Myanmar and America politics, only one to like

Goatherd on the tracks in Myanmar?
That's a job I wouldn't mind talking about.

“I think we should talk about politics,” I suggested to the table of tour members, bored senseless with the American conversation of what you do for work.

“Oh, but wouldn’t you rather be friends?” A woman responded, half joking. Maybe a quarter. Heads around the table nodded their agreement, and we discovered that Bill was an accountant.

I get it. It bums me out, but I get it. And given how much more important politics is than what we normally talk about (unless Game of Thrones really affects your life) this kinda boggles my mind, so I’ve grabbed a few theories to explain it.

Not your enemy. Not anyone's enemy.

3. Things seem so screwed, talking about them depresses me. (I get that. But what if ignoring problems is an implicit endorsement of them?)

2: I don’t understand politics and I’m scared that if we talk about it, you’ll find that out. (Chicken or the egg?)

And my number 1 reason why I think Americans are scared to talk about politics: We’ve forgotten that disagreeing with each other doesn’t friggin mean we’re enemies. You can still be friends with people you disagree with. And personally, I think you should be friends with people you disagree with. That might help our impasse, and lessen the ease with which we demonize and ridicule those with other opinions, instead of understanding and connecting with them.

So I’m delighted that Rick Steves encourages his guides to talk politics with tour members. And I’m going to. With frequent disclaimers that they’re just my opinions, and that I respect differing viewpoints, yada yada yada, and I’m sure I’ll get cases (like the one in Rome) where people look at me and their eyes indict “Oh. You’re one of them.” Who want to take our guns. Who want to demean the sanctity of marriage. Who want to give our jobs to the ___s.

Daily life, somewhere between Yangon and Mandalay

But what about when teaching refugees? Should I talk politics with people whose politics might have gotten them killed, and gotten their families killed? Probably not.

But when I have so many students from Myanmar, and that country is having its first apparently/relatively fair election in 25 years, I just have to ask something. And that one particular student is such a positive, friendly, open guy, and he speaks English so well, I just had to ask him a question that’s been lingering since I visited Myanmar in 2013.

I stopped by Aung San Suu Kyi's birthday. It was fantastic.
But why were the shirts in English?
(About 100 languages are spoken in Myanmar. Oh.)

 “How do you feel about Aung San Suu Kyi?” He looked at me, slightly bewildered. “I heard, in Myanmar, people say that she is kind of more for foreigners than Burmese people.” (Kind of like how the Dalai Lama is the outside world’s representative of Tibet, but inside the country the Panchen Lama is often more significant.)

My student summed up politics in so many countries. “We like her. Because she’s the only one to like.”

So as the Republicans continue to search for the most insane viewpoints, the most profound misarticulation of reality, and the worst possible responses to it, and Hillary tries to squirm out from under the perception that she’s an intelligent, dedicated diplomat who is basically just another politician, I am left loving Bernie Sanders. Of course, the more I hear from and about him, the more I love him, but still, he’s the only one to like. Wouldn’t it be great to have more than one good option?

I wonder if I can get a table full of Americans to talk about that one.

Sweaty streets and Chinese imperialism in Mandalay, Myanmar

Monks catch rides on scooters & bikes, even to the palace.
The Tatmadaw is the Myanmar military

I was in a bad way when I got to Myanmar, two years ago. Mental, emotional, spiritual, I was a wreck at every level of the human totem pole. In Mandalay I walked because I didn't know what else to do, around the palace island where banners bragged that the military would never betray the people, up Mandalay Hill where the eyes of Buddha's shrines told me nothing I was able to hear, and through the city, blasted by 100 degree heat and viscous humidity, a debilitated bustle in the baking streets. I relaxed into an intangible flow, accepting the nudges of imperceptible perceptions to choose my path.

Typical Mandalay street moment

It was a surprise when an inattentive right turn carried me away from buzzing motorbikes, coughing Mahindra trucks, and the haphazard community of people living and eating in the street. Here there were no clusters of low tables or blankets spread with knock-off manufacturing, no whir of chaotic movement and chattering voices.

The writing is just a bit of a give-away

Instead, spotless apartments rose in cemeterial silence around an inner courtyard created when they built a solid city block into an inward-looking fortress with only one entrance, gated of course, but the guard must have wandered off. And the heap of golden spires and red arches in the center could only be a temple, while behind me a fat padlock sealed the door to a classroom, rows of desks watched over by posters of Confucius.

