One Night in Bangkok

I'm a traveler. I love getting out and going places far from home. Always been this way. That said, I'm not very good at it. Namely, to be a good traveler, you should plan things in advance. Consult resources about where you're going. Confirm plans, check reservations, that kind of thing. If you don't do that kind of stuff, things may not be as you expect when you arrive at your destination. I've never been very diligent about this preparation/confirmation kind of thing. Hopefully I'm not to the point of being a polyana, but I've always just sort of assumed that things will turn out for the best.  That's my mindset, and I'm happy with it.

That's fine if you drive a couple hours to a state park and find it closed. That's just a disappointment. It's another thing when you've got an immigration-mandated international flight out of a fairly quiet airport in a country whose national carriers are renowned for canceling flights at the last minute.


But that couldn't happen to me, right?

This last Friday, I show up at Yangon International Airport a good two hours before departure time (patting myself on the back for the time cushion), step up to the check in line (there was no line) for Golden Myanmar Airlines under a big LED sign that said BANKOK: 4:45 – CANCELED. You'll see it in the video at the end.

Canceled? WTF? I already paid for my hotel in Bangkok. I have to make this trip tonight to renew my immigration visa status. What's going on?


I give them my paperwork, and there is, at that point, an unspoken request/demand that I hoped was being understood. Get me on another flight. They find my name on a list of about 15 people and one of the attendants gets on the phone, reading my name to who knows who. Another says, “We are checking with other airlines, please have a seat over there.” pointing to an area where about half a dozen other somewhat disgruntled looking disappointed passengers sit.

Twenty minutes later, they call me over, bring me to the queue for Bangkok Airways (the carrier with the funkiest painted planes in all of Asia) flight 704, leaving mere 30 minutes after my original flight had been booked for and told me to have a nice day.

Whaddya know. Things turned out for the best. I even got a free meal. Golden Myanmar wasn't offering food service for the short 60-minute flight to Bangkok. It was a cheap ticket. $120 round trip. In fact, it was explained to me three times and my boarding pass had the words “NO MEAL” highlighted right on it, so I was anticipating not getting any wonderful airplane food. Who cares? It's a one hour flight. That detail got missed and I had a lovely dinner during my hour on board Bangkok Airlines. Same thing on the flight home.

Remembering the list on a clipboard I saw with my name along with a dozen or so others, I'm guessing the flight was canceled due to underbooking. It just doesn't make sense for an airline to fly 600 miles or so on a Boeing 737 or an Airbus 320 with only 20 people on board. There's probably some of agreement between the airlines to handle these kinds of situations.

While in Bangkok, I spent the evening hanging out with friends on Sukhumvit's infamous Soi 11, and spent the next day shopping. Should have made a list of the stuff I intended to buy in that world-city Bangkok that I can't find in Yangon, but I forgot. Instead, I banged my head against a wall I had before while living there: trying to find a pair of shoes in size 12E for less than $100. If my feet were but one size smaller, I could buy a decent pair of shoes in Bangkok for $10. I did, however buy a whole bunch of science fiction books at Bangkok's Dasa Bookstore for a pretty penny. Worth every Baht.

Enjoy the video.

My Ein-Myaun Health

Hot. Hot, hot, hot. That's the news here from Myanmar. Not complaining, just reporting. We're talking 38C, 101F every single day. Oh, but it's a wet heat. Like a Houston heat. Air so thick, it's like you're swimming down the street when you're out for a walk. It is the height of the 'hot season' here in SE Asia. It's so hot, you don't really want to go out and do anything. A week with no blog. I haven't really had anything to blog about because I've been 'hibernating' in my AC'd apartment.


So let's catch up on some things about... well... it is my blog, so things about me.


If you've read this blog back from my days in Thailand, you'll remember I had some pretty significant issues with an inflamed disc in my back. Kept me bed ridden, and although it slowly got better, it regressed from time to time and there wasn't really any point in my last eight months in Bangkok that I was pain free.


