Wandering around the dusty roads of Bagan, we took a turn toward the river and discovered a thriving little shoreline where women washed clothes, kids splashed and others bathed modestly. As we strolled past gardens that hugged the sandy bank, we met a little boat pulling to shore, letting passengers off. Three kids paddled people across the river to what must have been a small village on the other side (though, as you can see in some of the pictures, it doesn’t look like there’s anything there. I suspect the town was far back from the shore, out of the way of floodwater).
We waved the kids over and asked if they’d take us on a little tour down to the gold-covered pagoda that commands the river’s bend.
The kids were young. They appeared to be managed by another young man on shore. I don’t remember exactly how much they asked for the half-hour ride there and back, it was something like one dollar, but we decided to pay five. We immediately regretted it. On the one hand, spreading the wealth is good, but on the other we were encouraging them to be reliant on (and to rip off) tourists, which can ruin a culture in the long run.
When we handed the kids the money they didn’t really give a look of “Thanks!,” rather they seemed to look at the money and say, “How do we hide this from our manager so he doesn’t take a cut?”
You might remember that kids from Bagan were the ones who served us at a tea shop in Yangon when we were contemplating child labor. So I guess, when I put the two situations in perspective, I’d rather give money to the boat kids who can remain home (even if working with tourists) than to tea shops who have taken kids from their families to live and work in the big city because they have no apparent prospects.
Obviously the better solution would be that the government provide adequate education, but that’s not the case right now.
(Then again, if I wasn’t so obsessed with money then maybe it wouldn’t be a central part of this story. That, itself, is counter-productive, I think.)
People fished. Another boat appeared to be dredging the river, its pump making a tremendous noise that didn’t travel too far in the humid air, but was plenty loud close up.
Throughout the trip I worried about my ankles being exposed to mosquitoes in the bottom of the boat, so we lathered up in bug repellent. Myanmar hasn’t rid itself of malaria and dengue fever, so we were constantly conscious of risky situations. Though it’s easy to look back at the pictures and romanticize the trip, a lot of energy in third-world travel is spent on minimizing risk and paying attention to your body. Am I just a little dehydrated, or is this the start of an illness? Though I’m hungry, is this food safe? Can you catch anything from drinking river water? And so on…
What’s intriguing about this picture is the question, “Where is that plane going to and coming from?” If you look at a world map you’ll see there’s almost no other cities on that longitude, from pole to pole in that hemisphere. The only possibility I can see for a direct north-south flight might be Lhasa to Yangon. If it’s actually going at a more southwestly trajectory, then the origin might be Kathmandu or New Delhi with destinations like Yangon, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur or Singapore.
This, to me, is what Yangon felt like – wide and quiet streets, air illuminated by the warm sun while people take their time at curbside teashops.
It was illegal to take pictures of government buildings. Sometimes they were marked, but sometimes they weren’t, so Azure slyly took pictures of these behemoths, most likely forbiddenly.
Typical scene on the backstreets.
We were surprised that the TV in our rooms showed international news (BBC) including stories on how the Myanmar government was illegally detaining Nobel Prize winner and opposition politician Aung San Suu Kyi. I wonder how many people inside Myanmar understand English well enough to grasp the newscast.
Downtown mosque.
Hindu shrine with serious guard.
The side of a Hindu temple.
A very recognizable tea shop.
Many restaurants and food stalls cooked at outdoor kitchens like this one. I’m glad we got a shot of this because sometimes, when traveling, something novel might be so ubiquitous that you never take the time to get a shot of it.
My dad got hold of an enormous king salmon, the largest he’s ever caught. They fought for 20 minutes as the salmon repeatedly ran for its life, but the hook was well-set. It was a monster, weighing almost 50 pounds (42)!
Early morning in the back streets is quiet. It smelled like smoke and fried foods – for breakfast I had a little doughnut thing that was cooked by a lady on the street with a small crowd around her. It was greasy-good.