Some sort of Chinese enclave. Where was everyone? At work? Not yet here? Vampires waiting for sundown? But then I realized I wasn't actually alone. Two mothers were on duty in the quiet heat. The first woman followed an imperious little boy riding a small bicycle with training wheels, bubble wrap still sheathing the bars of the frame. The second trailed a motorized car moving at a speed so slow it couldn't scare the pigeons, who eventually moved aside with desultory head wags, ambivalently monitored by the two egglike children placed in the seat. The buzz of the small motor only accentuated the breathless stillness of the place, the honks and hum of vivacious Mandalay kept away by concrete.

It's blurry because it was shot from the hip, since when is it
comfortable to take photos of strangers' children?

They ignored me and I stared at them. Not symbiosis, but not parasitism either. They were visitors here, as was I, and we were all filling a languid afternoon as best we could. And here, in the inherent intimacy of living quarters, they’d given me a glimpse of their present, as well as Myanmar’s.

Myanmar falls deeply under the umbrella of Chinese investment, with its geographic position, resources, and vulnerability. The country was changing, fast, with Mandalay on the forefront, the largest, closest city to the border, and I had stumbled into the bones of it. My tiny life might be in chaos, but the world at large was a semi-coordinated process, movement and progression, and that was a nice reminder, a nice distraction, a nice contrast.

I put my bag back on my sweaty shoulder and went looking for whatever I’d find next.

Love for the old and the young, America to Myanmar, on FeelGood Friday

Let me be clear: I love the 92 year old man. Born in 1921, Ronald Read walked to school every day, served in WWII, then worked as a janitor for 42 years, first at a gas station then the local JC Penney in Brattleboro, Vermont. Married only ten years before his wife died, he was known as a frugal man, always wore a flannel shirt and baseball cap, ate off paper plates at the American Legion Christmas breakfast, and died last June. I already love him. Oh, but also, he was really good at picking stocks, and when he died he left $4.8 million to the local hospital, and $1.2 to his local library. And now you love him too.

So I love Ronald Read and would happily talk about how he demonstrates the answer to humanity’s capacity for altruism without personal reward, but for these FeelGood Friday posts, I want to go right up into the horrors of the world today and find beautiful things in them.

Bagan was beautiful, even when I hadn't slept

This week I had the privilege (and I use that word deliberately) to work a little bit with some refugees from Myanmar. Rampant in my privilege (there’s that word again), I hear “Myanmar” and remember Shwedagon Pagoda’s golden buddhas, Bagan’s misty morning zedis, and the rich sauces of streetfood vendors in Yangon. Their memories of Myanmar are very different.

What happened to them, there? Language barriers meant I couldn’t ask them, and I would be hesitant to pry anyway, but it had me thinking about that beautiful, but strife-ridden country. Myanmar’s improving, and I hope the corresponding tourist boom is pressure to continue forward progress, but I don’t measure real change by the statements of the government or GDP growth, I measure it in the lives and experiences of the people. So what’s happening to the most vulnerable people in Myanmar?

"Before this, we never talked to the
other girls in the camp because they
came from different villages and we
were too shy, but now, wherever we
go, we have friends who know us so
we don't feel so scared."

“In traditional Burmese culture - where men are considered superior to women and young people are bound to defer to their elders - adolescent girls are widely expected to keep their thoughts, feelings and opinions to themselves. As a result, abuses go unreported and many girls remain ignorant of their human rights or potential.” Doesn’t sound very FeelGood at first, but you need to read the rest of the article. Because the program run by Girl Determined, where these vulnerable adolescents are learning "issues such as decision-making, self-confidence, girls' rights and planning for their future" will make you smile, and make you FeelGood on this beautiful Friday.

An unexpected chance to get killed in Mandalay (reblog)

Apparently this post never made it onto the blogspot version anyway. Oops.

Reminiscing about moto-taxi rides in Myanmar...

“On there?” I asked.
He smiled. “Yeah.”
“Am I going to fall off and die?”
He smiled. “Yeah.”

Is it weird being back in America?

Is it weird being back in America?

I wasn't sure how to answer that question. “Not...really.” Adjusting to Stateside norms was pretty easy; I did grow up here, after all. I can handle silverware and I never picked up on the whole spitting thing anyway. But as the last month has passed I've noticed a couple ways in which I am still adjusting after all.

