy them for meat. The broker will then hire a man (who will be paid $20) to walk the buffalo for five days through the forests to reach the Chinese border. This avoids paying road taxes.
Bagan
I asked the guide if the marks on this man's chest were tattoos. He told me that the man had rubbed tiger balm in this pattern and then scraped it in order to let his fever out.
Lahu Shi village chief and his wife
Loi woman
This is a Loi long house. In this one twenty families lived. About one hundred people. Ten fmilies on each side, each with a fireplace. The men stay with the family and the daughters join their spouse's family in their house. As the family outgrows their house an extension is added on one end. There were no windows the only light came from the doors at each end. A few people had battery operated lights. Most of the people were in the fields when I was there but 20 or so elderly, sick and youngsters were hanging around. Three woman were making shoulder bags. One man was making a woven bamboo mat for the family to sleep on. I asked how long it would last. He said 15 years! Apparently the life expectancy of the Loi is among the shortest of all the hill tribe people because of the quality of the air they breath.
This man was entirely covered with tattoos. Apparently it started after he was robbed as a young man. He said that it took 8 passes to become uniformly blue. Originally he began with Buddhist scriptures. He went on to tell us about all his miraculous feats that came with his acquired powers. He showed us his club and knife skills. I didn't offer to demonstrate my nunchuck skills.
Shan women on the trail. They were drinking tea from bamboo cups and eating papaya which they shared with us.
Most pickup trucks on the road in Burma double as semi-trucks/greyhound busses. Bus fare is too high for many people. You can imagine the potential difficulties. There was a head-on collision on the road between Tachileik and Keng Tong the day before I got there I heard that somewhere between eight and twenty people were killed.
Some of the larger trucks coming from China actually have a man riding on the top lifting the overhead wires over the truck's load.
The Shan people have their own deal with the government. Part of that deal (including growing tea instead of poppies, though apparently it is still going on) is that they do as they please. Our friend and also guide in Yangon who came along, said that he felt free here. His mother was Shan. This man made rifles with his wife. She carved the stock and he made the metal pieces. They could make one every two days. They sold as fast as they could make them. There were gunpowder kits in the market.
These were some of the 52 orphans in this orphanage run by Burmese Christians.
This is a nat shrine. What is unusual about it is that they have provided canopy beds for the nat spirits should they need to rest. There were also swords under the beds in case they had to defend themselves.
An animal path through the newly burned hillside. There were fires everywhere I went as people prepared for the growing season. As a result the forests are quickly disappearing, the air quality is terrible, there are landslides regularly as well as a host of other problems.
We stopped on a trail for our lunch. Left to right, Sai Yot (local Keng Tong guide) me and Spring (friend and guide from Yangon)
This cigarette is made by the Wa people (former head hunters). Now they go for the lungs. Notice the fine Virginia blend.
Sat March 27 Red Shirt Rally Bangkok
The night before the big Saturday rally, all the posters around the city were vandalized cutting out the "parliament dissolution"
Red shirt
A monk on a truck blesses the crowd spraying them with water
Monday, March 22, 2010
Reddy or not
The red shirts are still at it. It's been nearly two weeks since this ragtag army of rice farmers and laborers from the East and North descended on Bangkok to force the Abhisit government to resign and hold new elections. Heat and exhaustion seemed to be taking a decisive toll, but Saturday the reds came roaring back with a massive "march"---in trucks, cars and thousands of motorbikes---along forty miles of major city streets. The six-mile-long, 65,000-person caravan of honking, hooting, yelling ruffians---as the middle and upper classes here view them---was disruptive but carefully non-violent. The reds' security people worked hand in hand with the police to prevent traffic gridlock. Bangkockians who complained to The Bangkok Post that the reds caused "traffic congestion" might have been asked, how could you tell?
Saturday's big stunner was the reaction along the parade route. Forecasts of some fear and widespread indifference were all wrong. Tens---more likely hundreds---of thousands of city residents turned out to cheer the reds. It wasn't just that Thais love a good show, which they do. The ecstatic crowds were the low-paid street vendors, waitresses, security guards, motorbike taxi drivers, hotel maids, mechanics, construction workers and others who do the grunt work for Bangkok's middle and upper classes. These people feels as voiceless and alienated from the feudal power structure as the farmers do, and here was a chance to show it.