Can I be honest with you? (Who am I kidding, we’re all the imagination of ourselves, we hardly exist enough that you can object. So I’ll be honest.) We didn’t like Shwedegon Paya very much. It’s the top tourist draw in all of Myanmar, and apparently the pinnacle of Myanmar pride. The LP guidebook writer appeared to have had an orgasmic experience that lead to them devoting more pages to the temple than to any other attraction I’ve seen in their books. There are probably more pages on the Shwedegon Paya than there are on non-Bali Indonesia.
But you know what? It was just a big temple, from the outsiders’ perspective. Another misguided human attempt to honor the supernatural with material goods. Eh.
Oh, 100% of our entry fee was turned into gold leaf, which they reapply every year, while their people beg and starve. I suppose they mine vanity from the same source as Americans who buy luxury cars here at home, but none of this excuses our five-dollar contribution to it, so let me say this: If you’re going to Myanmar and you don’t have any connection to Buddhism or architecture, maybe skip this place. Give your five dollars to someone selling their own food on the street. Pictures!
Anyway, the whole time I was taking pictures here I felt like I was trying to draw blood from a stone. I mean, I know this place is beautiful, but opulence is ugly. It’s enough to make a monk take to the forest.
The Structure
I do have to admit, though, that the entrance was pretty exciting. It made you feel like maybe you were about to walk out onto the court for Game 7 of the NBA Finals, the only thing missing was the roar of the crowd.
People
Pagodas seem to be spirituality-centered gathering places. Locals were just hanging out, chatting, some even had food with them. Many were deep in meditation or prayer, and nobody seemed to mind having their picture taken. I wonder if this was due to the general, “I’m OK, You’re OK”ness of Buddhism.
I was on the fence about including this picture because it’s not gorgeous or well-executed or anything, and the kid is an idiot, but I was so moved by this woman, apparently exhausted by her devotion, that I could never bring myself to cut it during the editing process.
This man is pulling a rope that rings a bell. Note that there’s a Buddha statue in front of him.
This was our trusty guide. He just started talking to us and we didn’t have the heart to tell him to leave us alone (I think that’s how it’s done here, anyway), but he was a nice guy. He spoke good English and had been a professor his whole life, but the government forced him to retire because he could remember the time before their regime. That made him dangerous, of course, because he had a broad perspective of the government’s lies. He told us not to talk about it, though, and also not to trust just any monk – some of them, apparently, are government spies. The government’s main resistance comes from within the monasteries.
TRAITOR!!
This little girl is wearing the traditional face paint, tanakh, I think. Most children and many women wore it. Men didn’t tend to wear it, for whatever reason. Apparently it works as sunscreen, though I think it’s primarily appreciated as make-up. It’s incredibly endearing.
Us.
Azure pouring water on the Tuesday Buddha.
Me pouring water on the Saturday dragon. If anyone knows what this symbolizes maybe you can leave the info in a comment.
My favorite of this whole set – Azure back at Tuesday with the guide
Anyway, I’m glad to finally have the pictures up and done with, they’d been blocking up my system for over six months! (Ew!) We’re going through our Myanmar pictures right now, so expect more in the days to come.
While Azure and I sat at a tea shop in Yangon we were approached by a young monk with his collection bucket. He held it out to us. I was happy to offer some food, so we held up a pastry, “Do you want this?” He shook his head no. I held up another pastry and he shook his head again, “No.” Click to Read More
Of course the monk isn’t going to ask straight out for anything, because he shouldn’t want in the first place (he should just present himself without expectations)… but the kid wanted money. We were uneasy giving him money because the practice isn’t supposed to be about that, we thought. That’s more like begging.
Wasn’t it the point that Buddhist monks be happy with whatever they’re offered? Wasn’t it the point that they not be choosy about food, that they only accept alms to keep their body going so it can house the life-force?
We were getting a little upset about the apparent corruption of what we thought were pretty straight-forward Buddhist values – and the fact that we’d met some unimpressive, certainly unenlightened monks a few nights earlier. One was possessive of us, which is again out of sync with what we understand to be Buddhism.
Azure and I spent the morning trying to figure out if we had misunderstood the practice or if we were seeing it misapplied somehow.
