Blog 200!

This is my 200th blog here at Leaving Amerika. It's been 23 months since I left the States, and closing in on one year since coming here to Myanmar.

I think I've changed in that time.  I'd say I'm a lot more patient with the world, accepting of difficulties and relaxed. Living in tropical Southeast Asia, although occasionally demanding, is, on the whole, less stressful than living in the USA.

As I mentioned in the Ajarn.com blog, I just re-upped my contract and with that comes some really great news.

When I started this journey, I spent three weeks earning a TEFL certificate, a teaching qualification which is a minimum requirement at most jobs if you want to teach English as a second language. Although there's some debate surrounding this, the TEFL is generally considered the second-tier of teaching qualifications in the industry.  Significantly more well regarded is the CELTA certificate.  The main reason it's got a better reputation is that it is administered by a single agency,

UK's Cambridge University.  Unlike the TEFL which has several competing organizations that certify the quality of the school, a CELTA is the same all over the world.

Of the 15 teachers who I call colleagues, I am one of three who have just the TEFL. The other 12 have CELTAs. One of those three, Anthony, is leaving Myanmar in a few weeks.

Speaking of Anthony, it's video break time!  Before I go back to the story, let me share this video I made after a recent visit to the Yangon Zoological Gardens...






It would be an important marketing tool for my company if they could promote themselves as being staffed entirely by CELTA qualified teachers. Not many places can do that, and for those in the know, particularly corporate clients, it ensures that all our teachers are well trained and qualified.

I got an e-mail a few weeks back from our CEO asking if I'd be interested in earning my CELTA on the company dime.  Yup, they've offered to pay for me to get my CELTA, and it's not cheap. I accepted, but there were some strings attached.  I'm actually paying for part of the cost and I had to sign an agreement promising that if I left the company before 18 months after completing the training, I would reimburse them for what they paid.

I'm staying in Yangon for the foreseeable future.

Best part of this CELTA trip is where I'm going for the month it's going to take to study.  There are no CELTA courses in Myanmar, so come April, I'm heading back to Thailand for a month. 

Speaking of Thailand, I'll break away from the story again for another video! Last week, I spent a weekend in Bangkok on a visa run.  I liked how this video worked out....

I'm not going back to Bangkok, though.  This time, I'll be up in Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand.  Chiang Mai is legendary for it's beauty and is probably

Thailand's most popular tourist destination. I'm going to stay at a converted resort some distance from the town, which I think is going to be a good thing.

See, the CELTA is said to be a LOT of work. It's not easy and a certain percentage of applicants fail the course.  There's nightly homework and several long projects. It's not going to be fun and games up there in Chiang Mai, but with my experience and determination, I'm confident I'll do just fine.

Cultivating Novelty

Hey folks!  Been a long time since I've blogged.  I do have some things to share, but for now, I wanted to link this article I wrote for Ajarn.com (Ajarn means 'teacher' in Thai). 

http://www.ajarn.com/blogs/joko-mackenna/cultivating-novelty

Hey folks! Joko here, your senior Myanmar correspondent at Ajarn.com. It's approaching one year since I left The Land of Smiles for the wild, final frontier of TESOL in SE Asia, and, as anniversaries often make one feel, I find myself more and more contemplative as the date approaches.

Finishing Up the Vacation

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Okay, it's the 23rd of January, so this is a bit late, but it takes some time to make these videos, y'know.

In other news, I've made a decision to re-sign my lease here at this apartment for another year.  Sure, this place has some flaws, but the positives outweigh the negatives. The same goes for this country of Myanmar itself.

Sometimes, I do miss the USA.  Just last night, I had a dream where I was having Thanksgiving dinner with Kyle, Stan, Kenny and Cartman.  It may also be that I watch too much South Park.

So, here are the final two videos of the trip (not including random shots from the dinky little Dawei airport the next morning).

I Had Tears Rolling Down My Face

This is a really bad time for me to be relatively disconnected from America when it comes to my favorite sports teams. My teams are doing amazingly well this year, and I, here in the land of slow internet, have been tantalizingly close to, but yet unable, to follow my teams' triumphs.

