we are siamese if you please :-)

s: Hi all!  It's Sara (hence the little 's') writing from Burma.  Amy has joined me, so this blog marks the return of the Sistahloos Narratives!  She has brand new eyes for SE Asia, so I'll turn the narrative over to her.

a: SOUTHEAST ASIA OMG!! The smells! The colors! The accents! I don't understand why Sara isn't still freaking out.

For me, it all started on Sunday, when Dad dropped me off at LAX and I hopped on board my first solo flight (Note: I'm so adult). I was served a vegetarian Jain meal, which I requested when I booked my ticket--my ticket, which I paid for with my own earnings (please refer back to previous note). I learned about Jainism in my Eastern World Religions class, and its principle doctrine is extreme nonviolence.
Jains are even restricted to a special type of above-ground farming to make sure no bugs are harmed by ploughing, etc. I was curious to eat like a Jain and my opportunity had arrived. Luckily, my meals were nonviolent AND delicious! I would have believed the stewardess if she told me my meal was take-out from Heart of India Cafe. So after dinner, Moulin Rouge, breakfast, an episode of Glee, and reading a book, a mere thirteen hours after I left LA...I wasn't even in Bangkok yet. I was at my layover in Taipei, Taiwan.

s: I waited SOOOO long for her!  But at least I wasn't waiting on a plane.

a: Eventually though, I did arrive in Thailand and found my way to THE SISTALOO! We drove to our guest house and spent the next day exploring Khao San Road. We also saw the biggest Buddha statue in Thailand...or maybe the world. I can't remember right now. But it's really big.

s: In the evening, we decided to splurge on the Siam Niramit, which is supposed to be Thailand's big world-class show.  Something about the Guinness Book of World Records?  So hard to know what Thai people are telling you when they get really excited, but we took the excitement as a good sign and went.  It turned out to be a the history of Thailand, told through Thai dancing.  While most of the scenes were
pretty earnest (villagers, goats, an elephant, a river with real water on stage, impressive dance-y thai kick boxing) the funniest part was undoubtedly the scene in which they demonstrated hell.  There were English captions on a projector narrating each new thing that would happen, and with each one I thought, "they're going to show THAT next?"  Samples include "if you kill an animal, you will have your innards eaten by demons," and "if you drink alcohol, you must boil in water."  Somehow, in the midst of this, it was considered appropriate for men to be running around with nylon covered flour sacks for bosoms.  Definitely quite something.

a:  Then yesterday morning we took a flight to Yangon, Myanmar. There was so much to look at! Colorful buildings, street vendors, rickety mostly-broken-down cars filling up the roads. One of our cab drivers appeared to be seated on a hot pink plastic lawn chair where his car seat should have been. Also unusual is the fact that most of the men wear skirts here. Sara and I laughed at a line from an article by Mike MacEacheran, which reads, "The longyi, a wraparound cloth worn by both sexes, though slowly being phased out by American jeans, is still a sign that Yangon keeps one foot--or rather, one flirtatious hairy knee--firmly rooted in the past." What an image.

s:  And true:-)   But despite the hairy knees, the Burmese people are definitely as wonderful as everyone says.  We'd barely been in Yangon an hour yesterday  when Amy asked a monk if there were any good restaurants nearby.  The monk, whose name might have been something along the lines of "Saisuku" proceeded to walk us three blocks to a restaurant he knew of, and when it was closed he asked several locals who pointed us in the direction of another.  We asked him to join us for dinner, and while he sat with us, he refused to even let us buy him anything.  We got to talk a bit about our lives (he's the youngest of four children, and he spends a lot of time studying) and after dinner he spent over fifteen minutes finding us a cab that he felt was giving us a fair rate.  Truly, so wonderful-- and the really baffling
part is that it seems to be the norm here.



a: I want to befriend ALL THE MONKS! They're so cool. Anyway, the taxi he found for us took Sara and I to the Yangon bus station. We hopped on a 12 hour overnight bus to Mandalay, which is in central Myanmar. We made a 4:30 a.m. breakfast stop at a restaurant, and after we finished eating we decided to hunt for a restroom. We asked a young Burmese waitress where they were. She pointed. We walked a few feet in the direction she'd pointed.

s: And then we stopped.  We were at the back door.  Were we meant to go out the back, or was it simply NEAR the back door?

a: The waitress noticed our struggle and pointed out the back door. We walked out the back door.

s: And then we stopped.  Were we supposed to go STRAIGHT out the back door, through the field?  Or was it attached to the back of the building?  We looked around.

a: The waitress noticed our struggle. She pointed across the field. We started walking across the field.

s: OH!  There they were, right in front of us, a long row of bathrooms.  Except...

a: The "MEN" and "WOMEN" signs were in Burmese writing; half of the doors were labeled with a circular squiggle while the other half were labeled in a mountainy swirls. We stopped. We internalized the two symbols, and were able to make no conclusions. Back and forth we looked, and noticed there was a person in a door that was labled with the moutainy swirl! We only had to wait for him or her to exit to know which stalls were meant for us.

s:  But alas, we couldn't save ourselves further embarassment.  The waitress had already noticed our struggle.  For the record, if you're a female in Burma, you want the circular squiggle.

a: Hopefully we won't be as clueless in our Myanmar adventures to come. Thanks so much to Geo for posting this! We'll add pictures when we find wifi, which may not be until we get back to Thailand.

Much love,
Sara & Amy