Sitting at another tea shop, an English teacher – I don’t remember his name, but it starts with Oo Oo – noticed I was wearing the traditional Myanmar longhi, and he commented on it. He sat down to talk with us. His long white hair was in a top knot and there were long, white wisps coming off, as I imagine a schoolteacher from the 1820s old west might look. He had a whiskery mustache and no beard. His white shirt was buttoned up to the collarless top, and he wore the same traditional longhi, of course. I asked him why he dressed like this while few others did. He said that he wanted to keep the traditions alive. Yes! Why are there so few who understand this?
We took advantage of his English-speaking to ask him about the Buddhists. He said he was a Buddhist, though he only lasted as a monk for 10 days. He said that we should give money to nuns – they need it. They’re not well-taken care of by the monasteries, monetarily. They only receive raw rice then have to cook everything themselves.
On the other hand – and we sensed this – monks don’t need the money at all. They get donations and eat very well, everything is prepared for them, so they don’t even take food when it’s offered. He said there are a lot of "fake" monks who only put the robes on then don’t change anything. They have a plan to start a business or something, so they throw the robes on, collect money while taking English classes and internet classes, then when they have enough they quit and start some computer store or whatever.
People (and all the monks) can tell the difference between genuine monks and fake monks. Some genuine monks – as I suspected – become forest monks. It’s just in their nature, he said, to go and be alone and meditate in a cave or under a tree. Some genuine monks will stay in the temples as teachers. Monks are not respected here unless they deserve respect, it seems, and people know the difference.
Nice tiger picture, right? Well, the picture that goes with the quote below was supposed to lead this post, but I just couldn’t bare to put it in plain sight. It’s hidden behind the Not Safe For Work cut.
The following is a quote from Steppenwolf (1929) by Hermann Hesse. There’s this ongoing (semantics-heavy) debate in travel circles about the difference between a “traveler” and a “tourist.” Here’s what I think: nobody with a cell phone is traveling. That’s all I’ll contribute to the debate at this point. Here’s Hesse:
We talked, too, of her nephew and she showed me in a neighboring room his latest hobby, a wireless set. There the industrious young man spent his evenings, fitting together the apparatus, a victim to the charms of wireless, and kneeling on pious knees before the god of applied science whose might had made it possible to discover after thousands of years a fact which every thinker has always known and put to better use than in this recent and very imperfect development. We spoke about this, for the aunt had a slight leaning to piety, and religious topics were not unwelcome to her. I told her that the omnipresence of all forces and facts was well known to ancient India, and that science had merely brought a small fraction of this fact into general use by devising for it, that is, for sound waves, a receiver and transmitter which were still in their first stages and miserably defective. The principal fact known to that ancient knowledge was, I said, the unreality of time. This science had not yet observed. Finally, it would, of course, make this “discovery,” also, and then the inventors would get busy over it. The discovery would be made – and perhaps very soon – that there were floating round us not only the pictures and events of the transient present in the same way that music from Paris or Berlin was now heard in Frankfurt or Zurich, but that all that had ever happened in the past could be registered and brought back likewise. We might well look for the day when, with wires or without, with or without the disturbance of other sounds, we should hear King Solomon speaking, or Walter von der Vogelweide. And all this, I said, just as today was the case with the beginnings of wireless, would be of no more service to man than as an escape from himself and his true aims, and a means of surrounding himself with an ever closer mesh of distractions and useless activities. But instead of embarking on these familiar topics with my customary bitterness and scorn for the times and for science, I made a joke of them; and the aunt smiled, and we sat together for an hour or so and drank our tea with much content.
Have you heard of the word, “terroir?” It’s French. Terroir is why champagne can only come from the Champagne region of France. It’s why you can’t call your crappy, molded chicken milk, “Roquefort.”
Terroir is the sum of the environmental conditions in a place. It’s the soil composition, the acidity of rain, the angle of the sun, the height of the hills, local farming techniques and surrounding plant species and all the minute variables that even local farmers might not know. The terroir of the Champagne region can’t be reproduced anywhere else on earth. You want to make champagne? Move to Champagne. But if you’re satisfied making some shitty sparkling wine then you can stay in Fife or wherever you live. Expand!
