Burma Learning Tour: 20 January 2010

On my way to breakfast that morning, a small puppy was sitting at the bottom of the steps. Animals run wild everywhere here, even in hotel lobbies. I think our hotel, adopted him. The hotel workers play with him and feed him treats. I made the mistake of petting him before I walked up the staircase, we heard him whining from downstairs during breakfast. He was too small to make it up the stairs.

After breakfast, the four youngest girls presented our rap to the group:



On the plane ride home today, Alaina and I were discussing how different it was to visit the villages as opposed to Inle Lake. I mentioned that we had two different focuses between the villages and the Lake. At Inle Lake they perceive us as customers and tourists, at the villages they perceived us white people interested in their lives.

We walked around downtown Yangon today, after our flight back from Heho. We passed food stands and many open durians, the most vile smelling fruit in the World. The mixture of durian and the open sewing filled my nose as we walked the streets. We had to be careful when crossing the streets – because pedestrians never have the right of way. It was the time of the day that young nuns walked through the streets, chanting and singing in order to receive food or money for the nunneries. I wonder if Nuns are any less revered than Monks.

We had lunch in a nice restaurant – there were no Burmese eating inside, only white Europeans or Americans. As my group was leaving the restaurant, we passed a group of older Americans ordering their food. We explained to them what NCP does and our purpose for being in Burma, they praised us and thought our goals were great. They were tourists from the West Coast, predominantly from Oregon and California. I don’t know what they had seen or what they were going to see, but it wouldn’t be anything like what we had seen or experienced.