The Long Way Home: Myanmar

Our first destination on the Long Way Home is Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar and the historical capital of the Burmese empire. A British colony from 1824 to 1948 and a war-wracked failed state from 1948 until roughly 2011, Myanmar is now an intensely Buddhist nominally democratic emerging economy just starting to re-engage with the rest of the world. It is the first place we’ve gone where we had to think hard about visiting a place with such a terrible human rights and environmental record, but ultimately we decided that visiting a country to see its people and culture first hand does not constitute support of its government, tacit or otherwise.

Flying in, Elizabeth saw an incredible number of pagodas from the air, and it seemed like a never-ending parade of temples and pagodas on the taxi ride to the hotel. And so much construction. Like a lot of the places we’ve been visiting, this city will look completely different in 10 years.

We wound up staying in the civic district – our hotel balcony looked out over city hall and could see the old supreme court building. One of the major religious sites in Yangon, Sule Pagoda, was situated in the traffic roundabout just two blocks away.

The city hall building was designed by a Burmese architect trying to copy British styles... but couldn't help adding a few spikey towers.

Pagoda being the center of town in 300 BC: makes total sense.  In 2019: Traffic obstruction.

Day 1:

One of these Borchert women is thrilled to be here!

After checking in and getting oriented we went exploring by foot. We walked around and into Sule Pagoda (which is ringed with cellphone and nameplate shops), and got an introduction into Burmese Buddhism - in which prayer stations for the days of the week play an integral role, and each day of the week has a spirit animal and lucky numbers.

It is critical to pour water over the Buddha's head 5 times.  Or your age.  Or apparently just any old odd number will do if you get too old.

Afterwards we remembered we were supposed to be relaxing, so we found a playground and the kids played with the locals until the rain got too strong. It’s worth noting that it’s the rainy season in most of the places we’re visiting; constrained as we were by the kids’ school schedules we didn’t have a lot of control over when this trip was. Luckily the rainy season suits us just fine: nearly no crowds and a little warm rain never hurt anyone! We hung out under the trees with some other folks and street dogs and waited for the downpour to stop before leaving the drenched playground equipment to explore the town.

The old Supreme Court building, now just a regular court building slowly succumbing to the elements.

We walked to nearby chinatown, exploring streets and shops. Eventually we made it to 19th street, which is famous as a BBQ and beer street. We had dinner at at amazing bbq joint where we got to choose skewers full of all manner of animal and vegetable bits, which we did with reckless abandon. Amazing stuff, and Michael is pretty sure he ate pig testicles. It started pouring again in earnest, so we moved inside and hung out with the locals.

At this point, the streets had not yet completely flooded.

Day 2:

We took a taxi to Kandawgyi Lake, walked around finding shrines built into bodhi trees and strangler figs and mysterious dead-end islands and bridges. Eventually we came around to the main attraction near the lake: the Schwedagon Pagoda, possibly the first Buddhist temple ever built (it was actually built while Siddhartha Gautama was still alive).

We declined to buy live sparrows to release from the top, hiked up past the religious shops (selling bell, buddhas, and battery-operated plastic toys), and explored the astounding pagoda and gold-plated stupa. We followed a helpful old man around (for a tip, of course) to see the tiny statue of the king that built the first version, the giant reclining buddha, and the replica of the largest bell in Asia that had once rung prayers at this temple... until it was stolen by the Portuguese and sank one of their ships with its weight.

Middle Child is carrying on a fine Borchert tradition of being a complete weirdo as soon as a camera is pointed at him.

White children draw a crowd.

The courtyard was immense, and filled with intricate shrines and statues.

Actual gold.  Hard to see from here: the 76 karat diamond on top.

Finally, we walked back to the Karaweik Palace, a replica of the royal barge that is now a dinner theater where we were regaled with traditional Burmese songs, dances, and puppetry while we gorged ourselves on a buffet dinner. Elizabeth stuck to the local dishes, and the kids consumed mostly watermelon and french fries. The kids had an amazing time, even though the whole routine started at 6:30 and ran over two hours long. I think we told ourselves “just one more dance” 6 times.

The boat from the money and the beer labels!

A big "Boat".  Apparently, "culturally" this is the same boat as the royal barge from 2500 years ago.  Even though this one is made of concrete and doesn't float.

Basically sounded like a Dead Can Dance song.

Pantomime elephant? PANTOMIME ELEPHANT!