Great news! I am now 100% pain free! The back has not bothered me at all. Ever since I came to Myanmar, I've had no issues with the bulging disc. Actually, I got better before leaving Thailand, a couple days after I sold my motorcycle. See, I'm pretty sure that was it. It was riding a motorcycle that kept aggravating my back. I sorta suspected that even while I was living with the pain, but I didn't really want to admit it to myself because that would imply I should stop riding a motorcycle! I loved the freedom and convenience having my own ride gave me. I loved the feel of riding the iron horse! I've had a motorcycle most of my life since I was 8 years old. If I could, I'd have one here in Yangon (motorcycles are banned within the city limits). One day, I'd planned on owning one again, but with this realization of how it causes me unending pain, maybe I should endeavor to buy a car.


On to a topic in other health news that I haven't talked about much on the blog, but my friends and family know about: my battle with psoriasis. For the last 18 years or so, I've had really bad plaque psoriasis. Big patches of white and red scaly skin covering most of my shins and much of my forearms. Elbows and knees totally covered. It itched. It caused me tremendous social anxiety. I'd tried everything to fix it, but nothing worked.


Just before I left Amerika, I'd gone to the doctor and he gave me a cocktail of topical steroids to use in combination. As I said, no single medicine I'd tried before had helped. Also just before I left, I visited the tanning salon two or three times a week. I had the time, and after five years in Seattle, I didn't want to arrive in the tropics pasty white. I was quite bronze when I came here a year ago. The UV radiation from the tanning booth also helped treat my psoriasis. With the medicine and the UV radiation, I was pretty much symptom free when I got here; I wasn't embarrassed to walk around in shorts.


Ultimately, the medicines I'd brought from America ran out, and I wasn't getting much sun on my legs, and although there are tons of businesses geared towards helping their customers appear more fair skinned, there are no tanning salons in Bangkok. The psoriasis came back. My regular doctor sent me to the Thailand Institute of Dermatology, the country's top skin clinic, where I underwent UV therapy.


Twice a week, I'd step into what amounted to a vertical tanning booth (medical strength) and in just a couple minutes, I got what amounted to a full day out in the sun.


It worked. They also gave me topical steroids, and after 4 months of this treatment, not a single symptom of psoriasis anywhere on my body for the first time in 18 years. Hallelujah!


I was worried about it when coming to Burma. I'm guessing there's not a single UV therapy machine in the entire country. I brought plenty of the topical stuff medicine with me from Thailand, but I knew that wasn't really what had alleviated my symptoms. I was worried the psoriasis would come back, as it always has before.


I've been here almost two months now. Haven't used any of the steroid cream on my problem areas at all (although the same stuff does do wonders for my jock itch). I'm still 100% symptom free. Hoooray!


One of the weird things about psoriasis, a condition whose cause isn't well understood nor is there any definitive 'cure', is that it is strongly influenced by psychological conditions. Another time in my past where my symptoms mostly went away is when I'd broken up with a girlfriend who'd been causing me a lot of stress. My symptoms were once again reduced by half when I divorced my ex-wife (same woman as the gf I'd broken up with years before that). See, stress exacerbates psoriasis. My skin, for these last however many years now, has been sort of a dermal indicator of my mental well being. When I don't feel like things are going right in my life, when I'm neurotic or unfulfilled, my skin tells me so by breaking it huge patches of auto-immune malfunction (psoriasis is an immune system hyperactivity; the skin is triggered into hyper-replacing itself when it doesn't need to).

If I'm psoriasis free, it means also that I'm stress free. Living here in Myanmar is tough, but it's an immediate, in your face kind of tough that I can handle. I had far more stress from the existential ennui of living in America surrounded by every creature comfort one could want, but still not feeling fulfilled. Here, my challenge is living. After that, everything's easy.


If my skin starts telling me I need to make a change, my brain will listen. 

For this week's video, we have me torturing an Ein-Myaun...