One of the things you hear from farangs who have lived in Thailand for a while is that the Thais are no longer as genuinely friendly as they once were, that the famous Thai smile is more calculating now. (These comments are generally followed by, "It's the Chinese influence.") In the three years Joe and I have been coming here, the Thais have seemed plenty good-natured to us, but on Saturday I saw thousands of faces that reflected something we don't see every day here, and that is joy.
Now the government is unnerved. They apparently believed that their restraint and patience would wear the reds down and they would drift away. But the reds have been bouyed by the local enthusiasm, and apparently by the continued financial support of the canny Thaksin Shinawatra. The renegade former prime minister is orchestrating the protests from Montenegro---Montenegro!---and he insists on amnesty for his corruption conviction as part of any deal Abhisit is willing to make. No deal seems anywhere near, and this Saturday the red shirts say they will hold the biggest political rally in the history of Thailand.
Joe will back in time for Saturday's blowout. In fact, he is in Yangon and is going to try to get on a flight to Bangkok today. So, soon we should get some pictures of the red shirts up on the blog. I am scheduled to fly to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for a weekend visa run, but I might postpone that.
Any of you interested in Thai history and politics should pick up the latest issue of The Economist. There's an excellent piece on the current mess and on the monarchy's role in creating it by keeping Thailand from becoming a fully grown-up democracy. Beloved King Bhumibole has been hospitalized since last September with a "respiratory infection" and his days are numbered. The thought of the crown prince, a man of---let's just say poor character---assuming the throne makes Thais despondent. The Economist piece explores all this---and of course has been banned in Thailand, necessitating its widespread, white-hot circulation on the internet. Thailand has free speech except when it comes to the you-know-who's.
I watched the US health care vote Monday morning on CNN. (There on CNN International was the actual CNN-domestic Wolf Blitzer and "the best political team on television"---which is like saying "the best chicken-frying team at KFC.") Wow. Maybe the country isn't doomed. Anyway, Obama lives!
Saturday's big stunner was the reaction along the parade route. Forecasts of some fear and widespread indifference were all wrong. Tens---more likely hundreds---of thousands of city residents turned out to cheer the reds. It wasn't just that Thais love a good show, which they do. The ecstatic crowds were the low-paid street vendors, waitresses, security guards, motorbike taxi drivers, hotel maids, mechanics, construction workers and others who do the grunt work for Bangkok's middle and upper classes. These people feels as voiceless and alienated from the feudal power structure as the farmers do, and here was a chance to show it.
One of the things you hear from farangs who have lived in Thailand for a while is that the Thais are no longer as genuinely friendly as they once were, that the famous Thai smile is more calculating now. (These comments are generally followed by, "It's the Chinese influence.") In the three years Joe and I have been coming here, the Thais have seemed plenty good-natured to us, but on Saturday I saw thousands of faces that reflected something we don't see every day here, and that is joy.
Now the government is unnerved. They apparently believed that their restraint and patience would wear the reds down and they would drift away. But the reds have been bouyed by the local enthusiasm, and apparently by the continued financial support of the canny Thaksin Shinawatra. The renegade former prime minister is orchestrating the protests from Montenegro---Montenegro!---and he insists on amnesty for his corruption conviction as part of any deal Abhisit is willing to make. No deal seems anywhere near, and this Saturday the red shirts say they will hold the biggest political rally in the history of Thailand.
Joe will back in time for Saturday's blowout. In fact, he is in Yangon and is going to try to get on a flight to Bangkok today. So, soon we should get some pictures of the red shirts up on the blog. I am scheduled to fly to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for a weekend visa run, but I might postpone that.
Any of you interested in Thai history and politics should pick up the latest issue of The Economist. There's an excellent piece on the current mess and on the monarchy's role in creating it by keeping Thailand from becoming a fully grown-up democracy. Beloved King Bhumibole has been hospitalized since last September with a "respiratory infection" and his days are numbered. The thought of the crown prince, a man of---let's just say poor character---assuming the throne makes Thais despondent. The Economist piece explores all this---and of course has been banned in Thailand, necessitating its widespread, white-hot circulation on the internet. Thailand has free speech except when it comes to the you-know-who's.