My favorite sport is basketball, and although I can't play it anymore due to my age and back (yes, I've finally recognized this), I can still watch it.  By far, my favorite NBA team is the Golden State Warriors, the SF Bay Area team.  This season, they are the best team in the NBA.  They've got the best record. They've had incredible winning streaks. Reportedly, they're incredibly fun to watch and dominate the rest of the league. Unlike last year in Thailand where I had unlimited high-speed internet for $10/mo, I don't watch the Warriors games on the net. When I got it here, it would have been impossible due to the extremely slow internet speeds. Now, things are faster, but prohibitively expensive.

Expense is no factor when your team is in football's NFC Championship Game. My Seattle Seahawks, whose every game I watched last year from Thailand, played in the game-before-the-Super-Bowl yesterday, and I had to watch.  They were no lock to win, and it was sure to be an exciting game. I plunked down my $30 to the NFL to get access to the Championship and Super Bowl games and was really worried that my internet speed wouldn't be up to the task to stream the game.

Good news: it was.

Better news: The Seattle Seahawks beat the Green Bay Packers in the most remarkable fashion. I won't recap the game, suffice to say they overcame the largest halftime deficit in Championship Game history to win and move on to the Super Bowl.

At the end, the swing in emotion from the deflation of defeat to the joy of victory was so strong that I cried.  I couldn't help myself.  I cheered at the top of my lungs on this Monday morning, screaming YAAYYY as if I were there in the stadium.  With the overcast morning and my AC at its utmost to the point of being cold, it kinda felt like I was in Seattle, my former home.

In the post-game interview, Russel Wilson, the Seattle quarterback, had tears in his eyes and was crying with joy.  He pulled himself together, and although my team hasn't won it all this year, we've gotten to the Super Bowl again.  I'm going to have a party at my place for the event that I've already paid for.  I woulda felt kinda stupid having shelled out half a day's pay had my team NOT moved on to the last game.

Although I'm happy my new internet provider was fast enough to let me watch the game without too many stops and starts, I don't have unlimited internet; I get charged per data downloaded.  It was $5 for the data to watch the game.  Yes, high speed internet has come to Myanmar, but until high speed internet is paired with unlimited access at a reasonable price, it's more like high speed profits for the providers.

Maybe by May when the NBA playoffs start and I want to watch my Warriors win their championship, my internet provider will offer an unlimited package. The way my teams are playing, I'd buy it.


TOday's video is the next part of my holiday vacation in Southeast Myanmar.  Watch to the end. There's a bit of a surprise.

This is Burma: On da Way from Ye to Dawei

Some notes from the second half of my vacation in Southeast Myanmar...

Foreigners and monks in the upper class car .

You may have noticed from the video chronicling my journey from Hpa An to Ye that I had picked up some traveling companions. This happened to me on more than one occasion in my ten days away from home. There aren't that many foreigners doing the tourist thing in this part of the country, and so when solo travelers meet and talk, there is a natural tendency to glom onto one another. I enjoy the freedom of making my own path at my own pace, but it's also nice to have people to talk to, and in my case, since I speak some of the language, I got followers who liked my ability to negotiate with the locals.

One of these, I called Santa Claus. I met him the day after Christmas. He was older, fat, and had a long white beard. He was from Canada, which isn't far from the North Pole. Never have I met someone who was so oblivious to what he was saying.

It was so cool to capture this image for my own which I had
put on my blog previously from another source. 

He was traveling with a young woman he had met the day before who happened to be Israeli. Twice on that first day of our acquaintance, he talked about haggling, once with a fruit vendor and the other with the Captain, the innkeeper there in Ye. When referring to trying to get a better price, on both occasions, he said, “I'll see if I can Jew him down.” 

Aww, man.

That phrase is offensive and politically incorrect enough as it is, but to make that remark in front of an Israeli? Completely oblivious.

