burmese days
i've only been in yangon (rangoon) a few hours but i'm already really liking the place. i was actually a few hours later than planned thanks to a shining example of indian bureaucracy. my flight was combined with the bangkok flight as obviously yangon's not that big a draw. instead of going cal-yan-bkk however, we flew all the way to bangkok, then back to yangon. if you don't get how absurd this is look at an atlas. bloody indian airlines.anyway, having been convinced that i was going to spend the next few weeks in some sort of gulag it was a pleasant surprise to find the city and its residents much more relaxed than might be expected, and certainly a welcome break from the hectic nature of cal. having said that, the internet's not technically allowed and this may well be being monitored (hi generals), so i'll have to be a bit more conservative than usual.
yangon is an amazing city for architecture. i've yet to have a proper wander, that's for tomorrow, but the sheer range of styles on view in my few hours here is nothing short of astounding, especially considering that i was expecting a city filled with drab, soviet style, concrete blocks. there's a lot of interesting, though fairly functional, crumbling british colonial buildings around, but every now and then a stunning paya (pagoda) appears where you least expect it. these are very different to the whitewashed affairs i was used to up in kaza: every one is bedecked in shimmering gold leaf and looks absolutely stunning, especially with any sort of light on them. the big daddy is of course the shwedagon paya: i was able to see it from the air as we circled to land, then drove past it, and both times it looked as amazing as it's supposed to be, if not more so. for a religion that i was coming to associate with plain rice and stark landscapes, it seems that buddhism does have a more opulent side.
accessing the net is a bit hit and miss, and relatively expensive, but hopefully i'll be able to check in again in a bit. photoes from my first month should be up on flickr soon but i have no idea where. more details to follow...
posted by bicrom @ 2:20 pm
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