I can’t check email, but I CAN enter blogs and read your comments. So if you want to contact me before Feb 15th, when I leave Myanmar, I can only be reached here. Someone please let my mother know, so she doesn’t worry about me. Her email address is pamandron@nfinity.com.

My first day in Myanmar was quite an adventure. I hardly slept last night due to being relentlessly attacked by mosquitos, even though I was under a mosquito net. I stayed in a dorm room, and it was WITHOUT any sort of fan. In other words, it was ROASTING. All the beds are butted next to each other, so I was sleeping next to someone I didn’t know at all. So the only way to fight the skeeters was to cover myself up with a blanket or dig through my pack for my repellent, which was certain to awake everyone… so I tried the blanket. The blanket only made me sweaty, which seemed to attract the skeeters even more, and any flesh that poked out of the blanket was IMMEDIATLY BITTEN. It was insane. I finally gave in and dug out my repellent at about 1:30 am. It felt much better without the hot blanket, but any spot on my body that I missed spraying DEET on was bitten. It took all my nerve not to scratch and make things worse. This went on until I finally got every part of my exposed body covered and I finally drifted off to sleep around 3 am…only to be awakened at 4 AM by the LOUDEST MEGAPHONE BHUDDIST PRAYER SESSION I could have ever imagined. Earplugs did very little to drown it out. This went on for AN HOUR. Some time around 5:30 I started drifting back to sleep, but awoke at 9 AM for breakfast, which was great. I then moved to a fantastic room at the top of the guesthouse which not only has a nice comfy PRIVATE bed and a fan, but what’s best is that it has a great view of the Shwedogon Pagoda, which is this amazing 2000 year old towering pagoda that is covered in over 54 tons of gold, 5000 diamonds, hundreds of rubies… It the holiest place in Myanmar and one of the greatest human-made structures I have ever seen. I have been trying to kick this phlemy throat and cough thing I’ve had since I went diving, but it seems to be getting worse again. So I went out and exchanged money from a money exchange tout (only to discover later that he tricked me out of about 7 dollars in the exchange, clever monkey!) and found my way to a pharmacy to get some drugs. On the way, two local boys approached me and wanted to practice thier english with me. They took me to the Sulay Pagoda which is another gold-encrusted pagoda in the center of town. A man approached us there at explained in perfect english everything about the pagoda, the practices happening everywhere, and about transendental medication, which he went at length about for over 20 minutes before we got rid of him. We got rid of him by my agreeing with the boys to go to their english class and say a few words…

I arrive at the class, which has about 40-50 students in there late teens to late twenties, and I am immediatly brought to the front of the class. I am asked to improvise. So I go on for about 10-15 minutes about who I am, what I have been doing, etc.. and then ask if anyone has questions… boy did they.

Are you married? No. Why not? My girlfriend and I broke up. Why? She left me. How did that make you feel? sad. Someone asked me to explain how I felt about relationships and love. JESUS! What is this?? What is your religion? Do you like Jennifer Lopez? (No. Which was an unpopular answer, I found out.) What do you think of Myanmar. What do you think of Thai people? What do you think of George Bush and the Iraq War? (I LOVED this question, because I tore into George Bush. I found out later that MOST people in Myanmar really LIKE George Bush. I can’t imagine why, other than the only news they can sometimes get is CNN.) All in all, I was up in front of this class answering questions about travelling, love, relationships, politics and J-lo for an hour. I WAS the class. I was exhausted and little embarrased about my answers afterwards, especially when I revealed how LITTLE I knew about thier culture and country. At the end, I took a photo of the class. Which I will post when I can. It was actually great fun, and I have been asked to return before I leave Myanmar. Then my new friends took me to lunch, then the Shwedogan Pagoda which was stunning but was unfortunately under some rennovation, so photo ops were limited. Then we worked our way back home by super croweded bus, and then I got a sarong, because almost everyone here wears one! You don’t know how happy this makes me! It’s like being back in indonesia again! Tomorrow my friends are going to take me around again starting at 9 AM. I am exhausted. I found this internet place about a mile from my guesthouse, and it may be the only one in town. Anyway, it’s late here, so I am heading back to my guesthouse for hopefully a peacefull night of sleep.