I watched the US health care vote Monday morning on CNN. (There on CNN International was the actual CNN-domestic Wolf Blitzer and "the best political team on television"---which is like saying "the best chicken-frying team at KFC.") Wow. Maybe the country isn't doomed. Anyway, Obama lives!
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Red scare
It's now nearly a week since the red shirts marched on Bangkok. A confrontation that many feared would turn violent has instead descended into farce. Yesterday and the day before, the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship demonstrators---mostly poor rice farmers from the North and East---hurled human blood on the gates at Eleventh Infantry army headquarters, on the front steps of the opposition Democrat Party offices, and on Prime Minister Abhisit's doorstep. This bit of 1960's-style street theater was meant to "curse" the amataya, the political establishment, which refuses to dissolve the House and call for a new election---an election, by the way, that the reds would likely win. The blood had been drawn in a medically approved manner from the red shirts themselves. The Red Cross, however, was disgusted, as were many Bangkokians, and the letters column in The Bangkok Post is bristling with outrage over waste and the possible spread of disease. The Ministry of Public Health says not to worry, they have cleaned up the mess.
The Abhisit government has been calm and sensible throughout the crisis, guarding its ground but avoiding provocations, and even having its psy-ops department josh the protesters over loudspeakers in the Isaan dialect most of them speak. A hundred thousand reds showed up at the big rally on Sunday, but the heat---99 today---and family and work responsibilities have taken their toll. Only about 15,000 are still marching around. UDD leaders say they will remain non-violent but will become increasingly disruptive---no specifics mentioned---until the government resigns.
I have to admit, I enjoy this stuff. I went to the big rally on Sunday and was just sick that Joe wasn't there with his camera. The crowd was militant, but it didn't feel dangerous. It felt like one of those big gay-rights marches on Washington in the '80s or '90s. One difference was, those folks were largely well-fed and well-turned out. The red shirts had the sun-scorched, sweat-stained look of the Thai rural poor. And they are people who believe that their survival is at stake, not just their dignity. There were few farangs in the crowd on Sunday, and the looks I got were friendly. A man asked me, "Are you scare?" [sic], and I could honestly answer that I was not. I think he wondered about this because the foreign embassies had frightened the bejesus out of tourists with advisories to remain alert and if necessary stay indoors. The man took my picture shaking hands with his two small, red-shirted sons.
A lot of picture-taking was going on, in fact, maybe because a sizeable portion of this crowd were seeing Bangkok for the first time. At Democracy Monument, the elegant art deco sculpture that celebrates Thailand's switch from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy in 1932, smiling red shirts posed for group pictures. Some of the smiles were weary; the heat was fierce, and many of these people had traveled long distances in the backs of trucks and had been sleeping in the streets. But they perked up whenever one of the speakers on the main stage said something awful about the power elite. And a huge roar went up when a tower of balloons carried a banner aloft with the number 40 on it. I tried to find out what 40 meant. I asked several people, but---these were not educated people, by and large---nobody I asked spoke English. In what I thought was flawless, well-accented Thai, I asked one man, "What is forty?" Trying to be helpful, he looked at his watch.
All the Bangkok Thais and farangs I have talked to in the last few days dismiss the red shirts as rabble. The reds are naive yokels being exploited and paid off by Thaksin. They are making Thailand look foolish and backward in the eyes of the world. They are ruining the country! There's truth in all of this---exiled former PM Thaksin, a crook of staggering proportions, is funding much of the protest---but the red shirts' grievances are legitimate. Tax laws are written by and for the rich. Land ownership laws are stacked against the rural poor, and the judiciary looks out for its wealthy friends. Politicians are bought and sold, and so are police positions. One of the saddest stories to run in the Post recently was about the death of Police Colonel Sompien Eksomya. Due to retire in a year, Sompien had asked for a transfer out of the southern region where a Muslim insurgency has taken hundreds of lives in recent years. Sompien died last week when his car was bombed. It was known that he was a marked man, but his transfer had been denied. He didn't have "tea money" to pay off department higher-ups. The government will erect a statue in his memory.
