The Life of an Isolated Expat

I’ve been in Phnom Penh about two weeks now. I haven’t had much more to report about my experience here yet, as I’ve locked myself indoors to work on my research for my thesis and my social life here is close to nonexistent (except for my ever-patient roommate Shana). And because I’m currently battling a viral infection that apparently is going around the city. But here is an update.

I am not good at being an expat. This is mostly because I don’t particularly like bars or drinking. I had forgotten that expat communities’ social settings in some countries revolve around bars and clubs. This had been the case in Rwanda, and it seems to be the case in Cambodia, too. I have gone out for a few drinks in the last weeks, but I don’t go out as much as would be useful to help me build up my social network.

And I’m nursing a sore throat, so the idea of pumping alcohol into my body at the moment is about as appealing as volunteering for a mosquito-related study.

Also, when I am around people, it has been almost exclusively the expat community. Part of this I know is because I don’t speak Khmer, and not all Cambodians speak English comfortably enough to have conversations with people like me. The Cambodians I have talked to have been either teaching me Khmer in language classes or pleasantly chatting to me while I purchase a product or service from their business. It’s bizarre to me to be living here and look up from my rental desk at the local incubator and see a sea of faces like mine. To be fair, there are a couple Khmer at the incubator using the facilities.

I went to a Zumba class over the weekend to see if I could better socialize in active settings. The class was inside a mall, Aeon Mall, which was (to me) shockingly fancy and high-end. I kept thinking to myself, Aren’t I in one of the poorest countries in the region? How does this exist here? There were very nice brands (Mango, Yves Roche, etc.) being sold in shiny stores on 3 floors of shopping. It reminded me how palpable growing inequality is in so much of the world (the US absolutely included), where only a few minutes’ drive would bring me towards much less fortunate circumstances. I know there is a growing middle class in Cambodia, and I suspect these areas are built more for them and the ever-present expat communities here…but it still stuns me how many fancy places are built in the city when one in five Cambodians are still in poverty. In fairness, I guess I could complain the same way about many other places, like NYC...and cities are normally not a country's normal, anyway.

The Zumba class was fine, mostly expats wanting to sweat to some meringue songs, and run by a friendly French guy.

Also, I did not realize just how big Phnom Penh really is until this last week. I’ve been sticking to my little area within the city (mostly to save money on travel and get better acquainted with my surroundings). I did venture out a few times, though, and drive through long streets with shops and restaurants for much further than I had anticipated. It’s a far bigger town than I had stomached, and now I realize how foolish I’ve been for my initial analysis of town, and I’m a bit more overwhelmed than before. I guess it’s still vaguely like Queens in some ways, but parts of the Bronx and Manhattan are also mixed in a bit.

Shana invited me out one night to a bar to meet some of her German group of colleagues. The tuktuk ride swept down the long road Monivong and we ended up on the other side of town – scootering past lots of lighted shops and hotel areas to Lakeside. Lakeside was once the hostel backpacker central area and used to have a big lake, apparently, but a few years Cambodia brokered a deal with China for some high-rise development there instead. They filled in the lake and force moved most of the settlements by the lake to other areas of the region (without compensation). The lake is still wet, so no development has occurred yet, but we drove to the one village that remains in the area and has a reggae bar in the middle of many beautiful graffiti pieces on the walls of the surrounding buildings.

Introduction to Phnom Penh

After a few hours of listening to screaming and puking children, we stepped out of the minivan from Siem Reap and into the stream of tuktuk drivers on the streets of the Cambodian capital - Phnom Penh.

While Marion was with me, we shyly explored the town, as the heat kept us hidden away in cooled-off cafes, and I was settling into my new housing here. My roommate, German Shana, kindly helped us get acquainted with the city when we felt brave enough to go out. This included a trip to the grocery store where Marion and I got a bit over-excited from seeing familiar foods imported here for our delicious enjoyment.

