I’m half a day ahead of you so if it’s news to you, it is history to me.
Dateline: Yangon, Myanmar 23 August 2008
Two weeks on the job and I don’t think ADRA has suffered unduly for it.
I am enjoying it here. I live in a nice 2 room apartment in the Summit Parkview Hotel. It isn’t like my place in ADRA Peru but it is all I need until the guests start rolling in. If you go to Google Earth and enter Summit Parkview Hotel, Yangon, Myanmar, you will be looking down on my room. I’m on the top floor, right hand end, facing the park. My apartment was two hotel rooms converted to an apartment. The bedroom is a normal hotel room. In the second room, they removed the bathroom sink and installed a kitchen sink. The tub was removed and cabinets installed with a microwave, hot plate, and rice cooker. The refrigerator is in the living room which also has a table and two small couches plus a desk and TV. The door between the rooms is just a little shorter than my head and a little narrower than my shoulders. I guess they didn’t want to work any harder than necessary when they cut the opening. I’ll wait just a minute while you gasp at the sacrifice I am willing to make to work here.
I eat breakfast in the hotel dining room. It is a large buffet with a mix of Asian and western foods. Usually I get some take-out from a street stand and eat lunch at the office. A meal of rice, vegetables and tofu is about $1.50. Sometimes we go to a restaurant and the price skyrockets to $2.50. There are nice Thai, Indian, Western, etc. restaurants where the price is $10-12 dollars for about the same meal as we get at home. I can buy imported food in the supermarkets. They are about the same price as home but expensive for the average person. The variety isn’t as great as Albertsons but it is good. I haven’t found Grapenuts or root beer or bagels but they have Schweppes Bitter Lemon so I’m getting by. Most of the foods come from Thailand, China, and Russia. Skippy Peanut butter is from America. Shopping is something of an adventure because I can’t read the labels and the photos don’t always represent the product. It reminds me of the time my sister Gayle sent us several cans of food with the labels removed. We couldn’t afford to waste the food so we agreed to eat whatever we opened. This is about the same experience without the malicious intent.
I get picked up by the ADRA driver in the morning but I usually walk back to the hotel in the afternoon. If I walk in the morning, I’m soaked by the time I reach the office. It is little over a mile and I like the walk. This is the rainy season so it rains off and on throughout the day. Yesterday I stayed at the office about 20 minutes waiting for the rain to slow down so I wouldn’t need to put my snorkel on. Everything is green, including most of the buildings covered with moss/mold. The temperature is about 80 F during the day.
I am assured that it is safe to walk, even at night. I’m told that even small crimes are dealt with strongly so there isn’t much crime. Almost everyone smiles when I pass them. Maybe it’s because my pronunciation of "Ming ga lae bae’" (hello) really sounds to them like "do I have spinach in my teeth"? Now matter, I have a good time. When I walk, I can use the Shwedagon
Pagoda for a reference point. It is usually visible through the buildings and trees. I carry my GPS, just in case.
Remember, email goes both ways in this modern age.
More photos on my blog. http://yangonyinyang.blogspot.com/
Stop by if you are in the neighborhood. Doug
1 comment:
I'm enjoying your comments, Dug, especially the reference to your Wicked Sister. I read quite an interesting article about post-cyclone conditions, which said that things were much worse in the countryside than is generally known. What do you hear?
Other than towering over the locals, what do you do for entertainment? Surely you have CNN?
saludos from Dhamma Makaranda, Mexico!
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