Quarter Year

He kept begging, so the shopkeeper stormed from his doorway and grabbed the old man violently by the arm. He pulled him away from us, then shoved him down the street in front of a number of people who were now watching the scene from other shops. We walked on.

Before the trip I brushed up on the five pillars of Islam, and something jumped out at me that now came to mind in this situation – travelers are given a special place in Islam. In the pillars regarding Ramadan, all travelers (including Muslim travelers) are exempt from fasting, as are pregnant women and the sick. In the pillar stating that a Muslim must give alms to the poor, travelers are considered appropriate recipients as well. So, when that old man asked us for money, it was the opposite of a Muslim act, and the reaction was swift.

This is an incredibly welcoming country. If you ask for directions they might grab you by the elbow and walk you there. People strike up conversations with us all the time, friendly and curious. A woman on the train sat down with us a few times over the course of the ride, holding Aviva’s hand and stroking her face. No language in common, but they talked for 10 minutes at a time or just sat and smiled. Another man sat with us for an hour and practiced his English and tried to teach us Turkish.

We’re invited for tea all the time. I’ve never been in a place that’s so purely generous, I have not suspected once that we were going to be asked to buy something, which is the unfortunate goal of “generosity” in many other places around the world. I’ve heard of places where someone might invite you to stay in their home and it would be offensive to offer them money for it. I could never really imagine what that would be like, but now I understand. It’s pure, it’s giving, it’s good.

I think we’re being looked after. I think when we walk down the street, people feel responsible to make sure we’re safe. It’s a pretty amazing feeling.

Sometimes we hold hands. (photo by Jessica)

We visited our friends Jessica and Jamie for five days in Vienna, celebrated New Years by melting lead medallions and seeing our futures in the re-solidified shapes they made in cold water, eating fondue and doing kissy face in the central square with thousands of other drunk people.

Thoughtful embrace outside some big church. (photo by Jessica)

We drove around the Austrian countryside, had some goulash, held hands in cute towns, ate lunch at the central market while showing off handerpants, and thoughtfully embraced outside a beautiful church.

Handerpants run the show in this relationship. (photo by Jessica)

Then we headed west to our favorite place, France, the country. We rented a refurbished farmhouse for a week, went on drives around the fields, made ratatouille, sat by the fire, read books, watched a movie about a man who buys an otter, planned our life in a tiny valley, got menu de jour in Bussy le Grand, went to the source of the Seine (I washed my face in it, Mike sent his pee to Paris — in that order.) We walked and talked and mike took spooky photos of me in the fog near the cemetery, of course.

This falls into the category of romantic-creepy date night activities.

After, we visited some new friends near Laussane, Switzerland and discovered the views there rivaled the Mediterranean, and had I kept the photos with me, they would be posted here. I’ll just tell you, steep terraced hills overlooking Lake Geneva with the Alps rising up behind the lake. From there, we drove down along the French Alps to the Cannes, a city on the sea. We ate more plat de jour, pranced in the fields and set up some night shots.

We walked the promenade in the sun on Sunday, went to our favorite lunch place just across the border of Italy and hiked into the hills before the giant meal. Mike got drunk and I got drunk and we napped in the sun on the walk back down, overlooking the valley. We drove around some more, took some more photos and pic-niced on the beach.

Mike got drunk! How could you not with all that wine?

MMMMMMMMMMM

Eating outside in January is a luxury by Seattlite standard. A view of a terraced Italian valley is a luxury by any standard.

It’s hard to not be happy thinking about those weeks, but it’s also hard to blog about a virtual honeymoon. We didn’t do anything important or learn any skills and often times I think that these times aren’t valid, but I suppose in the spirit of 2011 (motto: “be who you are”) it deserves a place here on the blog.

PS this will be backlogged in a week to its rightful place around 1/10/11

For a country that you can drive across in a day, I was shocked at the amount of open space that seemed to belong only to cows and sheep and mostly to arid tumbleweed and rocky soil.

We found our way west until the sun set and stopped for the night at an old border town, which the guidebook described as an old frontier town. Excited by the idea of the wild west, we pulled in, but found an ancient fortified city with a cute old town inside a still standing wall. In the main square, we found the cutest hotel and were able to walk to dinner across the plaza overlooking the center.