This will blow your mind. Have you ever heard of camas or salal? Well, let me tell you about them, friend. Camas is a plant with an edible root that seems to be somewhere between an onion and a potato. (It has a bad-ass brother named, death camas, which isn’t nearly as fun to eat.) And salal is a low shrub that you’ve definitely seen around the NW if you’ve spent any time here. It lives under tall trees, near water and it makes little black-purple berries. You’ve definitely seen it.
Both these plants are native to the Pacific Northwest. Along with salmon they were the staple foods of the Northwest native peoples.
I have lived here my whole life. I wouldn’t say I know everything about Western Washington botany, but I pay as much attention as anyone else. Until a few months ago, I had never even heard of the two plants that were the pillars of people’s diets, right here, for the last 10,000 years. And it’s not like I’m six years old; I’m thirty! Over thirty!
So, what does this have to do with anything? I’m not really sure myself, I’m a little drunk.
I guess what I’m getting at is that Presence/Attention/Awareness is about more than just focusing on the moment, it’s also about engaging with this place where we are.3 Because we eat many times a day, we have many opportunities to engage with the terroir, to be sensually present in this physical Place and let the rain become our blood. We should eat food with which we share terroir, with which we have a common rhythm.
Salal and camas evolved here, so where are they in our diets? Maybe they taste bad, I don’t know, I’ll tell you this summer, but maybe they were pushed off our plates by cheap food from other places. If we are where we eat, then most of us are geographic Frankensteins.
Where it rains so much that there’s rain in my dreams and my knees can feel it and it narrates Sunday mornings, do I eat the onion that drank the rain that wet my hair weeks before?4
—
1 “Terroir” technically refers only to food and drink (and the official distinction doesn’t even require that the food be organic), but I like to think of it as applying to other things as well – clothing and building materials immediately come to mind.
Art made with local materials is, I think, something different. Of course food and clothes and structures can be created with inspiration to become more than just necessities of survival – they can become expressions of place through person – but the timing of the creative process may or may not coincide with the need for food or shelter, and those two things are going to be taken care of regardless.
2 Not to mention the spirit with which the farmer grows, treats and harvests the food.
3 Travel is, essentially, the experience of and engagement with Place. Which is why these food posts have a place on a travel blog.
There is a mysterious person in traditional Corsican towns, a man or woman kept at the periphery of society because they play a supernatural role in death. At night, this Mazzeri is compelled to sneak into the maquis, the low shrubbery that blankets wild parts of the island, and to hunt down whatever animal comes across their path. The boar or dog meets a violent death – the Mazzeri bludgeons it with a club or a rock, it might strangle the animal or tear its flesh with their teeth. (Read More)
When the animal is dead, the Mazzeri rolls it over and looks into its face. They recognize a person they know in the face of the animal, and the next morning, they announce to the town that the person they saw will die within a year. Even if it’s a family member, they are compelled – by Quellu Quassu, the Corsican “Some Thing” more vague than the Christian God – to hunt it and kill it, against their own will. The Mazzeri do not choose the person, they’re simply death’s messengers.
The hunt takes place in dreams, but Corsicans consider dreams to be a parallel and relevant world: the prophesied deaths occur within the year.{1}
Of course, this tradition died out half a century ago.
I arrived on Corsica among the skeptical majority, the rational liberal who doesn’t necessarily believe in something he can’t see, like God or dream-hunters. To each his own, of course, but if I can’t see it, I don’t believe in it.
Then, in mountains that had been presented as ogre- and Mazzeri-filled, where dreams had been dangerous, we saw kids in Yankee baseball caps and Nike tennis shoes listening to 50 Cent.
We have lost something, I could see.
The world is poorer for the loss. Much poorer. What richness is steam-rolled by skeptical media, employment-focused education, the medical establishment and our science-centered faith? What creative force was extinguished by the Church or ignored by tv-addicted posterity? And how did MY money encourage it?
