Am I Staying in a Haunted Hotel?

On the Road to Mandalay

I've now been here in Naypyitaw, Myanmar for about 24 hours. Unfortunately, the negotiations with the Hilton fell through, and we weren't able to get the rate we wanted... or something like that. In any case, I'm NOT at the Hilton as promised, instead another place which although not as nice, is more conveniently located. It's across the street from BOTH of NPT's only two malls. Given the sizes of the hotel grounds and the roads here, I can zip over to the supermarket and back in under 30 minutes. So, the place has its good points.

It's a toll dog

Unfortunately, it's also kinda small, not a lot of room for my stuff and well, it's not the Hilton. The shower head was clogged. There's no bedside lamp(I bought one). Perhaps, however, the oddest peculiarity showed up at about 3 AM when I woke up to go pee. The window was wide open. I had no recollection of having opened it. What was going on?

See, Naypyitaw has a reputation for being haunted, which is kind of strange for a city that is only 10 years old. None of the buildings are older than that, but certainly the land is. Land that people used to live and farm on and had taken away when they started creating this capital. I've got two friends who've visited here and had spooky experiences. In both cases, their showers would turn on mysteriously in the middle of the night. All on their own.

This was running through my mind as I stared at the wide open window.

This morning, I mentioned this along with the couple other issues I have with my 2nd-tier hotel room to the head of our corporate department, the lady who coordinates our outside work (not the incredibly cute girl in the video below). This afternoon, on returning from my first teaching session at the Department of Labor, I got a series of visits from the hotel's maintenance crew. New shower head: installed. All the wet bar stuff in the fridge I won't use: gone. They even sent a guy with a screwdriver to tighten up the latches on my window.

Unfortunately, no witch doctor appeared to exorcise the spirits for me.

Here's some clips from the "Death Highway" - AKA the Yangon-Mandalay Road. There is a video there. Just click it. It's not showing a thumbnail because of copyright issues...