Myanmar (Burma) part 1

We heard the loud whistle and the vibrations of the tracks before we saw it. From the platform you could see men holding on to the vertical bars with their heads and limbs hanging out the doorless openings. It pulled to a stop and we climbed the steps onto the crowded train, bumping into bodies with nowhere to go. A few stops later seats opened up and we watched Myanmar speed by. Grimy apartment buildings, tin room houses, vendors by the side of the road, construction, monks, women with baskets on their heads. We got off at the central station, the center of Yangon – the biggest city in Myanmar.

A tall, golden peak rose from a building. We walked towards the pagoda; sweat already pouring down our faces from the heat. The Sule Pagoda was round, and you could walk around the interior of it, with air-conditioned rooms to your right and golden statues of Buddha on the left.

Men and woman knelt in front of the statues and prayed. The rooms held more statues encased in glass. Although there were many people who had come to the pagoda to pray, people came and sat on the floors of the air-conditioned rooms, talking; or sat on the raised platforms in the pagoda talking on their phones.After the pagoda, we visited a synagogue. The synagogue is the only one in Myanmar, and there are only 20 Jews left – there used to be over 2,500.  It was located on a small street filled with paint shops, carts, and stores selling rope and buoys for boats.

In downtown Yangon, each street filled with stores was dedicated to a different thing; one street was filled with paper shops, another boat supplies. We watched men push sugar cane through a crank to make sugar cane juice, and people sat on little stools on the crowded sidewalks eating and talking to each other.

We spent the afternoon at the National Museum, where we saw the golden throne of the last king of Burma, and wax figures of men and woman of different ethnic groups. Our taxi driver guided us through the museum and then took us to a pagoda even bigger than the one we had seen that morning: Shwedagon Pagoda, the largest and most important pagoda in Myanmar. We could hear female voices singing in unison from an open building at one end of the pagoda, and we walked towards the noise. There were Monks everywhere, wearing maroon robes, and bells tinkled in the wind at the top of the pointed roofs. Women stood in front of raised statues of sitting Buddha and poured cups of water over the head and shoulders of the statue.The next two days we spent in Bagan, riding around on rented bikes.  Bagan is 400 miles to the north of Yangon, in the rice-growing heartland of Myanmar.   From the 9th to the 13th century Bagan was the capital of what would become Myanmar.

We visited an ancient monastery with paintings from the 10^th century. It was filled with small rooms all connected by openings in the walls, and rays of light streamed in from the small windows with metal bars. We also went to a current day monastery where we burnt our feet running barefoot over the hot sand to the buildings. A monk led us around an older building with wall paintings, similar to the ancient monastery. Monks were sleeping on wooden platforms with blankets under shaded areas, and we talked with one of them.

On our way to the monastery we’d passed a small shop with pictures of Aung San Suu Kyi – the leader of the democracy movement in Myanmar – and her father, General Aung San, who led the country to independence in the 1940s. We’d seen their pictures in some shops and restaurants. On our way back we stopped to talk with the people in the office. This was the local office of the National Democratic Party and they told us about their work organizing meetings and opening offices in small villages. The country has elections in the fall, but it is still not decided whether Aung San Suu Kyi will be able to run for President. In the past, the military put her under house arrest for 15 years and tried to get her to leave the country by separating her from her children. The next day, biking to the river gave us a glimpse of the thousands of pagodas scattered across Bagan. The river was packed with wooden canoes taking tourists for rides, woman carrying baskets of small stones on their heads – bringing the baskets off of a boat onto shore. Tiny shops were set up randomly on the dusty open area bordering the water, and we stopped for a cold drink.

Later that afternoon, a driver from our hotel gave us a tour of the biggest and most interesting pagodas in the area (there are over 10,000) and we watched the sunset at – not surprisingly – the “sunset pagoda.” A beautiful way to end our three days in Yangon and Bagan.

-Natalia