I wondered, “Really, what does it hurt to open myself to believing in dreams and magic? Am I skeptical only because I have so much pride that I think it matters that I be right or wrong?”
I chose to open myself to the possibility probability that there’s much more going on than what I can see. At the very least, it will make my world richer.
But science and money, the twin pillars of Modern religion, crush cultural niches, the pockets in which creative wealth can accumulate. The Corsican mountains are flat. The Snoqualmie run casinos. Modernism has its cellular talons in Africa.
Then we rolled into the valley of the Christian Back-to-the-Landers, and everything lit up. Nowhere else had I seen a cultural cauldron like this: the kids were singing songs to entertain themselves, they talked about natural phenomena, they believed in the supernatural, the Christian God, they believed that Mary was there and helping them. They had stories. They had a world that was immediate and rich, and legends of their own creation were growing in its garden.
I could see how this might be the kernel for a culture. It wouldn’t take many more generations, or like-minded families, for this to develop into a web of myths and practices that the world has never before seen.
So, what does this have to do with food?
Rugged independence persists in modern Corsica.
There are groups of people among us that are making an effort to live in this fashion. They don’t have TVs and don’t read the newspaper. They’re trying to live in a way that allows them and their kids to sharpen the impression of their characters{2}, that the force of their creativity be unrestrained and untarnished by mass-commercialism, that they can channel their unblemished centers and create with its texture. And for their efforts our world will be richer.
These are the people we need to support with our money. Whether they’re making clothes or constructing homes with local materials or growing food, our money needs to go to those who are creating culture, not steamrolling it.
If we’re going to buy food, let’s buy it from these people, the farmers, the independents who are making this place richer. Let’s buy from the small stands at the farmers’ markets, to help the fragile ones nurse quiet lives.
And we need to stop supporting the steamrollers, the brand names – Coke, Safeway, Costco, Monsanto, Dole, and all the others. There is no spirit in money-centrism, and I’m tired of hearing their voices in humans’ mouths.
Money is the agent of the modern world’s evolution. Spend wisely.
— {1} Dorothy Carrington in Granite Island, describing the Corsican fishing community:
“A week he was missing with his boat and crew…. I heard only a single comment on the situation: ‘His wife came down to ask for news. You should have seen that woman! Her face was black; she has drunk the blood of his heart.’ Blessed are the illiterate, who can spontaneously express themselves in such apt and opulent imagery! But perhaps this was general in the days before universal education began mass-producing minds. I have often wondered how far the Elizabethan writers were indebted to the virile, vivid speech of an illiterate majority.”
She wrote about the Mazzeri and other Corsican folklore in The Dream Hunters of Corsica, in which she reinforces her point:
All this, one might say, belongs to the past. Rational French state education and materialistic values have discredited the evil spirits and reduced the legends to curiosities of folklore. The ogres have vanished; the Devil no longer roams among the rocks. Nor, indeed, does Saint Martin…
{2} “The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character… Under all these screens {brands to which a person subscribes} I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.”
People seem to be curious about our blackout nights, so I thought I’d explain it a little more:
In an effort to live more effortlessly, to sync our bodies’ cycles with the natural daily rhythm, we’ve stopped using electricity at night. As night falls we light candles, we close the computers to read or talk. Instead of using the phone, we shout down the street. We don’t have a TV, sorry to be one of those people.
It’s not about saving money – Seattle has some of the cheapest electricity in the world. In fact, I’ll bet it’s more expensive to burn candles than flip on lights. Nor are we motivated by saving energy/the environment, though it’s a nice side effect. It’s health, it’s (pagan) spirituality, it’s simplification.
We start to light candles as the sun sets, a couple in the kitchen, if we’re still cooking, and one in the bathroom so we can be sure we’re peeing in the sink, not on the faucet. Around 9:30 or 10 we go to bed, and we’re usually asleep before 11pm. (click here to expand this blog post lol)
I’ve gotten a great sleep every night.