 

I CAN READ!

It's a quarter to five on a Friday.  Last month, this woulda been my favorite part of the week as it woulda been the end of the work week. Now, I'm looking out into the sky disappointed.

Back on Monday, I noticed thunderstorms predicted for today in Yangon.  First time I've seen that in a weather forecast in SE Asia since December. All week, I've been looking forward to the thunderstorms, which can be quite exciting here in the tropics. Also cools things down.

This morning while waiting on a download, I checked the weather on my phone again.  The hour-by-hour forecast said T-storms from 4 to 5 PM.  It's cloudy, but I am not seeing any ominous black clouds out there. Aww, man.

You can tell it's been a slow week when I'm disappointed by the inaccuracy of a weather report.

The download I mentioned was actually a streaming video that wasn't streaming.  See, I am a big Golden State Warriors fan, and my favorite basketball team was playing in a pivotal game 3 of their first round playoff matchup against the favored Los Angeles Clippers.  Game started at 9 AM here.  Although there are plenty of places around Yangon that have satellite TV that show NBA playoff games (I don't know of any, but I'm SURE they're out there), none of them are open at 9 AM.  What to do?

Somewhere, somehow, it'll be on the internet.  Even if it comes down to me just watching a text update thing, that's what'll have to be. The internet cafe about 6 blocks from my house offers about 50% (depending on how many other users are there) faster speeds than using my phone's hot spot at home, I trudged down there this morning to watch the game.

I found a site that was working pretty well!  The site where I was streaming it from was all in Chinese, but they offered three choices of feeds.  The one I picked was the original NBA TV feed, it streamed without too many hiccoughs, and the Warriors were winning!

Then the NBA TV feed ended because the game that had been on TNT was over and they were picking up coverage of the game in progress.

Oh.  I'll check out the other feeds.

Took a while, but I got CCTV5, and my team was now losing.  I think CCTV stands 'Communist Chinese Television', as the original audio feed was down to like 10% volume and I was listening to commentary from two Chinese analysts. In Mandarin, of course.  I understood like 2 words in 10, those two words being the names of the athletes.

It was getting to be later in the day, and the internet cafe, a big two-story establishment with about 60 to 80 computer stations in it, was starting to get full.  The speeds slowed down.

Got to be where I'd be able to watch like one minute of video followed by three minutes of the screen just being frozen while it buffered itself or whatever. Even during the commercials and time outs!  There were no controls to advance the feed even though we were falling way behind what was happening in real time.  At half time, I shut down the site and re-loaded to catch up to real time.  It was midway through the 3rd quarter. Still losing, but it was close.

By that time, the cafe was entirely packed.  At that point, I got 30 seconds of video for every five minutes waiting. I think I showed remarkable patience. I made it until two minutes left in the game.  My Warriors had made it close, but those Clips went on a run and it was an 8 point lead with not much time left. I clicked over to Facebook (which I had avoided for 4 hours knowing it would have shown me results), and sure enough, we lost.

In the words of the Chinese commentators I listened to for 5 hours, my team of Shi-Fan Ku-Lee, Kae Tom-Son and Igoo Dala lost out to that damn team from LA with Bae Gi-Fon and Zhis Pau.  Five hours it took to watch 2/3rds of a two hour basketball game.  Five hours at the cafe cost me all of $2, so it's not like it was expensive or anything.

It was not a wasted day though.  See, once I figured out the odd timing on one-minute on, four minutes off, I just used my time in the air-conditioned cafe to do other things.  Specifically, study my Burmese.  The written part.  I did those little 'draw this letter' exercises I've seen being used for beginning English students. I learned about vowel markers and then both spoke and wrote in Burmese what my book told me to. Studying wise, being out of my house and away from distractions, it was a very productive four minutes out of five. 


How many of you have memories of before you knew how to read? When you were about four years old, therebouts? I do. I remember being a little tiny kid riding around in the back of my mom's '62 Ford Fairlane and looking out onto the world and seeing all those signs with what I knew was writing, but I couldn't understand it. I remember being a very frustrated 4-year old living with illiteracy. 