This morning, we crossed the border to Portugal around noon and took the side roads through the interior. We were greeted by the presence of many sheep and changing rock walls. The walls I am used to in France and Italy use small rocks and are tightly fitted together. The walls as you get farther west in Spain and more so as you get into Portugal, use larger rocks, with spaces large enough for light to fit through.

The interior hills of Portugal were some of the most dramatic landscape that I have ever seen humans inhabit. Olive trees went unharvested as they sat high on 100 foot drop-offs, but most of the steep slopes were drastically terraced and farmed, though the soil was rocky and dry.

The word I think of is “hardship” as we cross these countries. When you stay clear of bigger cities, it seems that life has remained mostly unchanged. We saw multiple donkey pulled carriages and once saw an image that I remember from the old Corsican photos of a woman in a headscarf leading a donkey with a man riding in the cart (no photo because I’m a wuss.)

Tomorrow we head north to Galicia, which is the part of Spain to the north of Portugal, where it is said that “the women work the land and the men work the sea.”

From the rice paddies of Bali and the temples of Bagan and the high dive in Chiang Mai and the olive farm in Coaraze and the woods on the grounds of the chateau, I learned that peace is in the present.

From Riana’s family I learned to look harder at what we have in our pantries, in our garden and growing in the neighborhood before I decide to go buy something. I learned to plan meals based on what we have, not just what we want.

From the slums of Bangkok and the deep roads in Bali and just going to Myanmar I learned that fear is not a valid reason to not do something. In fact, fear is a symptom of some falsehood I’ve been programmed to believe.

From the slums of Bangkok and the streets of Yangon I learned that smiling at strangers is a form of peace-making, and from the busy streets of Nice, France, I learned how alienating it is when someone looks at you then quickly looks away or just keeps their head down and walks without looking at anyone. After seeing how people acted in Myanmar it seemed like everyone in Nice had some kind of social illness.

From the fundamentalist Catholic family I learned that you can still make a powerful emotional connection with people on the other side of the social/political spectrum if you are generous with your attention, if you listen in order to understand them and forget about the intention of talking about yourself. Identity is an addiction.

From Ko Lanta I learned it’s harder to find your way onto a squid-fishing boat than you would think.

From the tribal hilltowns in Bali to the intentionally-designed rustic life of the Catholic back-to-the-landers, I learned that lifestyles I’d thought were lost are actually accessible, here, now, under our noses; they’re simply different versions of our own lives.

From the volcano and the airport delays and from Against the Stream by Noah Levine, I learned that anger is a choice. It’s an ember that we want to throw, but picking it up will mean burning ourselves first. Best to leave it alone.

From Riana and the fundamentalist Catholic family and Claude and Margarite I learned that eating is a political act and gardening can be revolutionary.

From our hosts in Jakarta I learned that workers need to earn a wage that gives them the opportunity to improve their life, if they so choose.

From Riana’s family I learned that it’s easy to be generous if you believe in abundance.

And from all of it I learned that I still love traveling, it’s still the best thing I can do for myself.

Quick note: Those on the RSS feed might have seen a post about the favela tour. I was re-uploading that post and accidentally broadcasted it. Sorry!

Earlier in the night we crossed railroad tracks and someone waved me into the buddhist temple, Azure and I stalled at the door. A young monk walked up behind us and encouraged us to go in – he spoke really quickly, and not really in English, but in English. He kept repeating the same words: Pagoda, Buddha, and so on, to the point I couldn’t understand him hardly at all. He took us in to the major sanctuary and we prayed to three images of Buddhas – one of which was an American. I meditated for about three minutes and it felt great. The monk (from Calcutta) told me to make a wish, so I wished for the happiness of everyone around us in the temple. I think that was a good, manageable wish.

Closer to the images, Calcutta monk prayed out loud – he chanted quickly in an unevenly dropping tone, some kind of human noises I’d never heard, like a creative bird’s call or a controlled, rhythmic sigh. It sounded like a few people had choreographed the chant, but it was just him. The power cut out and his prayers continued to run, the thread that connected the darkness to the light. The lights flickered back on and he kept praying.