We fall asleep gently and wake slowly as the sun rises. We keep our blinds open so we get as much early light as possible. Early morning is rad, I’d always wanted to be in the habit of waking earlier, but fuck alarm clocks. Now we wake up around 6 or 6:30, without an alarm, totally refreshed. The morning is no longer pinched between sleep and work, it’s now a lazy couple hours that I can read or meditate or talk with Azure or satisfy my internet addiction, ordering too many books on Amazon before I’ve even earned the money to pay for them.
My internet addiction frustrates me, and this is a good way to hobble it. TV, the internet and phones (especially as they’re used now) separate people from presence, almost always unnecessarily, so I’m glad to be rid of them for the night. In fact, I’d dramatically smash my phone with a wine bottle, shirtless in the rain, at night, by candlelight, with long hair, if my clients didn’t need it (the phone) to contact me, but that’s another story.
Do we cheat? Occasionally, but don’t worry, we feel really guilty about it.
What does this have to do with travel? Deprogramming.
What we get from the new rhythm:
- Blog content.
- Better sleep.
- More quiet, focused time.
- Early mornings.
- A sense of superiority.
- A predictable nightly rhythm.
The negatives of not using electricity at night:
- We miss out on media-based cultural narratives (news, Lost, internet memes, the Mariners)… which isn’t itself so much a loss as the fact that these narratives connect people.
- Internet withdrawl.
- We aren’t physically able to stay up late with friends, though they seem to be falling asleep earlier too, because they’re old now.
- Sometimes it’s hard to cook by candlelight.
Now, when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, “I will go there.”
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
by Mike
When Kate and I were kids we had this book that celebrated the diversity of people in the world – black, white, different kinds of Asian, people who ate fish and others who ate rice, some were Jewish and some didn’t have religion, etc. On the pages where they showed samples of different kinds of writing, I was mesmerized by the circular Burmese writing. How confusing and gorgeous! The people who used this writing, how would they talk? How did their minds work differently than mine? What was in the corners of their country? (more pictures of writing)
In the corners of their country, we found beautiful writing…
This chalk writing, on the side of a guy’s water tank, tracks how much water is left in the tank. He hauled the water himself then sold it to neighbors. He explained this all in pretty good English.
(This post refers to the time we spent with the Catholic back-to-the-land family in southwest France).
I killed my first fowl on this trip, it was a guinea fowl, practically a chicken. I didn’t actually kill it, rather I held its legs and wings while Gabriel put a knife through its jugular, but I was a pretty-involved accomplice, so it counts in my book. As the blood drained I expected it to squawk or kick or something, to freak out, you know?, but it didn’t react, even as the knife went in. The bird only convulsed after it was already dead, and it was so strong I thought I’d hurt my hand. The bright red blood, which drained into the slop bucket, was fed to the pigs. (read more)
The most unexpected part of holding the fowl was that it was warm. I guess I don’t know what I expected, but the feet felt like human fingers. It’s kinda like when you imagine kissing a person, but you forget to imagine saliva, and it totally changes everything.
City boys have written about killing their first chickens before, so I won’t go into it. It wasn’t an emotional experience for me. But as we were plucking the feathers I told Didier how amazing it was that I’d only killed my first fowl after 30 years.
“I got a good education in high school and college, I’m happy about what I learned and it was relevant for what it was… but it wasn’t…”
“…essential.” He offered.
“Yes.”
“The root of the word ‘essential’ is ‘essence’ or ‘truth.’ You weren’t educated about the truth…”
“… of how our bodies mix with the earth.” I said.
“Exactly.”
Didier and I were on the same page a lot, some of his rants could have come from my mouth. The ones about how companies have a stake in keeping their employees powerless, how it’s good for capitalism that people be vaguely afraid about the future, and so on.
When he taught us about the medicinal herbs in the garden I took tons of notes, but I had a hard time accessing what I’d been taught. I’d look at a plant and look closer at its leaves and compare it to my notes and would be too unsure to declare it Citronelle! or Lemon Pepper! or whatever. I said this time and again, and I’ll repeat it here:
“Learning to identify plants is like learning to read for the first time.”
