Saturday, July 29
I'm sitting at my desk in the palatial apartment that Joanne and I have here in Rangoon, listening to the clamour of the evening and celebrating the fact that for the first time in 4 nights I'm able to stay up past 10 pm. Jet lag has hammered both Joanne and I and for the first three nights we crawled into bed exhausted at 7:30 or so. This has compensated for waking up every morning at 4 am, but it would be nice to be able to sleep uninterruptedly until sunrise at 6 am.
Let me fill in a few chronological details. I left Thunder Bay 8 days ago on a supper-time flight to Toronto (not that WestJet fed me supper), met Joanne in the remodelled and highly confusing Terminal 1 at Toronto airport and then took a Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong via a refueling stop in Anchorage. The flight was long and fairly sleepless for me, as the seats were even closer together than usual and I had no legroom. We got into Bangkok airport and were met by Devron, one of the returning teachers who has been a one-woman Welcome Wagon for the 9 new teachers. We spent 2 days in Bangkok getting our first 10-week business visas and sleeping a lot. We stayed in a fancy-ish high-rise hotel on Silom Road and while it was far more salubrious than the Khao San Road dives I have usually stayed in, I missed the bustle and energy and feel of Khao San. Our visa situation is strange; we have to come into the country on 10-week single-entry business visas, after which we have to leave the country and reapply (usually in Bangkok) for a new visa. After a few of these 10-week jaunts we're eligible for a 6-month multiple-entry visa, but we still have to leave the country every 10 weeks; we just don't need to apply for a new visa to re-enter the country, and we don't have to go to Bangkok; we could fly to Bangladesh or Kathmandu or the Maldives if we want to.
On Wednesday morning we trooped off to the airport. I had all my luggage and my bike with me, having retrieved all my stored luggage from the Khao San guesthouse where I had stored it for a week; the lady at the guesthouse was from Burma and gave me a 50% discount on storage fees because I was headed to her country. At the airport all the other teachers got most of their luggage out of left luggage and we headed to the check-in desk with luggage trolleys groaning under the weight of suitcases. Our school reimburses us for up to $500 in excess baggage fees and so we weren't travelling light. It looked like a line-up of trucks at an international border crossing. The flight was quick and painless, and we were soon disgorged into tiny Rangoon airport, a complete contrast from the huge, slick, professionally-run airport in Bangkok. I felt as though I'd landed in a poorer Asian version of Thunder Bay airport.
Our school director, Greg von Spreecken, was on hand to greet us and we moved our mountain of possessions through customs and onto two waiting buses. It's the rainy season here and it was pouring rain on our arrival. We rolled through the suburbs of Rangoon which resemble a large village more than the capital of a country of 50 million people to our apartments. Most of the teachers live a stone's throw from school, in a purpose-built apartment block. Joanne and I were stunned by the scale of our apartment when we first walked through it, and it still makes us giggle. We have a three-bedroom, two-floor ground-floor apartment with no fewer than SIX bathrooms. There are two rooms on the ground floor (a living room/entryway and a TV/family room) with cathedral ceilings, and the rest of the rooms are large with high ceilings. It's sparsely furnished at the moment, and our mountain of luggage seemed to evaporate in the huge spaces available to us. We've both staked out separate bathrooms, dressing rooms and studies, while one of the ground floor bathrooms has become my bicycle shed. There is abundant space for guests; two or three rooms could easily be made into guest bedrooms, and there's still the TV room and Joanne's study for extra floorspace, so we could sleep at least 6 more people without undue crowding. It's the most spacious place I've ever lived in, other than my father's house, and I will probably still be marvelling at its size two years from now.
We live in the northeast part of the city, Thingangyan, about 7 kilometres from the Shwedagon pagoda, the symbol of Rangoon and indeed of all of Burma. From my classroom on the 7th floor of the school I have an uninterruped view over the rooftops, treetops and gold-covered pagodas of this sprawling city to where Shwedagon rises golden and enormous over its surroundings. There are worse views to have from your desk. Our neighbourhood is a curious mix of modern opulent mansions and village shacks. I go running every morning to explore, and I'm entranced by the diversity of people and buildings and activities that I see. Rangoon reminds me a lot of rural India, but also a lot of East Africa, with the same air of decaying colonial buildings and very little material progress since independence from Britain. On a 20-minute run I pass ice factories, dozens of tiny tea shops, a few more substantial restaurants, innumerable tiny shops and kiosks offering betel, tailoring, samosas, pens, teak furniture and newspapers, hundreds of Burmese clad in cotton longyis (wraparound skirts) for men and tmeins (longer, fancier longyis, often made of silk) for the women, lots of Muslims in white skull caps, dozens of scarlet-clad Buddhist monks out begging for alms, lots of Indian labourers, Hindu temples, Catholic churches, mosques, monasteries, bicycles, tiny cycle rickshaws, antique buses and a few cars. Compared to the rest of Southeast Asia it's so much quieter, slower and less motorized than just about anywhere except for Laos. I really like the feel of the place so far, although it's just a superficial impression.