When we were all finished I donated $1 to the box in front of the image of the American Buddha.

Calcutta monk took us outside sanctuary (still in the temple) and brought out a book (which he carried on him regularly, I guess) that had monthly calendars going back to 1900. I found out I was born on a Saturday. Azure was born on a Tuesday. We walked around the pagoda and found the Saturday Buddha image and poured water on him nine times (good luck for each of our family members) then five times on the dragon underneath, and I’m not sure why. He took us to another Buddha room that had Buddha’s footprint. This whole time he was talking about things I wasn’t really following. He did say that they meditated from 4am to 7am, then collected alms at 8am. They then meditated for three more hours in the evening, which I think is when we met him.

The monk was gaunt – he seemed to eat almost nothing. He even said that he was weak. His teeth were bad and he looked years older than me, though he was only 28. At 18 he became a monk and left Calcutta for Yangon. Here in the monastery, they speak Sanskrit, and apparently he speaks Pali (what the Buddha spoke, maybe Nepalese?) and he says he speaks English. He said that he does not speak Burmese, which is strange considering he’s lived here 10 years. The monks study English, I guess, but it didn’t show: they were incomprehensible a lot of the time. A Bhutanese monk (we later met) giggled the whole time and spoke in such a weird cadence I’ve never heard before. Another Burmese monk spoke bad English as well.

He invited us back to the monks’ living quarters, which we were pumped to see. As we walked out of the temple something strange happened: a man in plain clothes started yelling at the monk, kinda challenging him. Calcutta monk kept walking and from behind we saw him raise a fist and throw it down to the ground, as if he were grabbing whatever anger he had and casting it off. After 10 years I’d expect him to be able to let that pass, but maybe not. There were several things that the monks did that I was surprised about, considering my understanding of the practice. For instance, Calcutta monk was showing us around as if we were his pets (ego) and was jealous when we talked to other monks. Also, he told us that certain things would be good luck, for ourselves, people we loved, our businesses, and so on. And my thought was, “Why the focus on self-serving things like business?” I guess there are people in all religions – young people – who are looking for something and latch onto religion. I think almost all the monks we met tonight might have been like that – just latching onto the practice for the sake of having something. I mean, that’s harsh of me to write, but I saw little evidence of their wisdom. The monks rattled off different Buddhas, different pagodas, they talked about a reverence for their teacher, but it was all kinda shallow stuff.

Calcutta monk took us to see his teacher, who, it turns out, was one of the leaders of the 2007 revolt. He didn’t speak any English (in fact the monks spoke less English than most people we met in Myanmar) so we just smiled and did some ritualistic stuff. Since I was dressed in my sarong thing I knew we’d attracted attention outside, and I could just imagine – as the monks rattled on – plain clothes policemen congregating outside the monastery waiting for us to come out. I’m pretty sure we weren’t followed, though. The teacher gave us each some laminated cards with pictures of Buddha that will make nice bookmarks.

The coolest part of the evening was when Calcutta monk led us into his room – the dormitory where the monks all lived together as in a fraternity. The part they lived in was a wooden addition to the concrete building – something like the wooden house we saw at Sam’s on Lanta. It was a wide porch with wooden boards and walls. We entered his room (after he knocked and told his roommates there was an American girl with him) and sat on the floor. His two friends (Bhutan and Myanmar) sat in front of us with him while people came and huddled behind us to watch the show. They were all interested to see the foreigners sitting in here. Calcutta monk brought out his English phrase book and showed us how he studied, but it was futile, even when I saw the words he was saying I hardly understood him. He was a nice enough guy – good intentions I guess – but just strange.

We sat and went over the same information over and over again. There was some nice music outside, sounded like a Burmese version of swing music or jazz. I read before we came that the Burmese can talk for an hour and not say anything, and this was definitely a night where that happened again and again. The Bhutanese monk smiled and giggled a little nervously. The Burmese monk (who theoretically spoke the best English) talked with Azure as she struggled to understand.

It was very peaceful on their little porch – just evening time in a monastery. Everyone was relaxed. In the little room were some posters of famous monks (who are revered for their messages, as we would have a poster of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in our room). There were a couple hammocks that double as beds. There were woven mats on the ground, used as sitting surfaces or beds, as well. I don’t remember seeing any candles, but I gotta think they were there.