People ask us often, “So, the kids could leave school at 15? How did he educate them?”
I was curious about this too. One day we went for a ride with Didier and his oldest son. They sat in the front seat, we sat in the back. As they drove, Didier pointed to the sky and talked about the movement of the clouds. He pointed to the hills and talked about the rock formations and the fossils. He talked about the fields that the neighbors were sowing. His son pointed to a sea gull that was out of place here. His son talked about the history of some old structures on their land. His son talked about planting by the moon and how it was a good guide but not the last word. His son talked about finding fennel by looking for a larger reed, because fennel grows at its feet.
Azure with her wild salad.
In other words, Didier taught his children about the land and the plants and the weather and the animals and natural systems and Catholicism. He taught them the things that he considered essential.
They might not know a lot of the academic stuff we consider foundations of knowledge, but they’ve learned how to have a relationship with the earth, and I think that’s fundamentally healthy.
Bali’s climate is so f-ing perfect that on any day of the year you can see all phases of rice cultivation: sowing, growing, harvesting. We came across this little corner when we were lost and trying to find our way back to Ubud. We knew we wanted to come back, so we made a backwards map as we drove home – Azure took a picture of each corner we turned, then the next day we traced it in reverse.
While I’d always understood presence to mean a sharp focus on – say – your breath as it hits your nose, here it meant paying attention to the area within earshot, which I consider Place. When we look back at photos sometimes I remember, “At that time I was dealing with a window washing issue back home.” or something like that. How strange is it that I’m looking at photos and thinking of a far-away adventure, but at the time of the photo I was thinking about home? It’s one of the struggles of modern travel: leaving home at home, not just in words, but in thoughts and attention as well.
The back-to-the-land family sings a prayer before eating cassoulet on a Sunday afternoon. The guy with the shaved head is Johann, the son who had just fallen from the rafters. This is near Carcassonne, France.
by Mike
Before every meal they would sing these prayers – two in French with a Latin prayer in between. One of the prayers is the Lord’s prayer and I believe another is for Mary. They prayed after the meal as well. When we left the farm and started eating without prayer the moment felt a little emptier, a little more mindless. The same was true after we left the meditation retreat in Chiang Mai – we had chanted a prayer before eating there as well. It’s just another instance in which the practices overlap.
The family prayed before and after eating, when waking up and before going to sleep at night. In addition to these five routine prayers, there were also moments throughout the day when they would, essentially, check in with God. They saw it as giving thanks to God; I recognized it as an act of staying present. Similarly, Didier described how at the beginning of each day he would dedicate his physical pain to God – he knew there would be pain. God (as Jesus) went through so much pain for him that it was the least he could do to give some back. In this I recognized Buddhism’s distinction between pain and suffering.
We took a horse-drawn cart to tour old temples in the arid Bagan surrounds. The driver took us to a little village – smaller than a village, even, maybe just a collection of homes – where we finally found a bite of something to eat. Rice, veggies, an egg. Pretty much all you can expect there.
Anyway, without asking, this young lady started to take us on a tour of her village. She showed us the loom, their cotton products and so on. At the end of it she asked us for some money and we refused out of principle: she hadn’t asked us if we wanted a tour, she just started towing us around. In retrospect I can’t believe we didn’t just give her a dollar or something, it would have been a lot for her, but it goes to show how money can warp your mind in a place like this. I think we sometimes treat beggars like they’re pets to be trained, and we forget that – hey – how about sharing something we have enough of?
Yeah, so I nailed this picture. Won’t it be ironic when I profit off of it?
Thought I’d do another little breakdown of the details. After the clicky clicky
Many of the people in Myanmar wore this face paint, which doubled as sunscreen. Some wore it in very exact patterns, some wore it messily (as this girl is), others would just put a line, and some people didn’t wear it at all. All the little kids wore it, but of the adults only the women wore it, for the most part. The people on TV didn’t wear it, and I wonder why that is. I’m sure there’s all sorts of codes and implications having to do with the design people make out of the stuff. I forget what it’s called. The paste is made by rubbing a piece of pigmented wood against a stone and adding some water to the powder. It’s hella charming.