We were surprised at the amount of Western food shops and restaurants in the city; we went to posh restaurants with salads and gourmet meals with vegan, paleo, raw, and gluten-free options. As a Celiac, I was particularly pleased to find that I could go to places with dishes specifically catering to the gluten free. Southeast Asia is pretty forgiving for my dietary restrictions, however having specifically gluten free meals can be like going home for my stomach. Raw zucchini pesto pasta? I don’t mind if I do. Tasty home-baked gluten-free bread and pizza? Oh my goodness, yes please!

We stayed at one restaurant for a few hours one day and listened to some talks that were part of a local wellness expo. People talk about essential oils, the meaning of yoga, and the importance of having a personal mission statement. Unfortunately, I missed the talk from the Reiki lady in town, but I connected with her about hanging out (and getting some Reiki).

I hadn’t realized that Phnom Penh was in some ways a hub for yogis interested in living a different lifestyle overseas while eating organic and healthy food (often imported from the West).

Marion and I went to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in order to better understand the horror people had here a few decades ago with the Khmer Rouge revolution that killed so many. The museum is a former school that was turned into a prison during the genocide; the specific location was the most secretive and brutal prison in all of the country’s interrogation units. We were guided by an audio guide through the museum, seeing pictures on walls of the victims who were bludgeoned to death in those rooms we entered and walking through the claustrophobic prison cells, divided by tiny spaces in one room with haphazard brick walls. The museum was very well done and appropriately somber. It was hard for me a little bit to walk through some of the exhibits that were more graphic.

I seem to find myself in developing countries with a recent history of genocide….and I end up living a few blocks away from the genocide museums. How odd.

Marion finally left me for Kabul, and I found myself lonely and with my final project as the sole distraction from a not-so-robust social life here. It has been a week since she left, and I am slowly making my way out and about, discovering the city a more little by little, since the city is more expensive than I had anticipated.

I went to the airy National Museum to admire the history and sculptures of the Khmer Empire. I stuck around the museum until the evening, where I watched a traditional dance show that was beautiful and fun to watch. I don’t know how the dancers can move so slowly with their hands stretched out to curl backward, but they made a magical atmosphere as the band drummed along to their subtle choreography.

With all of the Western bars and restaurants and chic shops, it doesn’t really feel like I’m in a developing country...well, aside from the dirt roads and occasional corrugated shack on the side of the road. I discovered that part of it is because I am in what some people here call the “Expat Bubble” – that is, the thick padding around Westerners in specific areas designed and maintained for Western tastes and expectations, not representative of the true culture or circumstances in the country.  

The city here, as German Shana has described to me, is broken up into different areas depending on the inhabitants: BKK1 (our location) is expat/middle class central, where we have more expensive restaurants and bars, as well as Adidas and coffee shops such as Café Bene; Riverside is where the backpackers and tourists stay, with dirty and cramped streets that house restaurants and clubs with prostitutes; and, Russian Market is where the more hipster expats live cheaply around locals. The local Cambodians who are not fortunate enough to be part of the rising middle class seem to have been pushed out to the sides of the city, often living in overcrowded yet large apartment complexes that look like they haven’t been renovated since the Cold War.

So far, despite these quirks and intolerable heat, I like being Phnom Penh because of the food options and busier life around me. It is like living in a tiny section of NYC for a little bit, where I can go get cheaper food after watching a movie at the expat-run movie house. In Brisbane, for example, things close much earlier.

Siem Reap (Welcome to Cambodia)

Marion and I landed in Siem Reap and were punched in the face with heat. We both had read that Cambodia would be hot, but after the cool (and often cold) climate in Myanmar, we were shocked with just how hot Cambodia is (and it’s only “winter” here). I’ll be here for a while, so I took an internal note that I would have to endure the heat for a long time. We were layered in DEET because of the intense mosquitos and the lingering threat to malaria/dengue fever/chikungunya.

We found our tuktuk driver outside of the terminal and began sweating our way to our guesthouse in Siem Reap.