It was a fascinating night – we got to see how the monks lived, we walked down an intense market street at night and down the train tracks, we meditated as the lights went on and off in an enormous temple, we looked at the stars in the middle of a huge city.

As we walked home (we kinda had to force our way out of there) I imagined being in the middle of millions of people with the lights off, as people lived hundreds of years ago, on an obscure sea. A movie theater let out and the air-conditioned air spilled into the alley. We walked down a very dark stretch and felt completely safe. We walked down an alley with dozens of other people with colonial buildings rising on each side. People smiled at us. The boy who made us some sugar cane juice earlier in the day was still making it as we got back to the hotel, eight hours later. The stars were bright above Sule Pagoda, even in the heart of the city.

The system is a grid with about five main streets running East-West, then about 60 side streets running North-South. On all the streets there is a wide, frustratingly bumpy sidewalk upon which the world sits, chats, eats, cooks, sells, buys and so on. It’s tiring to walk because you have to watch your step, then look up and make sure you’re not walking into a grill, then maybe sidestep a person or hop down on the road to avoid something. Very tiring.

The cars stick almost exclusively to the main streets and they drive like bats out of hell. Imagine that driving down Montlake you discover that 1) 80% of the cars had disappeared and stop lights don’t really matter and 2) there are no traffic cops. Even careful citizens might push 90. Azure and I had a couple scares where it was evident that, no, really, they would hit a pedestrian without slowing down. Noted.

On the side streets, though, there are so few cars that it can be quiet in the middle of the day in the heart of the urban center. You can hear birds flapping their wings. Footsteps might echo between the high buildings. Kids play soccer in the street, people walk down the middle. At dusk, young men run a net across the street to play that foot-volleyball game, taking down one side if a car does come through.

When I first noticed this phenomenon of having fewer cars on the road (and even car-free zones), I wrote in my journal, “This is good for all the reasons that are so obvious that I don’t even need to write it.”

But then I started noticing all the other reasons that people don’t mention in the usual diatribes against cars:

Little people under trees.

Space
First, without cars my concept of the space was scaled down to human size, speed and volume. The city became human-centric, which is really the way a city should be. People walked anywhere safely, they called down the street to each other, they kinda lived out doors. Being outside in the city wasn’t unpleasant, which was kinda a revelation.

In most cities, people are pinned between cars and buildings. People are diminished by cars, they have to give up right of way, even if the law doesn’t say so. They have to, otherwise they’d be killed. Cars are the fastest, biggest, loudest and most dangerous things that are in our physical space. Cars dominate people, period. I hadn’t seen it this way before – I’d always thought, “I need to make sure I don’t get hit by a truck.” I didn’t even question whether a truck should be allowed to dominate human space.

Incense on a tree

Focus
Secondly, the attention of life refocuses on interacting with people. Walking down the street I looked forward to passing someone, to smelling what they were cooking, to kicking the ball away from the kids.

In most cities, yielding to cars tacitly legitimizes the purpose of those cars… cars or trucks will kill many people a year. Why are these bullies even allowed in our space? Commerce. So commerce is important enough to allow people to be penned onto sidewalks. This isn’t overt, it’s subconscious. I’m sure every one of us is thinking, “Yeah, of course I have to let a truck come down my street – they need to do business, after all,” and in the process we give value to conducting business even if it creates a space that’s not conducive to natural social living.

Penned-in.

Movement
Third, humans naturally move in patterns that don’t have anything to do with the patterns of roads. On the side streets in Yangon, people walked down the center of the road. They crossed at a diagonal because there was no rush. Someone might drift a couple feet off the side walk and stop to talk to someone there in the middle of the right lane. Kids played wherever – their ball hitting a wall, bouncing across the street, hitting the other wall.

Before this trip I hadn’t understood that, just because I might be killed, my movements in most urban spaces are completely unnatural.

Presence
Finally, on carless, human-sized street, it’s a lot easier to be mentally present. When we host dinner parties, Azure will often make two rules: 1) Leave your cell phone at the door and 2) don’t make any other plans for later that night. If you can’t follow both these rules, don’t come. The reason she makes these rules is that the experience is so much better if people are thinking about what’s going on here, in front of them, being present.