Day 3:

Today we booked a food tour in the morning, to connect all the dots! More-so than Singapore, Myanmar has really integrated the neighboring food cultures, borrowing from Indian, Chinese, and Thai cuisines in each meal, and sometimes in each dish, to achieve something greater than the “original” version. We had breakfast donuts that were shaped like Yu Tiao but as soft and buttery as croissants, samosas wrapped in spring roll wrappers and deep fried, sticky rice fried with cumin, amazing fish noodle soups and coconut stews. Everything was amazing and novel, but nothing was challenging or scary (like, say, everything we ate in Chengdu). Merely delicious. We also put together a lot of puzzle pieces... Burmese people have only given names, and the first syllable of your name is determined by the day of the week you were born (keeping in mind that Wednesday Morning and Wednesday Evening are somehow different days), which made the day-of-the-week stations in all of the temples make a lot more sense! We also learned about the Burmese language (33 consonant-vowel sounds, with 11 “vowel overrides”, and 3 tones that the elders couldn’t hear at all, but made perfect sense to the Mandarin-speakers).

Stuffed from the food tour, we skipped lunch and had a lazy afternoon in the hotel room, the headed to dinner at “Sharky’s”, a truly great Italian restaurant with a Burmese-native head chef who studied cheese-making in Switzerland before coming back to Junta-era Burma to start curing salamis and figuring out how to make a truly great camembert out of water buffalo milk.

I had almost forgotten what good cheese tastes like.

Day 4:

The last day we leveraged food-tour-guide contact to find a reliable tri-shaw (like a side-car bicycle) operator on the other side of the river, in the much more rural village of Dala. We took a ferry across the river (luckily doing a reverse commute... the ferries coming from Dala to Yangon in the morning were packed to the gills) and got a really amazing view of the decaying Victorian splendour of the remaining colonial buildings - with their domes and turrets covered in jungle vines and starting to lean, literally across the street from gleaming modern high-rises.  On the far side of the river, the shore was littered with fishing boats, some in the water, some pulled up on shore for the rainy season, some which had been pulled up during previous wet months and either collapsed or been turned into buildings.

Hard to see: lots of bicycles coming across that bridge.

Once off the ferry we met our trio of guides who pedaled us around, visiting some of the lesser temples, as well as fishing villages, lotus pond, candle factory (the Yangon municipal area burns roughly 30,000 candles a day, all made by this factory. They’re mostly used by illegal squatters now, as most houses have reliable-enough electricity).

The Dala suburbs.

The lotus pond is _actually_ the water reservoir.

Candlemaking is pretty low-tech, even with the water-cooled candle molds.

We also visited the local morning market.  From Michael:

“A few months after we’d been living in Singapore I remember walking through downtown and thinking, ‘did we move far enough from Minnesota?’ Singapore was so cosmopolitan and western that it felt like we’d just moved to downtown San Francisco. Crossing the wooden plank bridge into the morning market in Dala, with the steady rain coming down on the sections of plastic sheeting intermittently stretched between the stalls, passing the guy rolling the chewing slugs from betel nut and broken-open cigarettes, the cages of straggly free-range chickens, the piles of fresh-gutted river fish next to the piles of fish guts for sale, I finally felt like I was far enough from home.”

All of our guides thought it was cute that we only had 3 kids. Michael lucked out and got the tour guide that spoke the most English and who had also studied as a Buddhist monk for 5 years, so got to chat about life in the village, religion in Myanmar, and a little about politics. When asked about whether things were better now that they had returned to democratic rule (Wikipedia says 8 years ago, MaughMaugh the tri-shaw guide says 5 years), the answer was:

“It is like a river. Some days lots of waves, some days not so much.”

Our last stop in Dala was at a small souvenir shop that made handicrafts and household goods from non-decomposable waste collected in and near the village. Lots of handbags made from tire rubber and detailed paperwork made from newspapers and instant coffee packets. We chatted with the American woman who had started the NGO that funded the shop for the first few years, but it was now self-sufficient and employed 12 people full-time.

Raw materials!

After the ferry back and a family nap, we went to explore some of the other markets in Yangon. The Bogyoke Aung San Market, the “original” textiles/jewelry/home goods/wacky crap market. Michael finally found his Buddha-Calls-The-Earth-To-Witness statue, Eldest got a full Longyi (traditional/contemporary Burmese outfit), Elizabeth got some prayer bells and her own outfit, and Middle Child got a decorated horse marionette. Danger Monkey insists that we owe her a dress and a skirt. We’ll see what we can do in our next stop: Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai in northern Thailand!