Siem Reap was a fun and strange initiation into Cambodia, as it is heavily tourist-centric and brimming with foreigners with nice cameras walking through souvenir shops, and expensive backpacks on travelers drinking in bars. Tourists are watched and solicited by tuktuk drivers on every corner, waiting eagerly for some business. Fancy restaurants that look like they are cut out of the streets of Manhattan welcome tourists into air-conditioned comfort. Lounge bars with artistic lighting and plush couches were crammed on the streets. Organic soap shops battle for space with spas and artisanal market spaces, selling goods in strictly USD and speaking good English. It is still clearly a developing country, but it felt like a strange mix of poverty and Disneyland when we walked around.

We had been warned before coming that the abject poverty in the area was depressing and visible, but I was surprised how contained it seemed to be. I had expected to be overwhelmed by begging of all ages, including children for milk (as a lot of tourists have described this phenomenon), but it was not nearly as bad as I had worried. Sure, there were shacks in some places, some naked children running around tourists at bigger jungle temples, some unpleasant smells of poor sanitation, and some beggars here and there, but it was not unbearable to me. Maybe I am too used to the signs of poverty because of my travels and work.

Our trip was not for partying and fraternizing with fellow foreigners; we were there to take in the sights of Angkor Wat and the surrounded ancient Khmer temples. If we hadn’t had our fill of temples in Bagan, we were completely saturated with temples in Siem Reap. Temples are everywhere and gorgeous, just like in Bagan, only completely different in design and architecture and meaning. Hundreds (Thousands?) of years ago, the area had a slow mixing and evolution: from the original beliefs in Animism to Hinduism; then, Hinduism dominating yet cohabiting peacefully with Buddhism; and finally, to Buddhism taking the lead in religious appreciation. The temples, even the main Angkor Wat, had evolved with the beliefs, and Hinduism was mixed and substituted with Buddhism in ways that I only understood by reading a tour book while walking through. The different marriage of religions in the temples renewed my interest in temples for a little bit, and I was fascinated to explore the bas-reliefs. Some of the jungle temples were part ruins (or all ruins) as well, making it particularly mystical and romantic to walk through.

We woke up one morning at 4 AM to get into a tuktuk and join the long parade of tourist tuktuks going to Angkor Wat. We all wanted to get to the temple in time to nab a spot before the other tourists could obstruct our views of the sunrise. With a few hundred tourists all having the same idea, this was a futile effort for most; fortunately, we were early enough to grab a sitting space right on the water, while the other tourists filled in the back of us. It was an annoying few hours of darkness, though, with camera flashes going off in the darkness in vain, blinding us for a few seconds, and the flashlights that never let us truly experience a starry darkness. I was also sad to see almost everyone’s faces tilted down, dimly lit with the glow of smartphones, instead of just being there and enjoying the fact that the sun was slowly rising above one of the most wondrous temples on the planet. I am not completely immune to the lure of the smartphone, but I am able to put it down, especially for experiences like that. Once the sun started coming up, some people looked up to enjoy the silhouette of the temple backlit with the rich and changing colors in the sky.

We visited many temples so it is hard for me to remember all of the names and descriptions, but my favorite was definitely Bayon, with the massive faces smiling peacefully on each side of the temple towers. We climbed to the top of the temple to get a better view of the faces; they were beautiful. The faces were hacked out of the stone after the construction of the temple, making it all the more impressive to me. I mean, someone had to stand up on some kind of ladder for days/weeks/months pounding away at rocks to make smooth godlike faces, times FOUR.

I also really liked Ta Phrom (also known lovingly by tourists and tuktuk drivers as the TombRaider temple). The Wat is in ruins, so it was difficult to get around the place without crawling on big rocks or ducking into a little hole. What was so cool about this temple, though, was how massive trees had taken over the area and had woven themselves into the rocks of the ruins, making the ruins look like something out of LOTR (or, I guess maybe TombRaider).

We tried to get through the temple tours early in the morning because of the unbearable midday heat. I napped in the afternoons once we were done stumbling through old places. We reemerged from our cool room in the evenings to eat good meals and meander through the Night Markets and Pub Street.