I found that taking away cars had the same effect.

We walk down the street at a human pace – the bubble of space that we’re conscious of is pretty consistent, about 20 feet in either direction. People see us coming and going, they anticipate us stopping, they anticipate smiling at us. We see food, we smell it, we stop. This is the rhythm of being in one place and moving at human speed.

Cars imply ELSEWHERE. They move so fast that they symbolize coming from somewhere else, going to somewhere else. We sit in one spot at human-scale but they’re engaged in some other activity that has nothing to do us. A passing car implies an origin and a destination, neither of which are HERE. It DIMINISHES the present.

And because they’re the fastest, biggest, loudest and most dangerous things in our physical space, they DISTRACT from the present and demand our attention, even if it’s as slight as changing how we walk.

And why do we sacrifice our space, focus, movement and presence? For ease of commerce. These are four aspects of being human that are tough to measure but have an impact on our mental health. They’re the things I recognized in the Rio favela when I thought, “This neighborhood is different and I can’t figure out why. How is it that I’m envious of the way people are living in a slum? There’s something natural about this life.” It was human-centric space.

First off, in May 2008 Cyclone Nagaris swept through and killed 138,000 people in region. (pause for effect). The government wouldn’t let relief in before it was far too late, and disease spread in ways we haven’t ever seen before (except during the 2005 tsunami aftermath) or since (except during the 2010 Haitian earthquake aftermath).

The second reason the city feels small is that in 2005 the dictatorial government started construction on a new capital city and relocated all employees, and necessary services, by force. So all of a sudden, 925,000 people were removed from their lives and told to start over in a development that looks sickeningly like the Issaquah Highlands. Our bus drove smack through the middle of this manicured new capital – about 4 hours north of Yangon – so I can report on it firsthand, through a bus window.

There are perfectly manicured roads for homes that don’t exist. The homes themselves look like suburban American homes. At dusk one night, hundreds of people were walking miles from one construction site back to somewhere, wherever the hell they lived, because there are almost no cars in the country (more on that later). As these people walked, they didn’t walk past any food stalls or stores, just curbs. Most importantly, the new city feels STERILE. In order to understand why this is so different to an unluckily relocated Myanmar resident, you need to compare three ways of life:

First, a picture of the streets of Yangon. Take this in:

Life lived on the streets as in most major urban areas. Next, a picture of village life (this one from Bagan):

Immediately an hour outside of Yangon the living situation goes from urban poor to rural. I’m not talking about American rural where people wear ugly jeans and live in quiet but clean homes, but ancient rural like using a caravan of oxen to pull your carts up a river. Huts made of whatever natural materials (palm fronds, etc) are around. Farming for your food. I can’t imagine the people in these small villages have much commerce because they don’t seem to have many possessions. The above photo is taken from the center of a very large village in a tourist town, so even this area is more developed.

Anyway, point is that these are two of the common ways of life for a Myanmar person: Yangon urban living and ancient rural. Which brings me to the new capitol. Here is a picture of the Issaquah Highlands which, I swear to god, is exactly how the streets of the new capitol look:

(photo courtesy of Jeff Youngstrom’s Flickr page)

It makes me hyperventilate.

I guess what I’m trying to show with these pictures is the cruelty of the government not only in moving so many people without their permission, but moving them from a rich civic space to a bleached suburban space. In Yangon’s urban center, people don’t seem to buy their food in grocery stores, they buy them from ladies selling produce on the sidewalks. If you can afford to eat out, the food vendors are on every street corner and up and down the side walks. Kids play in the streets, people chat on the sidewalks, that’s where life is lived. The streets of the newly constructed capitol were manicured, clean and deserted.

Finally, in an effort to clean up the city center, the government forcibly relocated 15% of the urban population, all squatters to a township outside the city center, I guess. I don’t know much about this.

Anyway, the reason that it feels like Yangon’s population doesn’t fill its urban space is that it can’t – people have been moved by force. In this way, it feels post-apocalyptic in the urban center, with most buildings falling into disrepair as the tropical climate starts to take them back.

