Thingyyan 2016- Day Two

So my video yesterday of Day One of the Water Festival got criticized for not showing enough beautiful Myanmar women. I can understand that criticism. Myanmar women are perhaps the most beautiful in the world, and so I should be showing as many of them as possible. So, endeavoring to make the video more interesting, I made an effort today to record the beautiful women of Myanmar in their wet T-shirts without being overtly pervy about it.

Right out of my soi onto the main road, the first bit of revelers included this person. A Burmese Ladyboy. You don't see that many of them here. This place remains far more conservative than Thailand.






Next we have the queen of the float! She's definitely in charge of this truck.

Myanmar beauties come in many shapes and colors. Here's two in one framegrab that worked out well.

 There's girls trying look glamorous...

As well as working class girls...

Not all the women were having a good time, however. 

Of course, there were lots of other interesting framegrabs from today's festivities.

People living in the moment. Like I gotta make this phone call RIGHT NOW.

 Your humble blogger.

 Enjoy the video.

Thingyan Water Festival - Day One

Freeze Mutha Furinah!

It's that time of year again.  If you've followed this blog for the last few years, you may remember previous Thingyan festival. It's the one in April where everyone throws water on each other.

My first Thingyan was just a few weeks after arriving in Myanmar in 2014. I was so new to the place that I didn't really know what to make of it.

The waterproof aspect of my GoPro is ideal
for the water festival.

Last year, I was in Chiang Mai, a big tourist mecca in northern Thailand, and the festivities were just so far over the top, it felt more like an ordeal than a celebration.

I'm looking forward to this one. I haven't got much planned out for what I'm going to be doing, but Thursday is going to be the big day. Today, I was waiting around for some repairmen to do some fixes at the apartment, but they never showed. In the early morning, I went out for some breakfast, and the celebrations handn't really started. Then, in the afternoon, the power went out, and given that it was 104F in Yangon today, I simply couldn't stay in the apartment. So, I hopped on a bus and headed downtown.

Consequently, there are two distinct parts to this first Thingyan video. Back when I did my motorcycle tour vids, you may have noticed I played around a lot with using the fast-speed function of my editing software. With the first half of this video, I explored slow-motion. The second half of the video is much more up tempo as I visited the crazy party zone downtown.

Unlike in Thailand, here in Myanmar, the first day of Thingyan is designated as Children's Day. It's only the kids who are supposed to be throwing the water. I'll let you watch the vid and see how much that tradition is followed.

Vacation Earned and Lost

Tomorrow, I have to go into work for three hours, 12:30 to 3:30, to fulfill my final day of my non-teaching-week other duties. I'm going to be placement testing. I'll be the one who decides what level new students get put into as they enroll at my language school.

The Tungapuri Hotel in Nay Pyi Twa, the place I stayed
on my recent business trip.

It's going to be my 19th consecutive day working. Two weeks ago, I forwent my normal weekend to go up to Naypyitaw to do a big placement testing gig. A week ago, when all my colleagues were let go for our 5-week April leave, I'd agreed to hang out for another week to fulfill my non-teaching responsibilities. Tomorrow is Friday, and beginning Saturday, I'm off for an entire month. Paid vacation.

It's a bittersweet break. As I've mention many times before, my favorite aspect of my job is the time off. 10 weeks of paid vacation per year. Work 8 weeks, get a week off. Another 8 weeks, then 2 weeks off. As one of my main motivations for leaving Amerika was travel, this sweet schedule was awesome.

Alas, the business couldn't support this way of doing things, and so it was unilaterally decided that going forward, within the constraints of existing contracts, the 10 weeks would be shrunk to six weeks.

Room #1!

Well, damn. The best part of my job just got killed. My colleagues and I felt angry, fucked over, ignored. To a certain extent. Underlying this righteous indignation over the summary shrinkage of our benefits was the understanding that SIX weeks of paid leave would be fantastic in any other English language school around the world.  Certainly, 6 weeks paid vacation isn't anything any American company would offer back home. Yeah, we had the rug pulled out from under us, but the carpet beneath the rug was still quite soft.