We also got a few massages that were quite good from a local spa. I am a very delicate creature, and most of the time massages hurt me more than help. I did get a head massage at this place, though, that felt amazing.

After few days into our Siem Reap, we got ourselves into a minivan with a number of other Cambodians. In the van, we took the 5-hour trek through the drought-ridden countryside, and into Phnom Penh. Here Marion would be leaving me in a few days, while I stay around for some research.

Inle Lake and the End of Myanmar

We landed in Heho, the Inle Lake airport, and found ourselves both cold and wet. It may be the dry season, but the lake region was getting soaked by full-on rain on our arrival. For our first day or two there, because of the rain, we were stuck in the hotel and read/napped. Fortunately, our hotel was small and the hotel staff was extremely attentive while we lazed around, offering us juices and teas regularly – they even gave us a full plate of fruit, including a whole papaya!

When the rain finally let up, we quickly discovered that there was not much to do in the town and took a cab to the winery on the outskirts. The winery was an open house looking over a vineyard by a lake; it felt almost like we were in Napa Valley or the south of France! And yes, Myanmar has wineries – though the grapes are young and the wine is not fully developed – and we were given a tasting menu each as we lunched at their open restaurant.

While we enjoyed our wine, we came to talking to another pair of lovely ladies. They happened to also be from NYC; being homesick, I relished the conversation around US politics and NYC haunts for a few hours.

I was wrong about my initial analysis of Burmese food. Marion and I found a restaurant that served Shan-style food (an eastern state and tribe in Myanmar), and I was blown away by how tasty the food was! We went back every day in Inle Lake to have fried yellow tofu (from the same vendor), and at least once a day I savored Shan-style sticky noodle soup (spicy and peanuty goodness!) that every restaurant offered.

In Inle Lake because we repeatedly saw people using the extremely polluted waterways for domestic purposes. The water was a hazy, opaque green, yet people would squat on piers and clean. This cleaning included laundry, teeth, and general bathing. Marion was disgusted and confused as to why people used the water when it was so clearly unacceptably gross; I tried to explain how sometimes they do not have another choice, either because they cannot access clean water at home yet, or cannot afford it. It is clear, though, that Myanmar has miles to go in terms of giving people access to clean water supplies for daily domestic purposes (one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals).

One day, we climbed into a longboat and sat on two precariously-stationed chairs in the middle while a boatman drove us around the Inle Lake. We started in the murky canal waters and made our way to the vast main lake area, where fishermen fished everywhere. The water seemed surprisingly shallow and full of high water weeds (so sometimes I was concerned the boat would bottom out). The mountains surrounding the lake rolled breathtakingly for 360 degrees.

The boat driver was a funny guy, but he had a strict schedule for us – mostly including cottage industry shops set up in the floating villages. As foreign tourists, I feel it is seen as our duty to buy as many souvenirs as possible to stimulate local economies, and we were shuttled through shops that carried handmade silver, silk weavings, wood carvings, rolled cigars….you get the picture, we saw a lot of different shops. In some places, we happily obliged buying a couple unique crafts, but in many, we politely walked through the shops and rushed back to the boat. One of the shops included some long-neck (Karen tribe) women weaving, their necks elongated by heavy metal coils and swaying with the rhythm of the looms. It felt awkward for us to watch them weave, partly impressed by their hand skills and partly in awe by their necks – I did not feel comfortable taking pictures as they scowled at us.

Cruising through the floating villages was a strange thing; it felt often like we were driving down the roads of a normal village, only the roads were made of water and our car was actually a boat. There were electricity poles and wires dangling above the streets, like any other place, except if you ran into these poles you might get electrocuted more severely. We also got off of the boats and walked through towns on more solid ground, where many of the temples were guarded by lines of souvenir stands manned by the locals. There were other temples that were accessible only by unstable, wobbly bridges over which we had to walk.