That's what it's been like living here in Thailand and Myanmar this last year+. I've been an illiterate. After spending all time in the cafe doing writing and reading drills, when I was walking home, I noticed a big sign in Burmese script. That's an 'L'..That squiggly there means it's aspirated, so it's like an 'HL'...with an 'a'..that's a d, and that thing there that looks like an S is definitely an N. Oh look, there's the rarely used 'Z' with no vowel sound on it at all which means... 

'HLEDAN ZI' Hledan Market! That's where I live! OMFG!! I CAN READ!!! I CAN READ!!! I'm not 4 years old any more! So excited. I smiled the whole way home.

Numbering Something Familiar

I'm gonna need a tutor.  This trying to teach myself Burmese out of a book is iffy stuff.  Some of my flash cards:

Spent some time today working on my numbers. I'd been practicing one through ten, saying them in Burmese over and over to myself and then trying to use them when out in the world. I'm getting there. Heck, I'm sure I'll forget 4 or 7 or something like that on occasion, but I'll say after today, I'm pretty much there. I changed some money today, so I even got to practice using really big numbers like ko-thaun-chaun-thon (96,000).

Now, the written numbers, that I had just glanced at, until today when I decided I was going to really learn them. Important things, numbers. I made out flash cards, randomized them, and drilled myself. Staring at this chart, at first it looks really hard.

 
All those squiggly lines and strange shapes! You'll notice 'zero' is the same. I learned the symbol for '2' already too. See, the 200 Kyat note has JOO in each of it's corners, so whenever I looked in my wallet, JOO was looking back at me.

As I started to really look and think about it, the similarities really struck me! None of the Burmese letters are the same as our Latin alphabet, but their numbers sure are. Look there at the number '3'. The top part is the same as our 3. They just don't use a second semicircle. Take their symbol for the '4' turn it about 60 degrees counterclockwise and it looks a bit like a 4. Look at 6 and 9. They're the same as each other just flipped horizontally, just like our 6 and 9! (Okay, the 9 is backwards, but that 6 looks like a 6) Seven is easy; it's just a curvy 7. The 5 has the save curvy bottom as our 5.

What's going on here?

A Roman walks into a bar holds up two fingers and says “I'll have five beers please!”

See, our numbers aren't Latin like our letters. They're what we call 'Arabic' numerals, but from what I've read recently, they're central Asian. Burmese derives from Tibetan, a Central Asian language. The numbers don't just happen to look alike. They have common roots!

If you're learning Spanish or German or some European language other than Finnish or Basque, there's bits you already know. Bits that are the same as in your language. Not just bits actually, but whole chunks of it. Learning Burmese is tough because there are no common roots with English. Even the consonants and vowels are way different. You wouldn't believe how I excited I was to really see how something about this language connects with something I already know in English... err Arabic... what have you.

Aha! A thread of commonality! Something familiar! Yay! Oh I love Joo.. err... You, Burmese numbers!

The Hovel

Every morning when I wake up, I open the front door, swing open the back windows and push my interior dividing curtain aside to let the air through.  There's always a nice breeze early in the morning, and it's not too hot yet.  The raucous cawing of the crows, the haunting chanting of the monastery next door and all sounds of the market rise up from below. I can look out onto the morning scenes without being observed myself.  Yes, people act differently when they notice a foreigner around watching them.

My observations may border on voyeurism, and from up high, I can see over fences and such and watch people leading their everyday lives.  Time wise, it's a limited voyeurism, as either I gotta go to work or by 9 AM, it's starting to get unbearably hot and sticky, so the windows shut an the AC comes on.  I'm beginning to feel more and more at home here in Yangon, but it's these morning sights that impress on me a feeling that I am in a very different place.

Out the back window, there's the hovel.  Calling it a shack wouldn't be accurate. Shacks are generally better constructed. It's a hovel.  I think about 6 people are living in it.

