Mandalay impressions

An woman whose ancestry is Indian addressing a monk as "Babu"
Billboards with pretty Asian girls advertising every thing from car batteries to gem stones, or vitamin drinks. Western women with glossy tresses promoting hair products.
Monks on alms walks at all times of the day.
Large water tanks (4x6) on nearly every block where people bathe in their longhi, do the wash, wash hair, shave with tiny mirrors. Its the village pump!
Men and women in longhi (sarongs) everywhere. Women riding side saddle on bikes and motor scooters.
A flatbed truck with enormous speakers heading a parade of jeeps and trucks taking pink clad youngsters to monastery to become novices-both boys and girls.
Papa washing baby bottom with a dipper of water while Mom suspends junior over the open sewer.
Dust, haze, smog from individual trash burning heaps around the city and Chinese built trucks that resemble tractor engines open to the elements spewing black smoke and of course scooters.
Spotty electricity and Internet.
5am call to Muslim prayer and Cathedral bells calling to mass and Buddhist chanting from the neighborhood temple.
EVERYONE, except children with stained teeth from plugs of beetle-sold in 10 packs like cigarettes.
Japanese cars with left hand drive, driving on the right!!
Derelect buildings started and abandoned.
Scooter taxis willing to give me a ride to a remote teak pagoda, wait two hours and return me to my dump of a hotel for $2.50!
A monk at the monastery which began the 2007 protests offering to show me around his school, climbing to the 6th floor stupa domed class building to point out the sites.
Peaceful cool lake spoiled by trash filled shoreline and slimy green algae bloom.
Pagoda complexes with hundreds of Buddha statues, each donated by the faithful to make merit for their next life or amends for this or another?
Dust greying all vegetation. It is the middle of the dry season.
Everyone driving with horns blasting.
Watermelon for breakfast.
Morning and evening shop keepers sweeping their space clear and piling debris at the curb. To be burned? Picked up? Ignored?
Pagodas packed with devotees offering flowers, food&drink, listening to lectures and chanting prayers daily.
Dingy grim museum with signs in English, missing artifacts, government run charging $5 US.
Jeep driver with 5' tall flower offering strapped to the hood, leaning out the side in order to see.
Grilled pork, okra, quail or quail eggs chosen personally from the cooler and cooked to order with a short Myanmar beer on tap.
Shared minivan to Pyin U Lwin, with students off on summer holiday. Chinese student in the front conversing with the driver in Chinese. Indian other and daughter 3rd generation in the back. Gratefully using the toll road which has unidirectional lanes climbing the hairpin curves up the Shan Hills. Up and out of the hot plain hopefully to cooler clime.
-On the road with Kathryn

Location:Mandalay