We also went to a village off of the lake some ways, called In Dain. There, we hiked a little bit to the top of a hill for a view of the lake. In the village, we also went to a pagoda. Most pagodas we visited in Myanmar had a long parade of souvenir shops you had to walk by to get to the center, as I’ve mentioned briefly, but this pagoda had nearly a kilometer of shops. The center had a forest of stupas of different styles/ages/sizes we walked through before reaching the Buddha. The place was lovely, and walking on the ground for an hour or so was a nice change from the rocking of the boat.

We ended the day watching the sunset in the middle of the lake. Some costumed fishermen (or were they just businessmen, we are unsure) posed for the tourist boats in the traditional way the lake’s fishermen balance – with one foot pushing an oar into the water and the opposite hand managing the fishing cage. It may have been contrived, but the effect on the water with the sunset in the back was beautiful, as they teetered on the edge of their boats in the golden light.

Our last night at Inle Lake included a movie at the local French café. The visuals in the movie were great, but the plot was a bit confusing and too much like a soap opera. The movie was about a monk who worked in a hospital and fell in love/knocked up a patient dying of cancer. The lady died in childbirth, and her brother brought the baby to the monastery, telling the monk secretly that he was the baby daddy. No one else knew the secret, though, and when the monk was in a coma from a fever, the child ended up getting adopted by a loving family with a crippled son, leaving the monk alone and heartbroken. What a show! And what a way to remember the Shan state.

We flew out to Yangon as our last stop before Cambodia. Yangon is the antithesis of what we experienced in the other areas of Myanmar – it is flashy, congested with cars and people in more Western clothing, and cramped with stores of all calibers and restaurants of all types. We found out there was even a Yves Roche store somewhere in town! And people were selling everything you could think of on the streets, including remote controls in piles. We visited the Shwedagon Temple (a headliner pagoda for Buddhism), which was massive and golden, but we had seen so many temples by then on our adventures that we were not as excited as we could have been. Otherwise, we spent a lot of our time picking up last-minute souvenirs and eating Shan noodles before we left for other countries.

A Birthday in Bagan

French Marion suggested that we stop in Bagan for my 30^th birthday and I was more than thrilled. Bagan is an area famous for its stunning temple-blanketed plains. It has been a dream of mine to visit the area for about a decade after I came across a picture of the temples while fantasizing about exotic future adventures.

We took a boat ride southwest to Bagan from Mandalay early in the morning. I thought it was going to be a four-hour ride, and was startled when ten hours later we finally pulled up to the port. We got off of the boat with a simple two-logged plank to a shore full of eager taxi drivers.

After much haggling, we got ourselves into a cab and drove to our hotel in New Bagan (as an FYI, New Bagan is the new settlement for the people who formerly lived in Old Bagan, where the main temples are, and were booted out by the government for preservation purposes). On our way to the hotel, we were already impressed with the spiky horizon riddled with stupas….and we weren’t even going through the Old Bagan area.

Bagan definitely lived up to what I had hoped for; for a few days, Marion and I were awe-inspired as we wandered, gazing at hundreds (thousands?) of beautifully old temples. The golden sandy ground complemented the majestic sights only more.

I was surprised that we seemed to be permitted to climb up and sit on top of most temples we visited. Throughout our visit, we would enter barefoot through the dusty archways of each temple and be greeted by a temple keeper who invited us up a small hidden staircase up to the top of the structure. I am not exactly sure how (or why) we are allowed to use the temples as our own personal jungle gyms when they have claimed efforts towards preservation. In any case, it gave us some impressive views.

People and guidebooks warned about hoards of tourists showing up in Bagan, but usually, it felt like we were the only people in the area, save a handful of other francophones roaming a ruin here or there. Only one night did we end up with all of the other tourists, and that was during a full moon sunset on top of a temple with the most photogenic skyline imaginable. We had arrived at the temple and saw the top edge of the temple completely lined with tripods. It was the only time there I genuinely felt claustrophobic and anxious about being on a roof with too many people.

In New Bagan, there was not much more to report other than we slept and had a few meals there. It was a dusty town geared towards tourists in some places and recent resettlement in others. We ate passable French food. It was hard to get around the area at night because street lights have not really been introduced yet, so our dinner adventures included stumbling in the dusty darkness with a flashlight towards better-lit restaurants.