The hovel is interesting to watch because it has no front wall.  I can see pretty much everything about this family's life right from my kitchen.  I don't think they can see me in the morning as the sun would be behind me.

Here's a closer look at the hovel.

If I ever want to remember how lucky I am to live in my somewhat modest apartment.  I just think about the hovel.  People, just like you and I, live there.  What's going on inside?

OMG!  It's a girl with four legs!

No, not really.  Two sisters, I assume, laying on mats.  You can't see the one in the back's head. The younger one, I'm guessing she's about five, is chopping cucumbers on the floor with a very large knife.  I'll bet your parents didn't let you (err..made you) play with large knives when you were five!

So, that's it for the hovel for today.  I'll try not to invade their privacy too much; there won't be a Hovel Webcam being set up. 

As for me, I'm still on vacation. Enjoying the languid reality that I wake up everyday with absolutely nothing to do. Exploring Yangon's better and less well known attractions.  Yesterday, I recorded a ukulele video for the Underground at a nearby lake.  Today, I'm thinking about heading down to the National Museum. 

An Unexpected Journey. There and Back: Downtown Yangon

I picked up a wonderful book at a roadside bookseller here in Yangon today. It's titled Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia by Thant Myint-U. A bit repetitive at times, re-stating points he'd made earlier in the volume. Kinda like this was a collection of stand-alone essays, but all in all, a fascinating read for someone eager to understand more of the history, culture and possible future of this new country he's come to. I burned through half the book this afternoon alone. Noticed at that same bookseller, they carried two other books by this same author. Definitely going to pick those up too when I finish this one (which might yet be tonight).


There was a line from that book I have to share. "Marco Polo, who never went to Burma, but heard about it second hand, described this area as 'a very unfrequented country with great woods abounding in elephants and unicorns and a number of other wild beasts'."

Unicorns? Okay, sure that was written in the 14^th Century, but if they were abounding then... where are they hiding the unicorns now?!?


Ain't seen no unicorns.


This morning, I embarked on a journey preceded by a simple concept. It was a suggestion that was given to me by someone when I first arrived in Bangkok about a year ago and was wondering how to begin exploring this strange, vast new city. 'Get on a random bus and just see where it takes you!' someone told me. I never did actually did that there, but the idea stuck with me.


That's what I did this morning.


Mixed feelings on the results. It didn't take me into someplace weird, isolated and unexpected. Big city buses don't do that; they take you where everyone wants to go, in this case, Downtown Yangon.


Way back before I even thought about coming here, I wrote an article for a Thai magazine aimed at English learners about the various ASEAN capitals. Yangon hasn't been the capital of Myanmar for 15 years, but it used to be, and its a heck of a lot more interesting than the new capital. Yangon's downtown specifically is very much wrapped up in Burma's English colonial past. As I learned when the researching the article, the British essentially built Yangon(nee Rangoon)'s downtown area, filling it with wide streets on a grid, monuments to imperialist Victorian architecture and lots of public spaces and parks. So different than the winding, narrow confusing roads of my part of town, streets typical of any Asian city.


Yet, in my 6 weeks here in Yangon, I had yet to visit downtown during the day. Done no sightseeing in that part, the most interesting part, of my new city. Did it today, quite by accident. It's where the random bus took me.


Some production notes on the video.

• That odd chanting-singing you hear at the start of the video, that's what I hear every morning at 7 AM from the monastery near my home. I'm a morning person, and am usually up by then, but this 15 minutes or so of 'music' is them just saying, 'Good morning, Yangon!'
  
• I'm not sure what the somewhat religious looking building I got off the bus to find at 0:46 in the video actually was. Could it have been the one Jewish synagogue here in Myanmar? No, too few points on the star.
  
• I was overwhelmed by all the colonial architecture in downtown. Yeah, I knew it was there, but it was something else to see it in the cool light of the morning.
  
