Shonna pointed out to me that my social media posts made it sound like I haven’t been having a good time on my trip. While I may have made it seem that way, that absolutely wasn’t my intention nor is it true. But her bringing this to my attention made me think more about what I have been posting and how it may have come across.

Not all parts of traveling are rainbows and butterflies and sunshine. In fact, there’s some downright shitty parts of traveling. Literally. I even experienced shitting my pants on this trip. I never thought I’d share that with the general public, but there it is. It wasn’t pretty or fun, but it happened and I survived.

I may not have posted about me soiling myself in the Singapore airport, but I did complain about the heat and bug bites and probably a number of other things. I think traveling can sometimes be glorified as something exotic and magical because people ignore mentioning some of the everyday and rather unpleasant things that occur when you go to another foreign place. Or maybe because people mostly just don’t want to hear it. But it is real and it does happen.

On our last night together in Myanmar, Taylor and I watched the Anthony Boudain “Parts Unknown” episode about Yangon that was fascinating but also bothered me because he made everything look so easy. Things aren’t so simple when you’re exploring the unknown and not everything you eat is going to be amazing! the best ever! life changing! Some shit may make you sick. Or you may be uncomfortably packed into a crowded bus. Or you could get lost or have to spend 15 hours in transit. These things aren’t all so bad, but they’re all parts of what makes travel worth it but exhausting.

Posting about our travels is just one more way we like to glorify our own lives, but I want to try to always keep it real. I did have a wonderful trip, but I also did have some miserable moments as well. That’s just part of life though, right? What’s the ups without the downs?

Signing off from the Taiwan airport now – one more flight (of 3) left to go then I’m home sweet San Francisco!

The week has flown by with a whirlwind of craziness throughout Myanmar. Last week feels like the distant past, but now I fly home tomorrow…

On my first day in Yangon (last Tuesday), I took advantage of an early morning start and visited a pagoda near my hotel. I got chai from a tea room that was WAY too caffeinated before meeting my airport friends for lunch (at the restaurant that had been closed the night before – and ended up having AMAZING pot stickers) even though I was basically high and jittery after drinking the entire glass of tea. I tried to relax as much as possible while getting a foot massage but that was kind of difficult in my state. After that I walked down the street to meet my SF friend Rebecca’s aunt for dinner.

Rebecca put me in touch with her aunt, Ann, who has been living in Yangon for the past two years since her husband works for the US Embassy. She kindly invited us to dinner with her and her friends Tuesday evening, so when Taylor finally! arrived she met us all at the restaurant. The 6 of us ladies all had a great time laughing and drinking wine and eating delicious Burmese food. One of Ann’s friends, Ellen, a true New Yorker Jew, decided to come out with me and Tay after dinner to visit the Chinatown street market. We bought some cheap pants, ate some crickets, and hung out for a beer. It was really fun.

The next morning (Taylor’s first official day in Myanmar), we went to Shwedagon Pagoda, the most famous pagoda in Myanmar. It’s pretty big, and you have to go early morning time or else the floors get too hot and it’s hard to walk around. We now like to fondly refer to it now as Sweat-agon.

Taylor got her palms read, we walked a bit around the lake, had a blind foot massage (it was weird and not very good), got a drink at a rooftop hotel bar, and then had to catch our night bus to Bagan.

Night buses are officially the weirdest thing. I think I basically blacked out and couldn’t figure out what day it was after arriving in Bagan. I kept thinking we’d been there for a whole day but we actually arrived at 5AM. The experience itself wasn’t bad though – besides the fact that the movies they played were the worst American action films of all time (Maxtrix 1 and 2, R.I.P.D. with Ryan Reynolds – wtf even is that?!) In the bus station in Bagan we met these two lovely Italian fellows and had our taxi driver take us to a temple (no clue which one – there’s like 726353) to watch the sunrise. It was beautiful and we were basically alone at the top of the temple for an hour. We quickly became friends with ze Italians and made plans for later.

Bagan. Was. HOT. I’ve never experienced 107F before, and I really hope I don’t again for a long time. The heat really wipes you out, and we mostly couldn’t do anything besides spend time in the pool from 11-4PM, which wasn’t so bad. However, our A/C stopped working in the afternoon and we had to switch rooms. I felt high maintenance for half a second but then was thankful for not getting heatstroke.

We napped, met some people from a hostel nearby and got lunch and rented our e-bikes for later. In Myanmar, motorbikes aren’t as common (like they are in Vietnam) and foreigners aren’t allowed to rent them so they rent us electric ones instead. They’re absolute shit. For 5,000 kyat (about $5) you can have it for the whole day, but if it’s one like mine and Taylor’s the tire will pop and you’ll be stranded on the side of the road after sundown. True story.

After our Asian friends “fixed” our bike (aka shoving toilet paper where the tube on the flat tire flew out), we took a different bike back to town and finally sat down for some dinner. As we were eating I saw some of the hostel friends from Yangon walking by and invited them to come join us. We ended up playing quite a few rounds of Exploding Kittens (this has been a BIG hit our whole trip) and invited them to our pool the next day.

The next morning we were supposed to go to Mount Popa with the Italians, but I was exhausted and slept until 10:30 while Taylor went. I have no regrets; it was nice finally sleeping in one morning. I hung out at the pool with our friends for the afternoon then we met back up with the Italians and went around in a shared taxi to a bunch of temples before hopping on a boat to watch the sunset.