The Abhisit government has been calm and sensible throughout the crisis, guarding its ground but avoiding provocations, and even having its psy-ops department josh the protesters over loudspeakers in the Isaan dialect most of them speak. A hundred thousand reds showed up at the big rally on Sunday, but the heat---99 today---and family and work responsibilities have taken their toll. Only about 15,000 are still marching around. UDD leaders say they will remain non-violent but will become increasingly disruptive---no specifics mentioned---until the government resigns.
I have to admit, I enjoy this stuff. I went to the big rally on Sunday and was just sick that Joe wasn't there with his camera. The crowd was militant, but it didn't feel dangerous. It felt like one of those big gay-rights marches on Washington in the '80s or '90s. One difference was, those folks were largely well-fed and well-turned out. The red shirts had the sun-scorched, sweat-stained look of the Thai rural poor. And they are people who believe that their survival is at stake, not just their dignity. There were few farangs in the crowd on Sunday, and the looks I got were friendly. A man asked me, "Are you scare?" [sic], and I could honestly answer that I was not. I think he wondered about this because the foreign embassies had frightened the bejesus out of tourists with advisories to remain alert and if necessary stay indoors. The man took my picture shaking hands with his two small, red-shirted sons.
A lot of picture-taking was going on, in fact, maybe because a sizeable portion of this crowd were seeing Bangkok for the first time. At Democracy Monument, the elegant art deco sculpture that celebrates Thailand's switch from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy in 1932, smiling red shirts posed for group pictures. Some of the smiles were weary; the heat was fierce, and many of these people had traveled long distances in the backs of trucks and had been sleeping in the streets. But they perked up whenever one of the speakers on the main stage said something awful about the power elite. And a huge roar went up when a tower of balloons carried a banner aloft with the number 40 on it. I tried to find out what 40 meant. I asked several people, but---these were not educated people, by and large---nobody I asked spoke English. In what I thought was flawless, well-accented Thai, I asked one man, "What is forty?" Trying to be helpful, he looked at his watch.
All the Bangkok Thais and farangs I have talked to in the last few days dismiss the red shirts as rabble. The reds are naive yokels being exploited and paid off by Thaksin. They are making Thailand look foolish and backward in the eyes of the world. They are ruining the country! There's truth in all of this---exiled former PM Thaksin, a crook of staggering proportions, is funding much of the protest---but the red shirts' grievances are legitimate. Tax laws are written by and for the rich. Land ownership laws are stacked against the rural poor, and the judiciary looks out for its wealthy friends. Politicians are bought and sold, and so are police positions. One of the saddest stories to run in the Post recently was about the death of Police Colonel Sompien Eksomya. Due to retire in a year, Sompien had asked for a transfer out of the southern region where a Muslim insurgency has taken hundreds of lives in recent years. Sompien died last week when his car was bombed. It was known that he was a marked man, but his transfer had been denied. He didn't have "tea money" to pay off department higher-ups. The government will erect a statue in his memory.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Back in Bangkok
I flew from too-sunny Yangon to too-sunny Bangkok on Thursday. (See "Burma" posting below.) Joe is there for another ten days, trekking among hill tribes in Chin and Shan states. The chin are remarkable for their belief that if they bathe, it will kill them. I think Joe should say, "Hey, why don't you take a bath? It won't kill you." But he is too polite for that. Anyway, I'm sure he would just get puzzled looks.
I returned to Thailand just in time for more political mayhem. Most Thais are sick of this, but it goes on. The "red shirt" supporters of ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra are descending on Bangkok this weekend for mass demonstrations meant to force the Abhisit Vejjajiva government to resign. This is unlikely to happen. People are nervous here---last year in a similar confrontation two people were killed and several injured. I hope to witness some of this year's goings-on. Though with care---a headline in yesterday's Bangkok Post read "Mob prepares arsenal of fish bombs and faeces." Live ammunition is bad enough, but this?