• 1:33; Forget a supermarket.. We got hypermarkets!
  
• The funky looking building at 2:12 is a Hindu temple, located appropriately in the Indian quarter of downtown. Wow. Never seen such a busy house of worship. Hinduism is, no matter what anyone might say, a polytheistic religion with hundreds and hundreds of deities. They all seemingly got little places on this one temple.
  
• I've been pining for a pizza since Thingjan started. Just as I was dying of thirst in the increasingly hot morning, I came across a place and went in for something to drink. They had pizza on their menu. It was delicious! Generous with the toppings and on a crust that was not too thick and not too thin.
  
• The place I visit starting at 2:45 is Sule Pagoda, a Buddhist shrine hundreds of years old located in the middle of a traffic circle in the heart of downtown.
  
• At 3:00, there's a horrified, piercing scream that didn't even register with me at the time I was recording, but when I heard it in the video, I had to include it. No idea who it was.
  
• Unlike the temple kitties I'd seen at Wat Phra Keow in Bangkok, the temple kitties at Sule Pagoda were very skittish.
  
• That beautiful, big white building at 3:18 is Yangon's City Hall.
  
  
  
  
  
  

Yacht Rock for Day Five.

The fifth day of Thingjan. The water play seems to have died down, but the Buddhist monastery a block from my home blasts away on their sound system like it's Holy Week.

Err, it is Holy Week. Yesterday was Palm Wednesday, and tomorrow is Good Friday.  Here, it's day five of Thingjan... and everything is still closed.  Supermarkets, most restaurants, the important stuff. I've had this surreal desire for a pizza for a few days now. Thailand's most popular pizza restaurant, The Pizza Company, recently opened a restaurant not too far from my home here in Yangon, Myanmar. Been there once already.  It was good.

Went there again tonight, thinking Day Five, they have to have re-opened.

Nope.  They were closed.

Their lights were on. There were half a dozen staff visible just inside the locked glass doors. One of them came out to talk to me.

"Tomorrow, we'll be open from..."

I stopped him there. What you're doing fucking tomorrow don't mean shit!  I want pizza NOW!!

Thingjan has been fun. I've never experienced a celebration quite like this. The whole society switched modes in honor of this holiday. I'm looking forward to next year. 

As this holiday has provided me with a lot of time off, I've been busy with my two favorite hobbies: video making and uke playing! I got some of both to share with you.

Last week, I went to Ngwe Saung on the west coast of Myanmar. About 100 miles from here.  On the way home, in the daylight, I recorded a bunch of stuff from the window of the bus.  Jeez.  How could anyone make that kind of footage interesting?  Set it to some Kill Bill.



Now, that's going back like a week. 

A couple days ago, I posted a video here that I made after some angry disappointment. See, I thought I'd already made it, but when I went to upload it, I couldn't find it. So, I made it from scratch all over again.  When I went to upload it (the vid from my last blog), well, lo and behold, there was the first one!  Since it's already online, I suppose I should share.




As I said, ukulele playing has been part here of my month off. What an interesting theme this week from my friends as the Seasons of the Ukulele community.  It's YACHT ROCK week!  This being that smooth, soft rock that dominated the airwaves, the early MTV and best seller charts in the late 70's and early 80's. Think Artists like Kenny Loggins, Christopher Cross, Michael McDonald.  Bands like Chicago, Alan Parsons Project, The Doobie Brothers, Asia.. that kind of stuff.

Easy listening rock that pre-yuppies enjoyed on their yachts...

I actually made TWO videos (thus far) this this Yacht Rock theme.  The first was a classic love duet I sang with myself...

Err... umm.. it looks like my Kyats have run out on my pre-pay phone/internet conncection. Can't get anything to download. I hope I can up load this.

As for the songs, you'll have to view them on my YouTube page: youtube.com/jokolondo.


never mind... got it to work by yelling at the top of my lungs about how much the internet sucks here. Somehow, things are working better now.