I'll write more soon about this strange, new and wonderful country soon. Until then, I will leave you with my contact information here.
Graydon Hazenberg
Yangon International School
999 Thumingalar Housing
Thingangyan
Yangon
MYANMAR
yis024"at"ilbc"dot"net"dot"mm
graydonhazenberg"at"gmail"dot"com
Obviously, replace the text bits with the appropriate symbols (I'm trying, probably futilely, to avoid spam).
(Note: I can't access my Yahoo Mail accounts here very easily, so please use one of the two addresses given above, or both to be sure I get your messages.)
Tuesday, August 1, 2006
A further update. This week is devoted to getting ready for school. I'm teaching grades 7-10 math, and although I have excellent textbooks and small classes, there's still a certain amount of thinking, preparation and trepidation involved before I'll be ready to teach on Monday.
The rainy season here lives up to its billing. It doesn't rain 24 hours a day, but it rains at least four separate times every 24-hour period. Sometimes it's intense cloudbursts, sometimes it's steady rain, and often it's heavy drizzle. The soil is absolutely saturated, so many of the streets are submerged along their lowest-lying sections. When I go running, I often have to pick my way through ankle-deep puddles or long stretches of glutinous mud. On the positive side, though, it's not terribly hot here since the sun rarely shines.
I got my bicycle ready for riding on Saturday, which involved rotating the tires (badly worn both front and back, but not suprising after 6000 fully-loaded kilometres), putting on a new chain, cleaning the accumulated gunk from the chain rings and derailleur and putting back the saddle and pedals that I had to take off for the flight. On Sunday I went for a ride with one of the other teachers, Viola, who showed me around the neighbourhood. It's a wonderful city for cycling, full of narrow back streets with very little vehicular traffic and full of colourful markets, smiling people and lots and lots of monks and gilded pagodas. I hope to explore all of the outlying districts of this sprawling city over the next 2 years, as well as getting further afield to the mountains of the northeast and north. I'd like to ride piecemeal from Rangoon up to Mandalay and Bagan and then as far north and northeast from Mandalay as I'm allowed to go. It will have to be on weekends, so I will take a night train or (horrors!) a bus up to where I had left off earlier and then ride for two days before scuttling back to Rangoon. This will have to start once the rainy season has left us, some time in October. I'm certainly looking forward to riding around Rangoon and hence avoiding the annoyance of taxis and negotiating fares with their larcenous drivers.
On Saturday all of us new teachers toured around Rangoon on a bus that looked as though Elton John had once used it for his concert tours: red plush ceilings with sparkly chandeliers and a big horseshoe-shaped couch at the back with an (empty) bar compartment. We saw the enormous Chaukhtatgyi Paya, site of one of the world's largest reclining Buddhas. It had remarkably expressive painted eyes, and seeing the monks scurrying around his torso cleaning him brought home how big he really is. On his feet there are, of course, the 108 signs of Buddha-hood (108 on each sole, actually) and his robe is gilded. There is an astonishing amount of gold leaf lavished on Buddhist temples here; the Buddha himself would doubtless not be impressed. We then drove by the immense Shwedagon Paya (100 metres high and surrounded by a vast complex) and marvelled at the changing colours of the gold against the leaden skies; I think I will be taking rather a lot of photos of it at sunset over the next few months. We headed past pretty Kandaugyi Lake, where I will be cycling this coming weekend, and on to the downtown core of Rangoon, the only part of the city where you really seem to be in a major urban centre. Lots of old colonial architecture along Merchant St. and the Strand, and, my favourite touch, a centuries-old stupa, Sule Paya, in the middle of a traffic circle right in the heart of town. All in all, Rangoon seems like quite a manageable city to get around, unlike gridlocked Bangkok or immense, sprawling Tokyo or Cairo, and there seem to be enough green spaces and enough trees everywhere to alleviate the urban blues. Much of the city is still timber-built houses, which is a welcome change from so many modern Asian cities.
One sight that takes some getting used to here is women wearing thanakha, a yellow paste smeared on the face as sunblock and skin lotion. It gives them an other-worldly, slightly frightening appearance a bit like African tribal dancers. As in many Asian countries, women have a horror of tanning their skin and hope that the thanakha will lighten their compexions. I think it's more effective as a way of scaring away ghosts, myself.
We went to an opulent brunch at a luxury hotel, the Dusit, on Sunday. It was interesting to see who showed up to spend a fortune by Burmese standards on a sybaritic spread. There were Japanese expats, a few tables of Europeans and several groups of wealthy Burmese. They may be the same ones whose lavish mansions are clustered here and there around the school.
Off to bed. I will post more soon.
Cheers
Graydon
posted by xuanzang @ 3:55 AM
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