The next day, Santa and I both rented motorcycles, but from two different sources. Santa pulls up on his bike, and the first thing I notice is the swastika on the front splash guard. Now, as many of you know, the swastika didn't start off as a NAZI symbol. It's an ancient Hindu symbol which Hitler hijacked as part of his obsession with Aryan culture (the Aryans conquered India about 4000 years ago and founded Hinduism). You see swastikas all over SE Asia and it has nothing to do with NAZI-ism. Thing is, this bike also had a German war eagle adjacent to the swastika. That changes the context. I pointed this out to Santa, and again, he was oblivious. Hadn't even noticed. He noted that might be why when he offered his Israeli friend a ride, she refused. At least he was aware of that much.

More on what you'll see in the video: The vid starts with me visiting a place about 15 miles outside Ye called Banana Hill. They recently built (and are still building) a gigantic Buddhist monument up on the top of this hill. Something occurred to me as I put this video together during this time of so much worldwide religion versus religion strife. The architecture, the furnishings, the interiors of this shrine were Buddhist, but they might (minus the statues) have been Islamic, Christian of Jewish. If you want to make an impact on people's souls with a place, there's certain ways to do it. As you view the interior of the pagoda, ask yourself, what religion is this? For me, it could have been any religion.

The train ride from Ye to Dawei was interesting and beautiful, but oh, my God, it was long. It was eight hours, but eight hours to go 255 kilometers (160 miles)? Do the math. One online travel guide called it the slowest train in the world.

I spent that first night in Dawei, which I thought made up for the day that I had chosen not to go to Sittwe Beach, part of my original itinerary. When I showed up at the Coconut Guesthouse, the only reasonable accommodation in Maungmagan, they told me I was a day early for my booking. Yes, they had a reservation for me, but it was for the following day. Again, this was the week between Christmas and New Years, not a time to be just assuming there will be vacancies. Fortunately, despite my bad planning, they had a room for me, and I began my stay in Maungmagan.

This is Burma: Uncertainty in Mon State

This begins the unplanned middle part of my trip which I had been worried about. I was changing my plans a bit. The original itinerary had me leaving Hpa An for Settse Beach, and after that, off to Ye. Well, I'll see Settse some day in the future, but it really would require quite a sidetrack from my general southernly direction, and I didn't really know how to get there anyway.

So, it was off to Ye instead.
 

The ride from Hpa An back to Mawlamyine was... umm.. interesting. The 'bus', which left every hour, was actually a pick up truck with some seats installed in the back and a canopy thrown over the top. I had begun my journey bright and early, and in the wind of the 'bus' zooming along at... err... 40 mph, I actually got pretty cold back there. Late December is mild in Myanmar.

I didn't know how I'd get from Mawlamyine to Ye, but these were the two biggest towns in Mon State, and I just needed to find the bus. My pick up truck driver was cool. He asked me where I wanted to go and then dropped me at the appropriate bus station to catch a bus to Ye.

As for what I saw in Ye, I'll leave that part of the story to those who watch the video. I got to meet Santa Claus.

A Priest, a Monk and Joko Walk Into a Cave

Merry Christmas!

Okay, today is the 13th Day of Christmas, and so this greeting is a bit late, but I'm still catching up on editing the videos from the long trip.

I spent Christmas morning at the Catholic Church of Hpa An, Kayin State.  There was a lot the familiar at the church.  Prayers, rituals, etc., but there were some uniquely Burmese things about the service as well.  Note the horn symbols - that's a Kayin thing.

Also kind of odd are the clocks on either side of the altar.  Usually, the front of the church is for sacred things, right?  There were a pair of clocks adjacent to the cross.  When people got bored in church, it did keep them rudely looking at their watches, so it does have some purpose. 

After church, I drove out of town to visit a couple sacred Buddhist caves.

Like many sites in SE Asia, the macacques were out in force.  I don't think local vendors were offering proper snack choices for the visitors to feed the monkeys, but I can't help but love this picture.  The way he's holding the bag is like he's shooting a commercial.  Macacques everywhere prefer Blue Dolphin Brand shrimp chips!  It's no Monkey Business!

Enjoy the video.