Today's video is the chronicle of my weekend in Naypyitaw two weeks ago.


I stayed in Room #001 of the Tunga Puri Hotel, which wasn't at all was I expecting having seen the hotel from the road many many times during my previous stay in the capital.

Drawing in the dust of the Tungapuri's inactive
main building.

In other news, it looks like after the break, I am actually going to be re-assigned to Naypyitaw. I won't go into details, as I've been told this before, but if it all works out, I'll be back in the fresh air of middle Myanmar and driving my motorbike come May.

An Update from (not) in Naypyitaw

Shwedagon, the icon of Yangon

Well, it's been a while since I've blogged. I actually had two people contact me who read the blog regularly and ask if everything was okay. So, as two people represents a significant percentage of my readership, I thought I'd take the time to let you all know that yes, everything is fine. I'm just plugging along here in Myanmar, working and waiting for my next vacation.

As it turned out, perhaps I did jinx the thing by writing in the last the blog that I would be going back to Naypyitaw. The big contracts which were on the verge of being signed fell through, and so my plans of being reunited with my beloved motorbike didn't work out. Instead, I've been working a lot of hours teaching in Yangon. Six classes, which is a lot to teach and plan for.

I resigned the lease on my apartment, but this time, as a future in capital is still possible, only for 6 months. As many of you know, my abode has caused me a lot of frustration and inconvenience over these last two years. Cockroaches. Roof leaks. Leaks through the door. Shaky power service which kicks off the aircon. One might imagine I'd have gotten sick of it and would move out. Well, there's lots of pluses to my apartment as well. It's roomy. It's got great natural lighting. I've got a wonderful balcony garden. And at 2.5 lakh per month ($210), it's really cheap for expat-suitable housing un Yangon. The hassle of looking for a new place, packing up and moving exceeded the negative feelings I'm feeling about the place.

I'm in room #1 at the Tungapuri.  I can't
remember ever staying in a Room 1.

Ironically, I'm writing this blog tonight from the Tungapuri Hotel in Naypyitaw. We needed an extra teacher (the guy who replaced me when I went for back surgery is still here) up here to administer a large number of placement tests at one of the government ministries. Mondays and Tuesdays are my regular days off, so I was available for a little extra work for some overtime pay. It's nice to get out of town on occasion, even if it's for a business trip.

Unfortunately, these last two days haven't been as pleasant as I'd hoped as I've been vexed by a stomach bug. It's been more than a year since I've had the mild dysentery which just happens when living in the developing world. It was an awkward moment when I was traveling from the airport to the ministry with my administrative helper, who I had just met and had been supplied by the NGO we're trying to partner with, when I told the taxi driver to stop, jumped out of the car and vomited on the side of the road. I got back in and there was no comment. No asking if I was okay. They knew I had a case of Anawathra's Revenge and it was no big deal. 36 hours later, after plenty of imodium and re-hydrating salts later, I'm feeling better.

As I mentioned, I've been waiting for the next vacation, and it's just around the corner. I'm going to have 4 weeks off soon, from the the second week of April to the second week of May. During the first half of that, we have Thingyan, the Buddhist water festival, essentially a week long party involving lots and lots of water being thrown, sprayed and dumped on everyone everywhere. This will be my third Water Festival in Southeast Asia, and it's always been a lot of fun. I expect no difference.

For the second fortnight of the month off, I'm off to a place few go and for which I have little idea what to expect. Back in 1991, when I lived in Indonesia, my good friend Aaron went to live on a work-study expedition to Pontianak, Indonesia. Pontianak is the capital and largest city of the province of Kalimantan Barat which is the westernmost province of Indonesian Borneo.

Pontianak is on the banks of the largest river on an
island in the world.

Aaron said the place was a lot of fun, and since I wanted to go some place new and different, and I'm always happy to go back to Indonesia, I'll be spending 12 days in late April touring and exploring West Borneo.

Borneo! Who's been to Borneo?! That's one of the few places on Earth more exotic and unvisited than Myanmar. I'm going to rent a motorcycle and explore several parts of the parts of the province and I hope to see an orangutan or two.