My birthday included walking through (and climbing) an uncountable amount of temples as we explored the Old Bagan area. In the evening, we socialized with a young Burmese man who was extremely dedicated to selling us paintings. We had a deal – he had to show us his favorite sunset spot in the area in exchange for a few art sales to us. The area has more art peddlers than tourists by a lot (everyone you meet wants to sell you something in this country), but we agreed and were pleasantly surprised to find the guy’s sunset spot was a genuinely great experience. He also answered some of my questions about the country five years ago, before the borders were opened; he asked us some very amusing questions about the romantic lives of westerners.

We ended my birthday with a traditional marionette puppet show at our hotel, and I drank far too many Shirley Temples and felt a sugar high for hours. The puppet show was fun – the puppeteers manipulated a slew of strings and made the puppets seem alive and dancing, even if we don’t actually know what the storyline was about. After the show, they allowed us to try out the puppets for ourselves, where we discovered that we would never get far in the world of puppetry.

The next day we rented a moped so we could speed around the temples faster and get to a nearby temple for sunrise early without hassle (there are not a lot of cabs there). In the dark, we fumbled through the old staircases of a quiet temple off the road and found ourselves sharing the sunrise with a handful of other people on the top of the tower. The sunrise was nice, as the morning mist laced through the temples below. What really made the experience memorable, though, was when 21 hot air balloons slowly rose into the air in the distance and made their way through the temple plains towards us. They bobbed up and down until they glided over our heads and our temple’s top, making their way to a plain further south. I cannot full express how lovely the experience was.

The rest of the day included endless more temples; a lot of the temples we saw were interesting outside, but inside had magnificent and intricate thousand-year-old paintings scattered on the walls and ceilings. I think I will not need to see a temple for a long time after this trip because we saw so many awesome ancient temples. We also discovered that mopeds in the sandy terrain are horrible; we continuously (and infuriatingly) got stuck or lost control in a pit of sand, and would have to slowly make our way to a more stable road.

I took our last day in Bagan to rest, feeling a bit templed-out and needing to work some on my research. Then, we hopped into a little plane and made our way to the big tourist area called Inle Lake.

Mandalay

French Marion joined up with me in Bangkok and we made our way to a great adventure through the magical and not-so-well-traveled country of Myanmar. We are still in the middle of our journey, but we have had so many adventures I should start telling them now.

We started our trip in the old town of Mandalay. The city is not terribly noteworthy, as it was razed by the Japanese in World War Two and simply rebuilt on top of the ashes of the ancient town that once was. Even so, it was a good place for us to get adjusted to the country a bit before setting on towards other locations.

We both noticed a few things about Myanmar so far that I think are worth sharing:

• People wear yellow makeup: It’s an age-old tradition in Burmese culture to smear a yellow paste on the face for improving the complexion and keeping it healthy (and, I suspect, hidden from the sun); most people we have seen have large yellow patches on their cheeks, noses, and foreheads. Neither of us knew this until we got here, and it was a surprise to see so many yellowed cheeks. We had to look it up to see why the women – and some men – were colored in that way, and even got to try it on ourselves and see if it works on our faces as well.
• Not many tourists yet: Myanmar opened its borders to tourists in 2011 after a couple decades of closed rule. While there are definitely tourists here, it was surprising just how few in numbers we are here. It has been really nice in a lot of ways to go through beautiful areas in the country without feeling suffocated by tourist groups and piles of stupid tourists (oh come on, you know there are always that pile of disrespectful tourists anywhere). As a result, we are considered novel to locals. We are stared at everywhere and people excitedly shout out “HellohowareyouIamfine!” to us when they drive past. Those with smartphones whip them out and take pictures with us to place on their mantels at home. I stopped counting how many people touch and squeeze our arms when they walk by us. We are very much celebrities in Myanmar.The other nice thing about not having a lot of tourists is that the culture has not yet been altered with westernization. The yellow makeup is one example; the fact that everyone (including men) wears long sarongs is another. One person nicely explained to us that the Burmese embrace the opened borders because they are getting more money and business, and we saw many newly-built English schools in Mandalay where people were diligently talking in English, improving their language skills. It has been fascinating to explore.
• But monks everywhere: Not surprisingly, as we are in a Buddhist country, there are Buddhist monks (and nuns) everywhere. So there is that. 
• The food may not be for us: The traditional food in Myanmar we have had so far has left us not so interested in eating traditionally while here. The food is mostly acidic or incredibly sour, like there is a lot of vinegar in the meals. While they are interesting tastes, we have yet found something we have wanted to order more than once. I ordered a chicken curry, for example, that seemed nothing like curry except for the fact that I got rice with it, and I got some chicken meat. Instead, it was eight plates of other things that were not chicken or what I know to be curry, and all had me wondering what it was exactly I was putting in my mouth.
• What’s your nation?: When we are walking around those who interact with us (eg, just by saying hi or trying to sell us stuff) asks us for our nations. Whenever I respond with, “the US”, they smile and excitedly say, “Oh! Obama! Good good!” Some will remind me that Obama visited Myanmar, as well, and make sure I like Obama as they do. Thanks Obama, for making people like me more in this country. When Marion says, “France”, in response, they always quickly retort with a, “BonJOUR!” 
• No one walks much: This one has been a bit of a bother for us – people do not walk around outside much. Marion and I like to walk to explore new areas and better understand our surroundings, but it seems to have made people very concerned about our wellbeing. Scores of people drive by us on their cars and motorbikes asking us if we’re alright and why we are not in a car. Many have offered to drive us somewhere else. We insist that, really, we are alright and just like walking. As a response to our insistence, they often decide that we are actually just exercising, and they not approvingly and drive off…only to soon after have another concerned driver asking if we are okay. Sure enough, we have not viewed many Burmese walking streets anywhere in our travels, and are often alone on the dirt paths that resemble vaguely a sidewalk.

Mandalay is not such a hopping city for visiting and we were not overwhelmed before we continued into the country. That said, we did a number of interesting things, including visiting a lot of pagodas and temple areas that cover the country and town everywhere. That will be the running theme of the trip in Myanmar, we’ve realized.

Our first evening in Mandalay took us confusedly in one temple with oddly-shaped stupas and Buddha displays for several city blocks. It also had (when we were walking through) a movie screening of one of the many older versions of the Monkey King that looked beyond surreal.

One morning we walked to the jade market in Mandalay. Once walking through dirty paths, we found ourselves in a deep set of stalls that held hundreds of huge jade slabs. Jades of all colors – green, white, purple, red – and other valuable stones were being sold there, and a loud workshop where the jade is polished and cut sat inside the open stalls and buzzed as we walked through. I was shocked to realize we were the only tourists in the area shopping for jade. After a haggle with one woman (and us being assisted by two older Burmese men in talking her down in price), we walked out triumphant.

That day we also walked around the large palace grounds in the middle of the city. The palace is surrounded by a square moat and heavy walls. Much to our surprise, the large 4 square kms of grounds within the moat area was mostly guarded territory and forbidden to tourists. The tourist-friendly area where the palace sits - in the middle - was small and intimate. The palace was nice and simple, but it had worn with time and restoration is not so prevalent in the country yet. We walked some more to visit some of the pagodas and payas in the area, including a beautiful shrine with the largest book in the world written on huge marble blocks housed in rows and rows of stupa-like structures.

We finished the day with a car ride to the top of Mandalay Hill to watch the sunset.

There are eccentricities in Myanmar that are hard to explain, but one of them included the 3-story free-standing escalator you have to take to get to the top of the hill’s temple for the sunset viewing. At the bottom of the escalators, you take off your shoes (shoes are not allowed in most places here), and you stand on the tall, winding escalators up the thin towers, and pray. Sure, you could pray because there is a Buddha statue nearby, but we prayed that the frightening escalators would take us up (and later, down) safely.

