In lieu of Skype: a blog from Phaung Daw Oo

In Mandalay the internet is very bad. Many things in Burma are different, but many are still the same.

In Bangkok it started to rain as we taxied towards the runway, in that sudden and torrential way it does here. We stopped and soon we were waiting in a river. This was channeled neatly beneath us by the nature of grass, and of tarmac. For a while, we didn’t know if we would be able to take off at all. Perhaps we could float instead.

Many people had been anxious already, before the rain began. They became very tense, as we listened to many litres of water hitting the roof and the wings. Two aeroplanes in front of us sat very still. Eventually they were obscured completely by screens of rain, and then slowly we began to wade towards the runway. We sped forwards for a very long time, into the weather. We took off shaking and creaking. It took a long time to come level, and for the plane to stop groaning.

I stayed in Yangon for six days. I had time to do this because in Bangkok I was given a meditation visa in one day. In England, I waited a month for one of these, before leaving without it. In Bangkok I expected it to take at least a week, and to be interrogated at least a little bit, and so I told  Phaung Daw Oo that I wouldn’t be there for a while. Actually, it was incredibly easy; I wasn’t asked any questions, and didn’t have to wait any days, at all.

(TLDR: At the moment, you can get a three month Burmese meditation visa in Bangkok in one day, without any questions, if you have an invitation letter).

On the way to Yangon from the airport the wall said, ‘Obama, come back’. The taxi driver showed me a photograph of the wall before Obama visited, too. It said ‘welcome, Obama’ then, and used a lot of colours. Now, they don’t just sell Aung San Suu Kyi t-shirts, they sell t-shirts with Obama on too.

In Yangon I stayed with my friend John, he also comes from America.

It was very nice of him to let me stay, because hotels are expensive in Yangon, now.

We went to Shwedagon Paya and to the museum.

Most people in most places had heard of our Burmese teacher, John Okell, and were very impressed that we knew him, and a tiny bit of Burmese, too.

I still really like Shwedagon.

In the last 18 months, most of the cars and taxis have been replaced with ‘new’ cars from Japan. Two years ago the government taxed and fee’d too hard for normal people to import vehicles, so the cars were all decades old and had no doors, no roof, no windows or were riddled with holes. On the way back from Shwedagon, it was a nice piece of history to find that a taxi that still had a small hole in the bottom, beneath my flipflop.

Phaung Daw Oo, in Mandalay

Phaung Daw Oo is very big. I wanted to go to a village, but I couldn’t find one because they’re all very small and hard to see. Instead I am in Mandalay, where there are one million people and I am teaching at PDO, where there are about 6000.

I am very tired a lot, because I don’t have much time to sleep or to be on my own, except between twelve and five AM, but I really like it here. It is incredibly interesting and inspiring and stimulating, because my students are all of these things. It is nice when John visits too. I would like to freeze time, but it’s too hot to find enough ice.

Now, I have finished my fifth week of teaching. Next week I will go on holiday; I have imported half term so that I can visit Chin state or Rakhine state with John. I feel a little guilty and a little sad about being away for a week, but I have cancelled everything else I was supposed to do this summer so that after half term I can go back for longer than I planned.

Pyin Oo Lwin

Last weekend we were taken all around Mandalay by some of my friends. The one after this, we spent in Pyin Oo Lwin. Pyin Oo Lwin is up in the hills and much less hot than Mandalay. The monsoon in Mandalay is a myth; it has been 40 degrees and almost entirely dry all this time.

Visiting Pyin Oo Lwin was very interesting, because I’ve been there before. Before, it was very shabby and archaic and odd, but now it is very built up and has many banks.

I was especially excited by a particularly shiny new ATM that looked very convincing for a joke. The story is that Burma now has many ATMS, but almost none ever have any money in. Visitors are still advised to bring in all their cash in dollars, and to change it to kyat when they get here. Although now, you can do this in real banks rather than at the market. Before, there were very few banks and the exchange rate in these, and in other proper places, was far away from what it really was. If you had changed your money in these places, you would have lost 80% or so in the process.

In Pyin Oo Lwin I tried the ATM as an experiment. To my wild excitement, it gave me 5000 kyat that was all flat and new and not full of holes or sellotape. Doing this may not have made sound economic sense, as I expect the bank charges will exceed the withdrawal, but it was a momentous and thrilling occasion nonetheless. I took many pictures, lest I forget.

I am glad, however, that in Pyin Oo Lwin the street food has not changed; in Pyin Oo Lwin, people still sell flying saucers of no u (quails egg) or chickpeas, chilli and tomato in batter. These are the undisputable best thing in the whole world of food. When we went home to Mandalay, I almost decided not to leave because the market wasn’t open until evening, and there were none of these for sale.