I'll report on developments in a few days. Meanwhile, how about some fish bombs for Mitch McConnell? Duty calls.
I returned to Thailand just in time for more political mayhem. Most Thais are sick of this, but it goes on. The "red shirt" supporters of ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra are descending on Bangkok this weekend for mass demonstrations meant to force the Abhisit Vejjajiva government to resign. This is unlikely to happen. People are nervous here---last year in a similar confrontation two people were killed and several injured. I hope to witness some of this year's goings-on. Though with care---a headline in yesterday's Bangkok Post read "Mob prepares arsenal of fish bombs and faeces." Live ammunition is bad enough, but this?
I'll report on developments in a few days. Meanwhile, how about some fish bombs for Mitch McConnell? Duty calls.
Burma
Two years ago I wrote a blog posting on "Twenty Reasons I am Happy to be Back in Bangkok." A Burmese friend was amused by this and asked me to do the same for Burma. In addition to the innate gentle decency of the valiant, put-upon Burmese people, here are ten reasons Joe and I are always happy to return to Myanmar.
1. It is a nation where nearly every educated person is a computer genius. This is necessary for getting around the Internet blocks and filters thrown up by the paranoid junta. Myanmar has three national sports: soccer, cane-ball (a circle of men keeping a rattan ball in the air using only their knees and ankles), and computer cunning.
2. Burmese drollery in the home. Electrical power is available in Yangon only a few hours a day, and nobody knows which few hours they will be. An artist we visited in his house apologized for the oven-like heat, and said, "My fan is not used to electricity."
3. Burmese drollery on the road. Before visiting the U.S., a Burmese friend was interviewed at the U.S. Consulate visa section. He said, "The man asked many stupid questions. It was okay. I am Burmese, so I am used to stupid questions."
4. Myanmar is a place where the United States is still liked and respected. (Europeans we have met on this trip have followed the health care "debate" and think the U.S. is doomed.) In Mawlamyine, an old man minding a ramshackle closed cinema asked where I was from. When I said America, he grinned and shook my hand. Others smile and say, "Ah, Obama!" There are mixed views on the economic sanctions, but everyone appreciates the U.S. vocal opposition to the hated regime.
5. Life in Myanmar can be precarious and unpredictable, and one way people have coped is by perfecting the language of uncertainty. On our travel agency program, Joe's March 11 day in Chin state is described like this: "From Aye Camp, continue to Mindet. Depends on triangle matters; time/local situation/travelers' anticipation, trek to Kyarto Village! (Conditional)."
6. Educated Burmese are generally nimble with English. We liked the way the gorgon who controls the purse strings in a Yangon business was described by another employee as the boss's "extra wife."
7. Thailand specializes in what is often called medical tourism, but Myanmar may actually have pioneered this practice. The old sayadow (abbot) at a Mawlamyine monastery told Joe and me that he had cured a German tourist's arm injury in ten minutes with holy water. He made some water holy for us by dipping his beads in it and reciting a prayer, and we sipped some of this. We were concerned about the water's source, but afterwards we felt neither better nor worse than before.
8. A friend from Yangon who was with us at the monastery asked and was allowed to take a puff on the sayadow's cheroot. He inhaled some actual holy smoke.
9. Myanmar is a great place for jazz fans. We went to a nat festival in Bago---and I don't mean Nat Adderly. Nats are protective spirits that are pre-Buddhist in origin and whose images often exist on levels below Buddha images in temples. At a nat festival, a wonderful racket is raised by a band made up mostly of percussion instruments---drums, gongs, cymbals, xylophone-like gadgets---and this draws the nat spirits inside the temple and makes them happy. Dancers in colorful outfits, many of them ladymen, make frug-like motions, or move around slinking like Harpo or slouching like Groucho, and sometimes spectators join in. We saw a woman get possessed by a nat, and she had to be exorcised. Sometimes the music at Bago sounded like a ten-car pile-up on the Long Island Expressway, but some of it was marvelously fanciful. In one piece, the percussionists and a man tooting a little tin horn of some kind were playing in different times, the drummer and gong guys in 1/4, the horn player in 2/4. It reminded me of Dave Brubeck's Blue Rondo a la Turk, and it was thrilling.