Trishaw drivers know better than anyone how to survive
in the traffic in Yangon, Myanmar

Number One: crossing the street. In 90% of the world, as far as I can tell, moving around on the street is based on the principle of not making any sudden moves or changes of direction. If you can estimate everyone else's trajectory, you can move around them.

To cross the street overseas: start walking into traffic, not fast, not slow, no sharp directional adjustments. If possible, walk straight at the back of a passing car. It will continue moving, so when you reach it you will slide right into the space it just vacated. Continue this until you've Froggered your way across the street.

It's similar to the way you don't try to avoid the cockroaches, just trust that they'll avoid you.

But in America, if you do this, all the cars on the street do something extremely unexpected in the global mind: they stop. Or at least, they slow down and wave you across. Now, instead of sliding unobtrusively through traffic, you are blocking it. Dangit, Americans, stop being so polite!

So I have had to go back to obeying formal traffic rules. It's weird.

One need not make plans in the San Blas Archipelago

Number Two: I rarely planned anything more than a day or two in advance for the past few years. I would reach a town and stay there until I was done, during which time I'd hear about some other place within a six/seven hour bus ride. Go. I am not an itinerary sort of guy. But here, this means I don't get out much, since everyone else has social calendars booked weeks in advance.

Me: “Hey, you wanna do something?”

Friend: “Sure! Let's get sushi! When works for you?”

Me: “How about tonight?”

Friend: “I'm booked until January.”

I gotta get the hang of that. Anyone want to go get sushi...in January?

Does this dude in Kuala Lumpur seem worried about his image?

And finally, there's Image. I've made a career out of trying to resist this, probably as a means of coping with my lack of fashion passion (as my closet of blank-ass clothes will attest), but my skills were were honed overseas. In Nicaragua they described my sandals as “Jesus shoes” and I kept wearing them. In Sri Lanka I sewed up the entire left side of my shorts with the wrong color thread and thought no more about it. In Myanmar I could not have cared less when it was a woman's style bicycle I rode.

You can't be too picky about your image if you get your hair
cut in a saloon. Can I get a sarsaparilla with this perm?

I brought that all home with me. The friend moving out of my new room offered to loan me her woman's style bike and I accepted, no worries, who cares if people think I look silly? It's a bike. That ended up not working out, so I have my manly man ride after all, but whatever, it's shruggalicious.

And I had to smile in the grocery store as I bought a big bag of toilet paper, thinking about how poop-phobic Americans are, and remembering confessions of people who were humiliated to buy the stuff. “I buy it at Cosco in gigantic packs so that I don't have to do it very often.” Whatever! I'm not embarrassed by anything!

Can you guess what these Pa-O kids in a mountain village
in Myanmar think of our image concerns and poop-phobia?

But on the walk home, toilet paper casually under my arm on the busy street, I saw a bag of clothes hangers on the sidewalk. I inherited four hangers with the closet, but I now had seven shirts, with premonitions of more to come. I needed hangers. And here was a bag full of them, free on the sidewalk. We're also an intensely germaphobic nation, but the odds these hangers were actually infected and infested, scabies, hepatitis, bed bugs? Very slight.

But I walked right on past. What would people think if I was rummaging through the garbage on the street?

Oh.

Damn. That's disappointing.

It's weird being back in America.

Why is my head so constipated?

The question, comment, or discussion will sound good in my head before I start, all the Spanish/Dutch/Italian verbs lined up obediently, but once I try to bring it into the real world? Nada, nix, niente.

You nailed that song when you sang it in the car, but now that it's Wednesday night at Hulu Island Grill and Tiki Room and there's a karaoke mic in your hand...not so much.

Like this temple, that was an interesting walk.
Why can't I just talk about that?

Why is it that the process of formalizing, realizing, enacting something, even in a basic, beginner form, can so kill it?

I love stories, whether to my ears, from my mouth, or out of my fingertips in this blog, so why do they suddenly seem so alien to me now that I've attended an actual writing conference?

The staff at the Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference was so accessible, so amiable...and yet the equation still came though.

1. Americans don't read.
2. Americans don't travel.
   Ergo:
3. Americans sure as hell don't read about travel.

But F that, I want to do it anyway. So why does it feel like my word-brain has been anaesthetized and sent home for summer vacation?

There have just been so many distractions and other things that needed doing over the past two weeks! Excuse.

That dog guided me around the out-of-the-way temple in
Bagan. Too bad he's not here to guide me around my head.

The idyllic peace of a Portland summer afternoon is thick comfort and succulent ease! Excuse.

