Today we flew from Kuala Lumpur to Yangon, or Rangoon, in Myanmar. Our first guide, Aung, met us and we headed straight for our hotel in the south of the city, while Aung filled in some of the gaps in our Myanmar knowledge, which, it turns out, are pretty gaping... Up until my arrival in the city this afternoon, I thought that Yangon was Myanmar's capital city... Turns out not. Aung tells us that as of 2005, the military appropriated a more peaceful, beautiful town in the centre of the country. Half the museums' artefacts and half of the city zoo have been shipped up North, but the businesses and the embassies are staying put. Why? They never finished the new capital city's airport leaving Yangon with Myanmar's sole international airport (about the size of Jersey airport...).
Aung is full of facts and passion about Myanmar and can't wait to tell us all about 'his country'. I can't bear to let him down by giving away that I only understand about 30% of what he is saying... What I do know is, though, that this is a country that has been completely cut off for half a century and is now facing a complete cultural overhaul. We can only hope they don't lose their old heritage like KL in its search for new things. Either way, it's is hard to fathom how cut off such a huge area of land can be shut away from the rest of the world and be run by such completely different rules, completely alien to us. For example, up until 2010 no one could buy an imported car but only a few years earlier the General decided he didn't like driving on the British left side of the road, so ordered all the driving rules to be reversed. The result? Cars with right-sided drivers on right sided roads because no new cars were being brought in. Even now, when they are free to import what they like, hey are buying right hand drives from Japan.
This evening we saw our first pagoda of the two weeks in Myanmar, Yangon's towering Shwedagon Pagoda. With the absence of nightlife, Aung tells us, whole families spend their weekend evenings visiting the beautiful gold leaf temple at the heart of the city. 2 hours later and I feel I've learned more about Buddhism than a year of RS at school... From the importance of the day you were born on, to the different Buddhas, from the value of odd numbers and clockwise motions to the founding of the pagoda itself and it's physical evolution over the centuries. Oh and found out that the Brits may have stolen a bell as a trophy for winning a war or two and managed to drop it in the river and couldn't manage to salvage it so ultimately had to give it back to the Burmese who safely retrieved it... Oops. Can't wait to see how Aung translates British colonialism for us...
Anyway, while I was standing astounded by this beautiful building, however, I started to sense some eyes on me, only to look down and find I am being filmed by a young Chinese couple... This continued throughout the evening, even at dinner I received a number of excited grins. Turns out they don't have ginger people in Burma. Who'd have thought?
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