I LOVED this feeling: life is being sucked out of the buildings and back onto the streets. I can only hope that’s how our apocalypse goes.

When I first wore it out of the hotel room I was nervous, like I was taking a risk that I’d be stared at while walking down the street. I was one of the only Westerners wearing this get-up, and people would definitely notice the difference. I expected that locals would look at me and think I was stupid or trying too hard or whatever. A poser. Which isn’t that big a deal, I could cope with that, though it would be a disappointing reaction for a place that’s otherwise full of extremely kind people.

Of course the cynicism was not at all what happened. What happened is that I got a lot of thumbs-ups from delighted locals and those who could say it would smile and say, “That looks good! Very handsome!” For the most part, though, people did what they did before: they glanced at us and didn’t take much notice. It feels good when that happens.

Other Westerners, for the most part, DID look at me in the way I feared: “Who’s this poser?”

I don’t know if it’s personal or cultural, but this experience revealed the cynicism about standing out – that someone going outside the norm should first be mocked, then admired if closer inspection warrants. I think I’m a cynical person, and if someone, say, wore a cowboy hat in Seattle I’d react negatively about it even though I logically know it’s ok.

I guess the fear of standing out is the potential negativity, the judgment that I’m a person pretending to be something I’m not. But I’m sad to see young men wearing jeans and t-shirts. Others cultures have thrown away their own traditional dress, though it endures even here in a major city, the only major city in SEA where this is the case. I don’t think I can contribute to the preservation, but I can make a quiet statement (if anyone even cares) that what they have is beautiful, it’s enough for me, and I like it. Jeans are boring and ubiquitous. Why sellout your traditions for the symbols of Western consumerism? Why be the same as everyone else?

I called over the manager – a 30-year-old heavy-set man – to ask him about the boys. I could imagine him being intimidating to kids (big dude, lazy eye), but the boys stood tall when he approached, so it didn’t seem they were afraid of him or had ever been hit or anything. I started my questions carefully, “Why do the boys all work at this shop and not another shop?”

He said they have scouts in Bagan who find poor, uneducated families and want their poor, uneducated kids to work. So the restaurant takes the boys off their hands and brings them to Yangon. They promise to provide the kids valuable experience in the restaurant industry, considering tea shops are very popular in Myanmar. Tea shop workers can make good money, though not as much as educated people. (Educated people earn between 40,000 and 100,000 Kyat a month – around $40 and $100. I’m sure the kids at the tea shop are making way way less. $10 a month to sleep in the restaurant and probably work full days.) He says, “of course” most kids send money home – that’s the point – but a few waste it on sweets or games or whatever.

When you start talking about scouts in another part of the country sending children to work in the cities, it begins to sound very child-slavery-like. As Westerners we’re confident in our stance against child labor, so much so that we imagine it to be a universally held belief. But the manager told us all this stuff matter-of-factly, openly, with no concept that it might be a controversial practice.

When we left, Azure and I talked about how im-fucking-possible it is to pass judgment on this specific business because we just don’t know enough. Maybe the work will keep the boys from prostitution or drug use or crime. We don’t know. We wondered if the line about giving the kids experience in a reliable professional field was actually true.

What we can say with confidence are two things: First, the most pressing need is education, and that falls at the feet of the government. We suspect, however, that the Myanmar government intentionally makes people’s lives difficult so they don’t have the tools or energy to revolt.

Secondly, we can invoke the rule of labor we learned in Indonesia: If the job gives the worker the opportunity to BETTER THEIR LIFE, then the system is justifiable. If not, then the system has to change. Of course, the minimum wage is so low even in the US that people don’t have opportunity to improve their lives here.

Azure and I aren’t opposed to kids working in general, but with some major restrictions: It should be a family business, they need to be there by choice and the work needs to not interfere with some kind of more formal education.

Kids were working all over the country – selling things to tourists, selling things to locals, making and selling food, cleaning, serving, moving heavy stuff and so on. We saw kids working in Indonesia, I saw kids working in India years ago as well. It’s a fact of life in the Third World and to ban it outright without thinking of the consequences could be devastating for the families. To me child labor is not the problem itself, but the symptom of a disorganized (or worse, sabotage-minded) government.