Big Recap

I think I'm finally de-jetlagged enough to blog again. I had a hard time sleeping last night, so I stayed up late to beat the arcade game Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. So jet lag isn't always bad.

Anyway, a recap of our last few days:

Inle Lake

Angel and I agree that Inle Lake is one of our favorite places of the trip. This is because the town we stayed in is a small village that hasn't yet been corrupted by tourism. The people there are genuinely nice - people were constantly waving to us and saying hello. This took some getting used to, because they weren't trying to sell me anything. The villagers were excited to see a white dude, and a Chinese girl with such fair skin (maybe they thought she was Maggie Cheung).

We were riding bicyles around town, and passed a mother taking her 4 year old for a walk. When the kid saw me, we had a "race" for quite a while, with the kid laughing the whole time. I also taught him a few English words ("fast!").

I ran out of deodarant here, so I had to buy some Burmese deodarant called "Le Gif". Ironic that they gave it a French name.

The boat ride on Inle Lake provided us with lots of unique sights. The lake itself was serene, and surrounded by rich vegetation. We saw many fishermen using the famous technique of wrapping a leg around the oar to row. We went to a couple of floating villages and took tours of sweatshops textile factories.

We were both disappointed that we couldn't spend more time there, but we eventually jumped on a plane to...

Bagan

The ancient capital of temples! This small area has literally thousands of temples. You can't walk down a street without seeing some ancient temple. It was their equivalent of Starbucks- except instead of drinking coffee, you worshipped Buddha.

The town we stayed at was pretty cool. We found a pool hall and decided to play a game. Naturally, it was a snooker hall, but the locals were game to help us out. After a few minutes, we were the major draw there- over 10 people were crowding around the table to see us play. Every time Angel sunk a shot, they clapped and cheered. Every time she missed a shot, it was "awww!". By the way, this was the fourth country in Southeast Asia where Angel and I have played pool, which is kinda weird when you think about it.

After eating dinner, the Burmese typically chew & spit "betel nut" in a manner similar to chewing tobacco, which has the side effect of staining the teeth dark red. Because of this, tons of people in Myanmar have red teeth. It's also a carcinogen and mild stimulant, and helps get rid of intestinal worms. Anyway, after eating dinner at a street stall, we were offered some of this "betel nut". We both decided to go for it, which made the locals very pleased. We chewed it for a whole minute before agreeing that it was the nastiest thing we ever tasted, and spent the next 10 minutes trying to get the taste out of our mouths. They were definitely not kupo nuts, but I have to admit, it felt cool spitting out some betel nut.

On our last morning there, we took a hot air balloon ride over Bagan at sunrise. It would be unfair to describe how beautiful the scene was, so I'll just let you see the photo gallery I'll put up in a few days.

Yangon

We spent a day in Myanmar's capital, which is a decent city. Their main tourist attraction is this large paya (temple), which we went to see. This is how cheap we were: when we got to the famous paya, they charged us $5 each to go inside the grounds, so we left and took pictures from the outside. But in our defense, we just came from Bagan, where we saw thousands of payas. "If I saw one more Buddha, I was going to puke anyway", I muttered as we left.

Our hotel had a TV with two English channels, one Bollywood channel, and one Burmese MTV channel. One English channel was playing a unwatchably bad movie, and the other was playing a Disney comedy called "Rocket Man", which I can safely say is the worst movie ever created on any planet by any species. Since both English channels were eliminated, we watched Bollywood movies and MTV bhangra remixes the rest of the night.

Bangkok again

Since no trip to Asia is complete without food poisining, I went ahead and got food poisoning the next day before leaving for Bangkok. Our hotel hastily gave us some orange juice, but it wasn't really mixed well. It was 2 inches of nasty concentrate, and 4 inches of mostly water. I couldn't stir it because of ice, so I decided that it was a good idea to slurp up some concentrate, slurp up some water, and then swallow the mixture. The average concentrate level would be equivalent to delicious orange juice!

My digestive system paid the price for my foolishness. I don't know if it was the nasty concentrate or tap water, but I spent the whole day in clutching my stomach and whining like a baby, "ooohhhhhh... rnghhhhh..." Luckily, the worst of it went away after one day, thanks to a good ol' technicolor yawn.

Anyway, I thought this was a great last impression to leave Angel with, so I flew home the next day.

-Mike