Myanmar

Myanmar was just recently opened back to the world for travel, so it was a huge privilege to be able to port there. Our port was about an hour outside Yangon. My first day at port I had a field lab for my International Marketing class, our class got to go to the Shwedagon Pagoda and a night market. The Shwedagon Pagoda is  a 99 meters high gold pagoda over 2,600 years old. It is the most sacred Buddhist pagoda for the Burmese. It was so gorgeous and awe inspiring. We got to see the sun set right next to the Pagoda and I may or may not have done a head stand near a statue of Buddha.

Our next couple of days I stayed around Yangoon and walked around the city, there were large outdoor markets, endless street food, china town, black markets, crazy traffic, monks, and some of the kindest people. We ate specifically at one restaurant and talked to our waiter for hours. At one point my roommate Allie and I asked if the restaurant sold ice cream. He replied no and started looking over the railing to the street, then he then told us that he would run across the street and get some for us! We felt like we were talking him off a cliff trying to tell him not to go for us we really didn’t want it that bad. He was too sweet and made our experience that much better.

Our last day a couple of us took a taxi to Bago, which was about two hours away from Yangoon. We took a taxi, which ended up being $7 a person (pretty steep!!).  When we got there we went to a local restaurant and happened to run into a tour guide who offered to take us around for the day. So we got in a tutu and headed off. A tutu is a motorbike with a carriage attached to the back, really fun really bumpy. We went to the world’s largest reclining Buddha, the world’s tallest Pagoda, and watched the neck dance at the snake monastery. The snake monastery was un real, there was an 124 year old snake who was a reincarnated monk. The snake was disgustingly large and it had just eaten 42 kilograms of chicken three days ago and was napping…yikes. The second I saw it breathing I was out of that hut as fast as possible. We then saw snake dancing which happens once a year for three days. There are 37 songs and at the beginning of each song the snake takes over the mind of two villagers and they dance. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. On our bus ride back to the ship they bus was playing Titanic, of ALL the movies they play Titanic as we are driving back to a massive ship! Myanmar was like nothing I had ever experienced before, I would love to go back one day and see the progress they make and new technology they adopt.