I'm intimidated by the quality of writing of others and fear that I have nothing worthwhile to say. Truth.

So? Start here. Uncork the brain and let the constipated sentences grind their way out.

Some of you might be shifting uncomfortable in your seats at that one. That makes me feel better already.

So here I am on the back porch, a cup of mediocre iced tea close at hand and far too many tortilla chips already eaten, going to start because what the hell, why not?

My new old travel companions

**I still recommend you try the wordpress version of the blog...you can subscribe to email updates there and blogspot strikes me as inferior, lower ranked, and an asset of the Bealzebub Corporation, NLC (No Liability Corporation)**

I was insanely lucky that traveling with K was not only doable, but actually an upgrade. It's a rare thing to find a travel partner who doesn't drive you crazy. On this trip I've had a very different partner. I just don't understand him sometimes! At first he was so undemanding, taking whatever came along without any complaints. "It's so hot, I'm just going to relax, you choose what we do" he'd say.

We'd have breakfast, then exist in companionable silence all day until dinner. Through Turkey, Israel, and most of Sri Lanka, that was how we worked.

What changed? I don't know. But in Myanmar, suddenly two meals a day isn't enough, and he's grumbling for lunch despite the stifling heat.

Sometimes it's hard to travel with one's stomach.

The first day in Bagan, 250 degrees, and he wants lunch. Are you crazy? But he was petulantly persistent, so we got back on the bike we'd rented for the day and pedaled down to the market in search of street food.

Tarps shaded the narrow alleys where goods cluttered tables and hung on strings in air so still and hot it seemed ready to preserve our bodies for future generations. There were stalls for tourists and stalls for locals, but no customers of either type. Women slept in low sling chairs with their fans over their faces, squatted behind stacks of spices and chili peppers, or sat at old metal sewing machines, no mistakes nor pauses in the rhythmic pumping of their bare brown feet on the platform foot pedals.

Burmese people don't seem to eat lunch though, so there were no wood fires lit below the woks which had cooked so many meals for me. A helpful lady accepted that I didn't need another pair of shoes and pointed me towards the restaurant. Inside, the tables and chairs were pushed to the sides so the dozen bare-chested men in skirt-like longyi could play some sort of gambling game on the ground.

They were startled to see me. No food, sorry. Try next door.

Next door looked empty, but a woman in the back doorway gestured me forward into the covered kitchen area at the back. It felt like a long-term campsite, rays of sun coming through the high roof of rough boards onto the dirt floor far below, where half a dozen women were preparing for the night, shredding carrots, scrubbing pans, and cleaning out the fire pits. They were startled to see me too, but agreed to my "food?" gesture with nods and an inviting hand sweep to an empty table.
I sat. They looked at me. I looked back, smiled. They smiled. I kept sitting. They kept looking. We smiled some more.

The elderly matron snapped something in Burmese and the youngest girl dragged over a big stand fan and set it blowing straight at me. I was ready to propose marriage. Either one, I didn't care. I'll take the fan as a dowry.

A woman over by the sink started holding up produce, and my smile was largest for the tomato. Tomato salad it is.

But they weren't going to let me off that easy. The salad came, tasty with a tangy sauce and soft noodles. And a plate of rice. A bowl of cucumber pieces, then one of raw cabbage bites. They love their fish sauce in Myanmar, so next was a bowl of super-fishy soup. Then a super-fishy paste. Then another fishy sauce. Fish sauce dishes smell like the gutter outside the fish market at closing time, and taste worse. I tried a bit of the sauce on some cabbage and barely hid my gag. What now?

Smile at the cook. She smiles back. Set the fish sauces slightly aside. Hope they believe the explanation that it's too hot out to eat soup. Eat the salad, cucumber, and cabbage. As always, evaluate the meal in terms of what a certain vegetarian could eat.

The stomach was feeling appeased after the tomato salad, but apparently my thoughts are a bad influence, and he was complaining again at the end.

Apparently I'm traveling with a stomach and a brain. We all got along better before.

Burmese internet recommends I post things once...

Not enough internet access around these parts to upload the pictures twice, so another game of follow-the-link for Myanmar posts.

First blog from Myanmar:
http://vagabondurges.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/average-thoughts-in-an-unaverage-thats-a-word-now-land/


Deciding where to go, a moment in Mandalay
http://vagabondurges.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/average-thoughts-in-an-unaverage-thats-a-word-now-land/

How out of date is this blogspot account? There may be more...