It’s hard to believe, but we are into our last four weeks of school for this year. This means that (hopefully) I am also in my last four weeks as a 6th grade teacher. It had actually been pretty fun as they are an amazingly easy group of kids to work with, but I am ready to go back to only having one job.

On a random and unnecessary trip to the DIY store just for the sake of going for a drive in our car (which I love) and to justify said trip we bought some mosquito zappers recently. They look like small tennis rackets but have batteries which pass a small electric current into the mesh of the racket.

There are some real advantages to living in a developing country. Cocktails are cheap, tourists are few (or non-existent) and life is a a little less complicated for the most part. But every once in a while something crops up that just seems so absurd that you are reminded that every place on earth has its drawbacks.

As I write this, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is in it’s 11th day. I was shocked when the coup happened in Myanmar but nothing compares to the shock of a modern day war in Europe. The inability of any country or group of countries to intervene though does put into perspective Myanmar’s own plight.

Time seems to be really flying at the moment. I can’t believe the March will be here this week-I always used to think that March started the slippery slope into summer vacation and I guess that is still true. It’s a bit different here though, as March in London meant the very beginnings of some good weather and sunny days and here it is the start of the super hot season. 45 degree days are around the corner, although we have been enjoying such lovely and mild weather since we returned I can’t even complain. Our bougainvillea (above) seems to also be enjoying the temps.

One morning while we were in our quarantine hotel I got an ominous email from the head of school and the secondary principal saying that they “wanted to talk about the schedule” with me and would 1pm be a convenient time? I had an inkling that I knew what this conversation would entail, but I did try hard not to get “pre-pissy” (Gav’s word for when I get mad about something that has not happened yet).

We made it back to Yangon! On January 7th, Gav and I (and the rest of the people who had been living in Thailand) flew to Kuala Lumpur to meet the rest of the returning faculty for a charter flight back to Yangon. The logistics of this were a bit complicated as Malaysia has quite a complicated process (not unlike the Sandbox program that we entered Thailand on) to enter and stay, which obviously we were not doing. However, since the flight we had OUT of KL was a charter flight rather than a regularly scheduled commercial flight, it was not viewable to ground staff who would be checking us in at our point of origin.

Regular readers of this blog are probably thinking “wow, that’s a lot of blog posts coming at us in a short amount of time!” Well, it just so happens that I (Lindsey) have quite a lot of time on my hands at the moment. Let me take you back to last Saturday evening when the mayhem began…

Two days after Simon and Paula left we had another 3 day break from school. It seems like we are constantly having holidays, I know. The SE Asian calendar is kind of jammed with important holidays in the latter part of the year . Don’t worry, we pay for it when we have basically no break from January to late April and are just stewing in our own sweat in Yangon.

Well, it’s been a busy and eventful few weeks. It’s going to take a few blog posts to catch up… When we last left off Gav and I had just been on an unsuccessful trip to Bangkok to try to get our visas for Myanmar. While we were there, I exchanged a few (hundred) texts with Gav’s brother and sister in law, Simon and Paula.