As Azure said, “SHE doesn’t have to worry about GMO seeds!” In fact, in Thailand they found a field “contaminated” with GMO plants. That’s the word they use, contamination. Anyway, I like the touch of the girl having tied her flower stems together with a little palm frond or something.
Wrapped in some big leaf for easy carrying. Notice the plastic bag hanging from her finger? There was plastic everywhere, and at one point we watched a cow eat a plastic bag. It was quite a scene – A cow innocently eating, which elicited an alarmed response from us three big white people, which elicited a confused response (“why do they care so much about that cow?”) from the dozen kids who were following us around the village. Good times.
I’m not one to toot my own horn*, (*that’s a lie) but this here’s an incredible photo of river life in Bagan, Myanmar.
In the details isolated below you can see what makes this place special. (click here)
There were a few kids splashing around just out of frame. This kid just made it into the picture, warped by the corner of the lens. I think, in the larger picture, you can see he’s checking out the lady on the rock, and she’s looking back.
Isn’t it beautiful how kids can turn anything into a toy? This little girl was playing with the bucket. I love how you can see her trail through the water.
There was a community that lived on the other side of the river and they took boats to get home. I WISH we had visited, but we didn’t. It appears that this guy is heading back home. There was a group of kids who ran a little ferry across the river (one of these same small canoes). Az and I paid them to take us up to the pagoda and back.
A lady washing in the river.
This girl is about to step into the river to bathe. I don’t know which they do first – bathe or launder their clothes. On the left you can see the clothes with a bucket and bar soap. I love that the pattern on her longhi (the sarong around her waist) matches the reflection in the water.
You would think this was a spectacular site right? Well, it is, but this is just one of 4,000 pagodas in this small area, and you kinda get used to it.
A little structure on the other side of the river, probably for waiting for the ferry or fishing or something. There are also two people on the shore to the left.
Mike stole a sandwich tonight and now he’s afraid the hotel won’t give us a wake-up call.
As we left Margit’s apartment this morning, she asked “What are the chances your flight will get canceled?”
We laughed and said it was about the same as any other day, so 99.9% unlikely.
Well, apparently there was a part “missing from our plane and they couldn’t find it”, so our flight was canceled and we were put up in a hotel. We were rerouted again through JFK with a 6 hour layover, getting us home at 10pm Sunday. Through the magical internet, I went online and found a more direct flight through Amsterdam that gets us in at noon on Sunday, so we called America to have it changed. I had to play the America is the best! card and the these Spanish people don’t fucking understand us! card, but we got it changed without issue. I felt bad about my conduct, but I took a bath.
Mike and I went down to our comped buffet dinner and sat with the superstars of the flight (three overly-made-up middle-aged Spanish women and a med student who we identified in the airport as being “a good talker.”) At the end of the meal, Mike asked if we could take some bread and cheese for breakfast, since our flight left before breakfast started. They said no. Mike decided to go rogue and grab some bread and salami for a breakfast sandwich anyway, but the woman reminded him that it was not for taking away. He waited until the woman had her back turned, then grabbed the sandwiches and ran.
Shelly (the good talker) and I sat there and wondered if he was coming back. He didn’t. About 15 minutes later, they told us the place was closing and we had to leave. Mike was sweating when we got back, afraid that he had been followed. He hadn’t. He called reception and asked for a wake-up call. When he got off, he said, I’m afraid they know about the sandwiches and won’t give us a wake-up call.
I suppose we are all allowed our own kinds of insanity. We have, after all, been rerouted four times already and should have been home two days ago.
We love to travel and learn. We like eating and sleeping and going on the internet and we can do all of those things from anywhere in the world. We are originally from Seattle, but no longer stay for the winters. We must leave and see new places and great ways to live. We enjoy living well and seeing how others live well.
This winter we traveled in Indonesia, Thailand Myanmar, France, Germany, Spain. We are currently home in Seattle, but Mike likes to think about things and blog about them.
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