I would like to share a video of my two-day Naypyitaw excursion, but I forgot to bring the gadget I need to get the vids off my camera onto my computer, and since the nearest store where I could buy one is 2 miles away (Naypyitaw sucks without transportation), you'll have to wait until I get back to Yangon.

Kuala Lumpur

Every 10 weeks, I have to renew my business visa here in Myanmar. This means I gotta go on a 'visa run'. My company pays my expenses for these brief overseas jaunts, and so although I agree with those who say the immigration department's policies are unnecessarily polemic and protectionist, from my point of view, I get to go some place cool every couple of months!

A couple weeks ago, instead of my usual Bangkok visa run, I went to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It only cost about $40 more, round trip, to go to "KL" versus "BKK". It was worth it. KL is a great city. The food was wonderful, the transportation system was awesome and the architecture was intriguing.

My only complaint was that the ukulele shop I wanted to visit was inexplicably closed on a Wednesday afternoon.



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Moving Back to Naypyitaw

I may be a bit premature in this announcement, as the details are yet to be finalized, but a general agreement is in place. My company is picking up a couple contracts with various agencies up in the Myanmar capital of Naypyitaw, one of the strangest cities in the world.

If you're new to the blog, I lived and worked in Naypyitaw from July to October of 2015, but my stay was cut short due to a more-invasive-than-expected back surgery in October. Although I was initially reluctant about moving to the infamously sparse and reportedly boring created capital, I found "NPT" to be a whole lot cleaner (streets and air) than Yangon. The food was better. Living in a hotel had tremendous perks (someone cleaning your room every day, daily  laundry service, fresh towels, hot water, fast and free internet). Best of all, I could be mobile and ride my motorcycle around.

As I said, the details are yet to be settled, but it looks like I'll be moving up there at the end of February. It could also be a long term assignment as the contracts we're working on are multi-year deals.

I've still got a lot of things to figure out about transitioning. First and foremost is what to do with my place here in Yangon. My lease is coming up in mid-March, and I don't really want to pay for a place where I'm not living. On the other hand, I've accumulated a lot of stuff after living here for two years, and disposing of it isn't something I'm looking forward to either. I'd like to visit Yangon on occasion as well, and I'd like a place to stay while here... Decisions, decisions.

Limelight

It's Progressive Rock Week (part 2) on the Seasons of the Ukulele contest at UkuleleUnderground.com. The band Rush was given as an example of a 'Prog Rock' band, and as I've always liked Rush, this seemed like a great opportunity for me to butcher one of their songs. Mind you, even on my best day, I can't sing like Getty Lee, and today I have a sore throat. My vocals are as understated as I get, and I turned up the reverb to compensate.

The backdrop is Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. This week, I was there on a visa run from Myanmar, so before I'd even learned the song, I was out on the streets getting snippets with which to make a video.

Some of the song's themes came out in the footage. For example, at 1:30 in the video, a couple female Japanese tourists wandered by while I was recording. They stopped, intrigued, and turned around wanting to take my picture. Suddenly I got self-conscious, unusual for me. I couldn't put aside the alienation and I said no. Besides, my uke was horribly out of tune after being de-strung for the flight and I couldn't really play it, I could pretend to play it for the camera, but I couldn't play it for these girls.  I failed in the momentary limelight.

Anyways, I don't post many uke videos here on the blog, but this one is half-travel.  I dunno what's up with this new formatting on Blogger. I couldn't post it via embed code as I usually do.

I had a weird dream two nights ago that kinda fits the overall "Leaving Amerika" l theme of this blog. In the dream, I was offered a job paying $60K/year, all I had to do was come back to the USA. Oh, what a conundrum roiling through by semi-conscious dream mind. I left the USA after my $60K/yr job turned into a $40K/yr job due to new corporate salary policies. If that hadn't happened, I might not even be here right now. If I could go back to making that... would I go home? I couldn't even think it through thoroughly as I was in a dream, but one which went on seemingly all night as my subconscious couldn't resolve an answer...