10. Where else in the world but in Myanmar can you take a ride in an authentic World War II Willis Jeep that is still running? We piled into this unlikely contraption for a ride up to a mountaintop temple near Bagan overlooking the Irrawaddy. I had been reading Donovan Webster's excellent The Burma Road, about the campaign to re-take Burma from the Japanese, and this machine was right out of that era. It ran like a champ, and I asked our guide how old it was. He said, "Eighty or a hundred years."
1. It is a nation where nearly every educated person is a computer genius. This is necessary for getting around the Internet blocks and filters thrown up by the paranoid junta. Myanmar has three national sports: soccer, cane-ball (a circle of men keeping a rattan ball in the air using only their knees and ankles), and computer cunning.
2. Burmese drollery in the home. Electrical power is available in Yangon only a few hours a day, and nobody knows which few hours they will be. An artist we visited in his house apologized for the oven-like heat, and said, "My fan is not used to electricity."
3. Burmese drollery on the road. Before visiting the U.S., a Burmese friend was interviewed at the U.S. Consulate visa section. He said, "The man asked many stupid questions. It was okay. I am Burmese, so I am used to stupid questions."
4. Myanmar is a place where the United States is still liked and respected. (Europeans we have met on this trip have followed the health care "debate" and think the U.S. is doomed.) In Mawlamyine, an old man minding a ramshackle closed cinema asked where I was from. When I said America, he grinned and shook my hand. Others smile and say, "Ah, Obama!" There are mixed views on the economic sanctions, but everyone appreciates the U.S. vocal opposition to the hated regime.
5. Life in Myanmar can be precarious and unpredictable, and one way people have coped is by perfecting the language of uncertainty. On our travel agency program, Joe's March 11 day in Chin state is described like this: "From Aye Camp, continue to Mindet. Depends on triangle matters; time/local situation/travelers' anticipation, trek to Kyarto Village! (Conditional)."
6. Educated Burmese are generally nimble with English. We liked the way the gorgon who controls the purse strings in a Yangon business was described by another employee as the boss's "extra wife."
7. Thailand specializes in what is often called medical tourism, but Myanmar may actually have pioneered this practice. The old sayadow (abbot) at a Mawlamyine monastery told Joe and me that he had cured a German tourist's arm injury in ten minutes with holy water. He made some water holy for us by dipping his beads in it and reciting a prayer, and we sipped some of this. We were concerned about the water's source, but afterwards we felt neither better nor worse than before.
8. A friend from Yangon who was with us at the monastery asked and was allowed to take a puff on the sayadow's cheroot. He inhaled some actual holy smoke.
9. Myanmar is a great place for jazz fans. We went to a nat festival in Bago---and I don't mean Nat Adderly. Nats are protective spirits that are pre-Buddhist in origin and whose images often exist on levels below Buddha images in temples. At a nat festival, a wonderful racket is raised by a band made up mostly of percussion instruments---drums, gongs, cymbals, xylophone-like gadgets---and this draws the nat spirits inside the temple and makes them happy. Dancers in colorful outfits, many of them ladymen, make frug-like motions, or move around slinking like Harpo or slouching like Groucho, and sometimes spectators join in. We saw a woman get possessed by a nat, and she had to be exorcised. Sometimes the music at Bago sounded like a ten-car pile-up on the Long Island Expressway, but some of it was marvelously fanciful. In one piece, the percussionists and a man tooting a little tin horn of some kind were playing in different times, the drummer and gong guys in 1/4, the horn player in 2/4. It reminded me of Dave Brubeck's Blue Rondo a la Turk, and it was thrilling.
10. Where else in the world but in Myanmar can you take a ride in an authentic World War II Willis Jeep that is still running? We piled into this unlikely contraption for a ride up to a mountaintop temple near Bagan overlooking the Irrawaddy. I had been reading Donovan Webster's excellent The Burma Road, about the campaign to re-take Burma from the Japanese, and this machine was right out of that era. It ran like a champ, and I asked our guide how old it was. He said, "Eighty or a hundred years."
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