These things are actually not called flying saucers, but moun lin maya, I think. If you ever come here, the most important thing you should do is eat moun lin maya and myin kwa yuweq thouq.

In Pyin Oo Lwin, I ate a lot of lots of things and swum in a waterfall pool.

These men were in the army, which lives outside Pyin Oo Lwin. At the weekend they like to stroke rabbits.

In Pyin Oo Lwin, the only thing I disliked is that there were many (other) tourists. I am not really used to this because last time I came there weren’t any and now I live far out in the ‘burbs, and hardly go into the city centre at all. I don’t like the way many tourists look at things, and I am worried that sometimes I look at things like they look at things and don’t realise that I’m doing it.

Speaking (self-righteously) of tourists, here are some places we went in Mandalay, the weekend before the weekend that we went to Pyin Oo Lwin.

Mandalay Palace:

From left to right: Eliza (Weh Weh Lwin), Su Nan Da, Mo Mo Shin (Olivia), Now Si

From left to right: Sophie, War War Khine and Eliza. War War Khine always blinks and ruins all my photos.

The world inside Maha Myat Muni Paya:

U Bein’s bridge:

John Poses.

Yann Aye ponders the nature of water chestnuts.

The second man from the left is wearing a helmet. I think he was scared of falling in and hitting his head on a rock. John thinks he probably just rode his motorbike there and didn’t know what else to do with it.

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Mandalay Hill. Eliza was ‘maaaaaaaaw deh, theiq maaaaaaaaaaaw deh, ayaaaaaan maaaaaw deh’ (tired, very tired, SO tired) all the way up. It took a long time.

We got there eventually.

I love Phaung Daw Oo, but this week I have been worn out of institutionalistation, and propelled into a phase of sporadic claustrophobia; the hot, busy road outside the school has changed from nightmarish to frequently, very appealing. I think one day they will find me delirious on the ground, kissing the tarmac and crying, because maybe there, for five minutes I will be left on my own. Mostly, this is the result of Eliza.

Eliza is my new nyi ma leh (little sister). I already have one nyi ma leh in England, but she’s too far away. Eliza can’t speak enough English or use computers sufficiently enough yet to read this, but it is only a matter of time; she is very fast like a shark, so, hi Eliza!

Eliza is very sweet, she puts thanaka on me every morning (and insistently on my sunburn, because it is cool, and not at all drying like facepack…) and ties my longyi when I have done it a little bit wrong (usually in public, after having ripped it most of the way off me, which is totally acceptable unlike pulling it up past mid-calf to aid walking, which is indecent and ‘not nice’). However, Eliza is also always here. Always.  And when she isn’t someone else is. Or a crowd of someone elses. A significant amount of this was written in the shower, because the door locks and the light doesn’t work so nobody knows that I’m in there.

Walking back from the shower, along the external corridors at the back of the girl’s dorm, where I live, hundreds of thousands of bats swoop around, in and out of the trees beside the river behind the building. I really like bats. I really like living in the girls dorm, most of the time. Mostly I like my visitors and don’t want to kiss the road. Anyway, I sucked a marble I found on the ground today and it didn’t taste very nice so I’m put off.

In the evenings my room, which is big and has air-con, as well as me in it, attracts a small flock of visitors. They come in and out in tides and try on my clothes and take photographs of themselves and teach me Burmese. Eliza often tells everyone else to leave or hits them, and then steals something small but usually of significant sentimental value to me when she leaves. Sometimes, I want to kill her.

My favourite class isn’t a real class, they were made up for another volunteer, who left and so they were left and I had to inherit them, or leave them sitting all on their own.

At first I was annoyed because they class are very loud and large and often slow to understand things. It is quite tiring to stand in front of thirty eight teenagers and force them to listen to you every day. However, after a little while they turned out to actually all be lovely and clever. They also started demanding all of my time.

My special, best favourites are all novices (apart from Eliza and her friend Sophie). I like Su Nan Da, Yan Aye and Ben the most. Su Nan Da doesn’t really like anybody, he spends most of his time studying or teasing people in an awkward and often offensive way. He is pedantic, sarcastic and sometimes really mean, but rarely to me. Instead, he brings me grade one Burmese books to study from and spends hours forcing me to practice handwriting and vowel sounds.

Su Nan Da comes from Shan state, but he is only half Shan, he is also half Bamar. When he is insisting he doesn’t speak Burmese with a funny accent he is definitely very much half Bamar, the rest of the time he is only really Shan.