For some reason puppet shows are kind of a thing in Myanmar, and our hotel put on a free one every night and Taylor really wanted to see it. I was really craving pizza for some reason that night, and even though I love Asian food, I just needed one night of western food. It was wood fired and actually so tasty. We brought my pizza back and watched the VERY mediocre puppet performance before commencing some intense rounds of Exploding Kittens.

We paid a reasonably decent amount to stay at a “nice” hotel in Bagan, but the second day we were there the Wifi decided to completely stop working. It’s really common for the power to go in and out throughout Myanmar for no reason during the day, but we basically never had Wifi again during our stay in Bagan. It proved to be kind of difficult in terms of planning because we needed to coordinate meeting our host of the cooking class we were taking.

The last day in Bagan, we got to do a cooking class. Sidebar: if you ever need to get me a present for anything (hint, hint), cooking classes are the way to go. Anyways, we somehow managed to find May and go with her to a local “market.” This was the dodgiest market I’ve ever seen. The meat was appalling with flies everywhere, stray dogs licking up whatever they could find, and the vegetable selection was slim pickins. We did get some stuff though although I was quite skeptical.

May took us to a tea shop (just a local spot to get breakfast), where we had more Burmese tea (man, do they like it STRONG) and these donut things that basically changed my life. I thought the meal could only go downhill from there but I was totally wrong. We proceeded to make chicken curry, pumpkin curry, tofu with tomato and onion, tamarind leaf salad, and cucumber salad. She also served us soup, okra, and rice. It was amaaazing. So much good food. We had this weird sugar cane/rice noodle/tapioca thing for dessert that I couldn’t eat but besides that it was the best $20 and 4 hours I spent during my whole trip.

The last afternoon in Bagan I napped, hung at the pool with the Italians, and tried to teach them how to shuffle cards like a real pro and play the Sommer traditional game of SET. We had to part ways because our buds had to head to Inle Lake as we were going to take the bus to Kinpun (by way of Yangon). It was sad saying bye to them but now I have friends to go visit in Italy! Yay!

I’ll leave you with that to digest for awhile, but the epic adventure continued over the next few days. Now to enjoy my last few hours of Southeast Asia vacation!

Ciao!

Well, I’m in Yangon, Myanmar and Taylor… is not. She is currently in Bangkok due to a wee bit of issues with VietJet (and her ticket for the wrong day) sooo Tay didn’t make it on the same plane as me. Instead, she’ll be joining me in Yangon tomorrow evening, about 30 hours later than originally planned. Alas, such is travel. All part of the adventure.

I flew alone and slept most of the plane, but when I woke up, the girl next to me started chatting so I kind of just followed her and her group off the plane and into immigration. The whole visa situation seemed sort of confusing and the customs/stamping line for foreigners was SO LONG so my new friend John decided we should just wing it and go in the “Seamen” line. The immigration people totally didn’t care even though I was really nervous for some reason. Then I ended up going in a taxi with the group to our respective hotels/hostels. They were really nice and I told them I’d meet up with them later for dinner.

Technically, Taylor and I are couchsurfing in Yangon, although the woman I’m surfing with runs and lives at a hotel, so we’re just getting put up in a hotel for a couple nights – which is really nice. The host, Zin, is super friendly and has a few international helpers in the hotel so I spent some time talking to one of her friends who are also “surfing” here. Then I wandered out and walked around this big lake in the middle of the city before heading off to dinner with my new friends.
I met up with the two boys from the plane at a place one of them picked, but it was closed so we waited for the girl, Che, to show up but she ended up bringing her ENTIRE hostel in tow. I sort of rolled my eyes in my head because I hate being that obnoxious group of foreigners. But we settled on a place on the street to have noodles and after talking to a few of the people (there were about 12 in total), I decided they were actually really cool. Except this one girl who was piss-drunk and thought it would be cool to pee behind a dumpster. At 7:30PM. I feel too old for this shit (jk I’m 24, sorry Shonna). We finished dinner and got some really bad ice cream cones from a drug store (…everyone else got beer) and went back to their hostel while I said goodnight to everyone and walked home.

It seems like there’s a good amount of stuff to do and see in Yangon, so much so that I wish we had another day here after Taylor arrives. Not to mention I’m not “allowed” to see anything cool without her here! Not really, but I’m waiting because I’m a nice friend. While walking around the lake earlier, these 3 Burmese teenage girls stopped me and asked for a photo so I just assumed they wanted one of the 3 of them together… turns out they wanted one WITH me. And I was so sweaty and gross (it was like 100 degrees out, no joke). It was hilarious. They kept giggling at me and I jokingly told them to stop and that I was so ugly from sweat, but they called me beautiful for some reason, so you can guess that made my day.

 I’m excited to travel for a week with Tay in a place we both haven’t been yet. She is so comfortable in SE Asia now (or at least Vietnam), so it makes me feel more at ease knowing she’s around.

We had such a good time in her “home” of Can Tho, and our last night out there was truly epic. It started out with a goodbye party for Taylor, mostly with her students in attendance, and ended up at a Biergarten and jumping into a pool across the street. We really weren’t supposed to but it was so worth it.

I’m excited to see what Burma is all about in the next week and hope to write again soon. More to come!