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Published: September 9th 2013
"On August 8th, we flew to Rangon, Myanmar (Burma). We went to 3 temples. The first one had a little game where you have to throw the money in the bucket. I got 9. The temple also had lots of rooms with Buddhas. The next temple had this thing where you can give a present (piece of gold) to Buddha. Then I poured cups of water on the Buddha. Then I rang the bell 5 times. Then we went to eat at the hotel. The food was good. Finally we went to the 3rd temple at night. It was beautiful! It was shiny gold. It was really fun. We saw lots of Buddhas. After that we went back to the hotel and slept" Sofia's Journal Aug 8th _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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Daddy's Comments/Details: I had been wanting to go to Burma/Myanmar for a very long time and the time was now. If I had read earlier that we would have ATM's and credit cards were rare or with a huge fee and that we would have to come with new, crispy US dollars without certain serial numbers, I would have definitely have made it our first stop,
Incredible Stree food
I think we tried them all for about $2not last. I had never had to worry about carrying too much money as ATM's can be found in most places in Africa/Asia/South America I have been. Even in the days of travelers' checks, they did not have to be in mint condition. But Myanmar is different, so not having a physical bank, I had to have my buddy, Sean, get a couple thousand of crispy $100 bills without a crease, tear, worn down, and not with the serial # CB. Even the plane tickets and one of the hotels I reserved many months before, had to be paid for in perfect US dollars. They treat them like baseball cards and minor flaws are either devaluated or not accepted. Wow, what if they somehow get wet or bent, let alone I lose them or worse. Anyway, they arrived in mint condition on our arrival at the airport. After a quick stop at our hotel named
Guest Care Hotel we went to Mandalay Air office followed by the office of Hotel Amazing to pay for our hotel at Inle Lake. Good think for ipod and DS Nintendo, as that was a boring 2-3 hours for Sofia. She did great.
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Our first stop was Botataung Paya. Sofia loved this temple as it had some games where you throw money trying to get it into different buckets. The central stupa was nice and we had a great time there. Outside the temple, 2 women were selling all sorts of street food, mostly fried. We had no idea what they were but Sofia wanted to try just about every one. We did, and we both liked all of itt. Not bad lunch for about $2 for both of us.
A short taxi ride and we reached Sula Paya which is basically right in the middle of busy traffic circle. Sofia also had fun here as she banged the bell, turned a rope to get a boat up to Buddha, and poured cups of water for good luck. We then decided to head back to the hotel. We ate at a cool restaurant that was part of our hotel called
coffee circles . Once Sofia saw spicy wings on the menu, she was so happy. That was followed by a noodle dish.
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The final part of the night was the #1 tourist attraction
in Rangon, Shwedagon Paya. Wow! It definitely lived up to the hype. We went at night and it was an extremely brilliant gold. Surreal. The whole place seemed to glisten in gold. It was raining slightly but that did not take away from the incredible time we had there. We just walked around, of course with bare feet as it is required in all temples to take off shoes and socks. We stayed for about 1.5 hours checking out all the sights and just walking around.
We had one more night in Rangon at the end of our trip, but tomorrow we were heading to Bagan very early in the morning (400am wake up call) so it was time to get some sleep.....
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