After that, I had a vague idea of a country opening up, which led to casual discussion with my friend Emily over a dinner at Peter Chang's in RVA about meeting each other there sometime during the fall semester when she and James would be studying in Singapore while I studied in Beijing.
That became a serious series of e-mails, which became a very real (painfully so for my bank account) plane ticket, still more or less devoid of plans of real substance.
Now it is so much more. For me, Myanmar has become a beautiful country full of incredibly friendly and earnest people. When I think of Myanmar, I think of endless temples, each deliberately placed so natural light highlights the structure within. I think of monks, and the sound of chanting and the smell of incense in the air. I think of people wearing skirts (longyi) with face paint to protect from the sun and to act as a cosmetic (thanaka). I think of people smiling at me in curiosity and in welcome.
It was an unforgettable trip. I plan to write more about it later, but I am in the midst of making up the work I missed for it, so photos will have to do for now.
The photos are all mainly in Bagan, which Emily, James, and I took a night bus to from Yangon (Rangoon) soon after I arrived. We found ourselves in Bagan at about 4am with no hotel and no plans, but with the absolute perfect opportunity. We bought tickets for a night bus to Inle Lake for that evening, and took a horse cart into temple-filled Old Bagan. Bagan is a town on the plain in central Myanmar that has hundreds if not thousands of temples as far as the eye can see, built over a number of centuries. Many are still in use, while others have yet to be repaired after a devastating earthquake in 1975.
Our driver knew the perfect place to climb a temple and get a beautiful view of the sun rise. After that, we rode from temple to temple, from extravagant golden pagodas (which Emily, James, and I agreed looked gorgeous at night but a little tacky in the daytime) to stone temples that seemed almost to hark back to the Aztecs.
One thing that both surprised and delighted me was the decorations surrounding many of the Buddhas. Rather than the simple stone or gold statues that tourists like yours truly was expecting to find, Buddha statues were surrounding by colorful lights like a tacky creche near Christmas time. I liked it because it was neither what we tourists expected nor what we wanted, but rather true Buddhist temples portraying the greatness and wonder of Buddha with everything they could, including Christmas tree lights. I think tourists (myself certainly included in that category) want a peek into the past to see the mysterious and beautiful relics of another time, but what those lights showed me was that Buddha is still very much a part of Myanmar of the present.
Well, I ended up writing a lot more than planned, but it all just spilled out, with tomorrow's vocabulary words putting up a feeble protest. I will continue the story of my trip to Myanmar tomorrow along with more pictures!
Keeping immortals out of Myanmar since 1954
James and I at Bagan at dawn
What had been dark shapes against the night sky begin to reveal themselves in the morning light
Awwwww... Emily and James
All the temples had this sort of lighter colored path around them since the sun would heat up the darker colors to a burning heat for our bare feet (no shoes, no shorts, and no spaghetti straps in temples)
Fierce
One of the larger temples of Bagan
An extravagant Buddha with colorful lights in front. James, Emily, and I were convinced this sort of set up would make a good bar. In our defense, we were very tired from a long bus ride with little sleep, we were beginning to be templed-out after dozens of temples, and it was (is) a great idea.
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