After a few days of quietly walking through Mandalay, we woke up one morning bright and early to climb onto our leisurely-moving barge that would take us 10 hours down the river to the ancient area of Bagan.

Last Week in Bangkok

In my last week in Bangkok I had a pretty horrible day. I won’t get into the details of everything that went wrong, but I’ll tell you one of the long, drawn-out stories from the day. It wasn’t anything particularly telling about the city of Bangkok's character; instead, it was more about having a lot to do in a place where I was still not completely comfortable yet and not fluent in the language.

It started after a Thai language class, when I needed to go to the Cambodian Embassy to get an extended visa for my upcoming trip. My teacher had told the cab driver a specific address to smooth the communication and get me more easily to the embassy. About an hour or so of being stuck in the ever-stagnant traffic of Bangkok, we finally got to the address my teacher had supplied, which ended up being on the opposite side of town (one of the numbers was confused in the location, I think). Instead, my cab driver was trying to drop me off at a local hospital on a dirt road somewhere I didn’t know. Frustrated, I got the correct coordinates for the driver and, both aggravated, drove through traffic for another 45 minutes to get to the embassy. 

Of course the embassy was closed by the time I got there. (Don't worry, I got there the next day and everything was settled.)

If you know me in person, you probably know that I am not someone who hides my emotions well when feeling things. Steam was coming out of my ears and I was thinking about getting a little cry out while on the streets of Bangkok in front of the Cambodian Embassy. Sweetly, the motorcycle drivers around me rushed over to try to help me feel better; some offered cigarettes, one gave me his seat, and others offered to get me some water. I finally realized I just wanted to be back at Lorena’s place and sulk for the rest of the day, and asked for one of the drivers to ride me home.

Something about Bangkok to know – motorcycle guys have zoned areas when it comes to their business. In some organized way, motorcycle taxis are permitted to work within a certain area, and understand to not go beyond those areas. My place was easily a 30-minute car ride through Bangkok to get to from where I was at the moment, and very much so out of this area's zone by a lot. One guy agreed to take me, still, and took off his orange taxi shirt and agreed. He took a pretty big risk to bring me home, and for that I am grateful he was able to bring a weepy girl home.

The ride, however, was terrifying. He sped through the streets and cut into parking lots to help save time. He also got on the highway and rode 80km/h, weaving between the cars flying off of every bump. Though I had a helmet, I clung onto him for dear life. I thought to myself, this was possibly the stupidest thing I could have done in my life. I was sure I was going to fall off of the seat and meet my demise on the roads of Bangkok. Thankfully, I got home safely, though shaking.

I failed to mention that the driver also held the motorcycle handlebars with only one hand because he had tried to hold one of my desperately-clutching hands while he drove. I felt the dread a woman can feel when in need of help from a guy and know that they’re trying to make something more out of it. I couldn’t change the situation because I was praying to get home safely, but I told him to drop me off a bit further away from the apartment just in case, so he couldn't follow me. He got off of his bike and kissed my hand a bit too enthusiastically (and tried to kiss me while I was walking away), and confessed my beauty and his love for me (after a 30-minute bike ride I’m not sure how that was possible). He asked to call and kiss me multiple times as I slowly inched away towards the complex. Precipitously, that day at class I had asked how to say “I have a partner” in Thai ("mii fan") and I repeated it until he finally rode of disappointed. I tiredly and weepily ran into Lorena’s place, and felt so completely spent and dejected that poor Lorena came home with a bunch of sweet bananas for my sad (emotional) consumption all night.

But my time in Bangkok has ended for the time being, and I feel like it requires a final note before I move on. Overall, I like Bangkok quite a lot. Aside from the overbearing humidity and heat (that I got used to), and aside from the oppressive pollution, I could stay in Bangkok for a while. I feel like that is a place that, like NYC, takes years to understand without simply scraping the surface of commonly visited areas. I’m not sure I would feel alright with staying there for the long term because of some cultural differences, but Bangkok is cosmopolitan enough that I felt comfortable there. Also, the food really is fantastic. I look forward to seeing it again.

But I'm in Myanmar now, which is a different story.