Sometimes Su Nan Da makes Eliza look like she’s going to cry, but I think she would win in a fight so it’s ok. The other day I asked Su Nan Da to walk Eliza home because it was late and I wanted to stay out, and he told me very quickly that actually he wouldn’t walk her home, instead he would sell her to China, because ‘they buy people there’. He hoped he would get lots of money, but maybe not because not many people would want her.

Yann Aye is very clever and enthusiastic and curious about everything, and very kind and wise. However, he also has some strange theories and many large holes in his knowledge, for example he is certain that the army do not kill people ever, this is an inexplicable notion that many seem to share.

Yann Aye really likes biology, and gave a presentation in class called ‘the nature of people the other day’. I asked him to speak for 5-10 minutes, it lasted half an hour. He covered everything from foetuses and umbilical cords to how people are all different, particularly because some are attractive, like him, and others are not, like his friend Winston.

Ben is only 17 and like bambi or an elf or a fairy. He always has rapt, encouraging expressions in lessons. He doesn’t talk very much but is always around bearing thoughtful gifts and helpful advice. He gave a presentation on a story he found on the floor, and he spent 3 nights memorizing it.

Together, this class and I are going to start a blog, I hope, based on their presentations. I am going to edit and upload it for now, but they will do all the writing. I hope this will let me keep teaching them from England and that they can use it to show prospective employers and educators their English and computer skills. I also want to be able to show everyone how interesting and clever they all are, and their unique, self-decided perspectives on all the things changing in Burma, that are almost completely neglected by the press.

My morning class are my real class with a proper name and actual text books. They should be the best, but actually I don’t like teaching them that much. I think this is mostly because lessons are at 7am every day. I don’t really like 7am, especially because sometimes there is no power so I can’t make coffee. Coffee is also bad here. I think my students also don’t like 7am very much because they are quite mean. Often this is probably because they haven’t had breakfast yet, but I think it is a bit unfair to take it out on me.

Individually, however, many are very sweet and one has hair to her waist, which is really cool.

These are some of my students.

Thu Zar Win

Htet Htet

War War Khine

All the boys love Wah Wah Khine. Su Nan Da has many opinions about things like her hair and the freckle on her lip. He has opinions on many things like this; democracy, he says, is good except for the short skirts. However he is very adamant that although they shouldn’t have short hair or skirts or freckles on their lips, women are people too and are equal in everything to men.

Mo Mo Shin (Olivia)

Aye Thandar Kyaw

My other friend at Phaung Daw Oo is Weh Phyo. Weh Phyo is 5 years old and probably evil. He spends his days wreaking havoc to the best of his ability. He is getting very good at this because he menaces sweets and money out of people and is growing fat and strong as a consequence. He likes me more than most people, because we share a love of dinosaurs. There is no sound on the office computers so we watch walking with dinosaurs and make our own sound effects. He also makes inciteful comments, like ‘the same fate for him’ when watching a herd of herbivores being eaten by carnivorous dinosaur.

However, our shared love of dinosaurs hasn’t stopped him attempting to disrupt all my lessons, biting me, hitting my and smashing my laptop. It was fixed by very kind computer people, but all my work is gone and I can’t get online anymore. Today he hit all the girls in my class with a soft toy cat and bit me when I removed him. Last night it is alleged that he climbed along a ledge and through a window into another teacher’s room, where he ate a mango, stole all his sweets and messed everything up and then climbed out again.

Other things that have happened are that I bought a pink umbrella and a longyi and had my hair cut like the nineties. Eliza made me because it was free, by trainee hairdressers who came to PDO to practice. They all had very funny hair, and cut everyone else’s very short and full of layers. I look like a bit like a spaniel. I had to stay for more time than the haircut, while they all took photographs. Su Nan Da was very upset, because I didn’t have long enough hair anyway. He began teasing me and War War Khine for being bald…

Novices shave their heads every ten days, and must not eat after lunch time, drink, smoke, ride motorbikes in Mandalay or ‘stay’ with women. Lots of the little ones sneak out to the teashop in the evenings to eat and watch Bollywood movies anyway, while the monks aren’t looking.

In Yangon, John and I went to see Side Effect. Side Effect are a Burmese punk band that I interviewed for SOAS Radio, and then Anthony Bourdain copied me and interviewed them too. They were really good. We also went to the Bogyoke Aung San Museum which is only open once a year, and we shuffled around in a vast herd that was more interesting than the museum itself.

I can speak a little bit of Burmese now.

I am interviewing everyone who doesn’t mind for my dissertation, it’s really fascinating. I might write about this later.