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Published: April 21st 2006
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I'm rich
thats what a 1 to 1300 ratio will do to ya. (Dustin)
Well I had a new experience flying into Yangon….they don’t actually drop you off at the airport when they land, you get out of the plane and hop on a bus to the terminal. Well we spent a little more time at the carousel than normal, since well we never spend any time there cause our backs we haven’t checked till now but it was cool and we met the guy who gave us free transportation to their guest house there while waiting.
These people really know how to treat tourists though. They brought us to their guest house on the east side of town and before we could do anything they were carrying our bags for us to our room, bringing us lemonade and just being very polite. We found out later the dorm room beds weren’t our favorite because they were really hard and didn’t really agree with us but the only other problem was the guy that slept next to me that who could have blown out windows with his snoring. I mean that was the worst snoring I think I’ve ever heard in my life, its like each snore was a building up to one
MAJOR one that would happen every 5th or something. Oh well we only slept in the same room as him two nights. But I saw Kev get up in the middle of one night and just stare at the guy before going out of the room, (I think he had some evil stuff going through his mind). Then again both of us aren’t really happy people in the mornings or middle of the night and I was just lucky for earplugs the second night that at least made the noise a quarter as loud. At least the dude smiled and was nice during the day.
Well we ran around town a little the first night and tried to find some of the illegal people changing money for better rates than the government. Turns out that it isn’t really all that hard because they actually will find you. Some white guy told us the best rate he could get was like 1200 or less and he said he'd tried pretty hard to get it down, but nope they all were willing to give a better rate than that to us even in the small towns.
Well we got to
check out Shwedagon and Karaweik two of the main places in Yangon to check out, and almost by accident every other sight that our guide book says to see just by wandering around. We had our first REAL encounters with Betel nut juice and with everyone hocking all over the place you keep watching your back so you don’t get spit on (though they are really good about where they spit).
Well we made friends with a street vendor and saw him every night and he was just happy that we kept showing up and was really nice to us. Though after like the 3rd day where I was just messed up and felt so tired and almost like I had a fever that I didn’t even want to walk, (though I did with lots of sitting down, shown in the pic “Relaxin in the park”) I somehow lost all appetite for that food and even the smell of it.
We kind of made friends with some kids selling post cards and even though we didn’t need any and didn’t buy any they were decently good about it and got into the pictures as well. We also found
a great place to stay after finding out one day that we couldn’t get out of Yangon that day and didn’t feel like walking back to our old Guesthouse so we went to Daddy’s House and actually it was great and it was here that I think I realized that everywhere has breakfast in their cost for the first time (this is GREAT). We slept great that night with some AC (that wrecked us for the heat the next day by the way) and almost missed our way out of town the next day because we were so happy. The people at the train station were REALLY confused, we kept saying Pyay, and stuff like Yangon to Pyay and they said yes yes yes so we waited while they wrote up the ticket. Well when they asked for 2 USD we were a little confused and we quickly noticed that Pyay wasn’t mentioned anywhere on the ticket so we pointed it out on a map. Pretty much they looked at us like we were dumb told us the trip was around Yangon and then shooed us out of the office because they had to give us our money back. So
we went and caught a bus instead and that worked out fine.
Yangon was pretty neat though, dirty like you’d expect but a pretty neat place, it really has character in its simplicity and age compared to a lot of the newer cities that we’ve been to so it was pretty neat stepping into literally another style of world only a short distance from the Asia we have come to be used to. Yangon was good fun for a couple days, maybe even more so because it was neat to walk through the places that we had already seen pictures of.
Enjoy,
Dustin
(Kev)
Yangoon was our first stop in Burma, so as I write this it has been two weeks since we have been there. The first two nights in Yangoon were memorable…but not in the good way. We slept in a clean and cozy dorm and all was good…but that changed! In the middle of the night, one of our roomies started snoring, and I mean he started snoring. Usually people have a pattern when they snore, as they get louder eventually there is a point where they snort and work themselves out of it,
not this guy! This guy progressively got louder, snorted like it was all over…and then kept going.
The first day, we explored the city of Yangoon, we had our first encounters with men who whore skirts, Burmese woman with white faces, and people who spit a constant stream of red. I don’t know why men in Burma have not transformed to pants, but the pants we wore deffinately made us the oddity. Their skirts are called longyis but could probably be more accurately described as a sarong. They combine their longyis with western dress shirts, they constantly seem to be rearranging there sarongs…but it works for them, I don’t think I will be switching over any time soon though.
The reason why the Burmese Woman’s faces are white is because they smear a special paste called thanaka all over it. Thanak is a yellow paste ground from a special bark. It is used as sun-protection, moisturizer, and make-up.
The constant stream of red spit I mentioned is of course beatle nut juice. Seeing ladies spit was a unique experience for me but it became common place after awhile, I just didn’t want it to land on me.
The streets were literally stained red with the stuff. But it really wasn’t to bad, all of these things just heightened my realization that I am far from home, and when you travel these experiences are good.
Burma was amazing and Yangoon was a good introduction to it. We had 10 cent dishes, met crazy, fun, and intelligent locals, and saw merging worlds where the old colided with the new. Walking down a dusty steet late at night and hearing music and movies was a walking contradiction. The sound did not fit the setting, but it brought back the reality of what century I was actually in.
Well, this is the last of our Burma blogs, Burma was an excellent experiance and it deffinately felt the most foreign to me of the foreign countries we have visited.
gotta go...
love Kev
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Rachel
non-member comment
Every picture is so amazing you guys!! I didn´t even know places like that existed! Hope you are safe and having fun!