Our school was on holiday this past week so we had no work, yay! In non-Covid times we would try to fly somewhere fun for the time off, but obviously that’s not happening, plus we happen to be in a pretty popular vacation spot so we decided to stay put and do a few things we had been meaning to do around Phuket.

We’ve been here in Thailand for a month now and have settled into our more permanent accommodation. Way back in August when this whole adventure kicked off, I was under the impression that in order to get our Thai visas we had to let the government know where we would be staying the whole time. I am now not sure that you actually have to do that but anyway it kicked off a mad search to see if we could find someplace that would rent to us for more than a month but less than a year. Airbnb seemed to have lots of medium-term rentals that looked good so we put together a short list from what we could see and eventually picked one house that looked great. It had zero reviews, but that was true of most places on there-I think the pandemic changed how people were renting properties here and new management companies snapped up places and started listing them on that platform.

Today is our 14th and final day in what is called the Phuket Sandbox-basically a program that allows fully vaccinated travelers from a wide range of countries to to serve their “quarantine” in a very liberal way. If you enter Thailand through Bangkok, it is straight to a hotel for 10 (expensive) nights of isolation. But if you are willing to jump through a few more hoops, you can qualify for this much more enjoyable form of quarantine. I say “a few hoops” but we did have a few stressful days right before we left London when our hotel was changed last minute (you have to stay at a special kind of hotel with extra certification and a lot of hotels lost that certification right before we came). When your hotel changes, your traveler ID number changes which effectively renders all the paperwork you have done and gotten cleared by the embassy void and you have to re-submit. Except there is no way to do this in the online system, so you have to call the embassy and get them to reject your already accepted application so you can fix your ID number. I do not know if you have ever had the pleasure of trying to phone up and embassy, but I do not recommend. At one point we got through, were told we were number 6 in the queue and then listened to the phone ring for an hour and 40 minutes before we hung up. Eventually we got through with email. We’re here so obviously it worked out in the end but I could have done without that last minute shenanigans.

Well, there has been a lot going on in our world, just not on our blog! We kept thinking “when things settle down and we know what is happening we will update.” Turns out, if we waited for that we would never post again, so I am just going to post what is happening right now and we can update as time marches on.

Way back in March, we were in Yangon dealing with the ongoing tensions due to the coup on February 1st. As foreigners, we never felt unsafe and largely our life was affected in trivial ways (cash was increasingly difficult to come by, mobile data was shut off, the internet was usually off from about midnight to 9am) but really (unlike for our Myanmar colleagues) things were only inconvenient for us. It was kind of like being back in 1995-hail a cab with your hand instead of an app and make sure you organize with your friends ahead of time where and when to meet as you couldn’t text! Obviously this was not true for our Myanmar friends and actually it is hard to convey how much grief people were feeling. It seemed (and still seems) rude and inappropriate to post on social media about anything when the people around you are watching their world be altered so completely.

These are strange times and are getter stranger by the minute. Yet, at the same time they also getting less strange as we reach yet another new normal. I think I may have mentioned somewhere the euphoria we have experienced when doing something that used to be normal and everyday. The first time we went out for dinner, after maybe 5 months, we felt this sense of euphoria and looking round you could tell other people were feeling it too. At the moment we’ll take anything that gives us a boost and one certainly learns to appreciate small triumphs.

It has been an….interesting few weeks here in Yangon. That’s all I can say about that, but we are fine and the Myanmar people remain as positive and friendly as they have ever been. Why, just this morning while on our dog walk a lady stopped me and told me “you are strong and beauty!” I am 80% sure that lady was drunk, but hey I will take a compliment!

Every year in January Yangon holds a big running event around the city. They offer a full & a half marathon, a 10K, 5K and a kiddie fun run. I ran it the last two years and it is a fun and well run event. It is also a very amusing event as it seems that almost no one trains for it, people are eating KFC in the starting corral, and at least 10% of the racers choose to run in flip flops but it is really wonderful to see so many people out getting exercise or cheering the runners from the side of the street.

“Lousy, but different” as my Muppet friends Waldorf and Statler would say. That just about sums up 2020. Here we are on New Year’s Eve, waiting for a do-over in 2021. I’m not sure much will be different really, at least for a while, but there is a psychological relief to putting this year behind us.

We made it to our December break. No one is feeling very jolly though, as we are still not able to travel. There was a government announcement a week ago that formally opened up the ability to travel within the country as of December 16th. However, the rules are so complicated and vague that it is rendering travel basically impossible. To get on an internal flight you have to have a negative covid test no more than 36 hours old. This is theoretically ok if you are in Yangon as there is a testing solely for people who have no symptoms and it seems like everything works ok but you do have to get there early and stand in line outside for hours. But what happens when you want to get on the flight to come home?

We are currently on Thanksgiving break, our very last official Thanksgiving break for a while! From next year we will be getting a break in last November, but it will coincide with a full moon holiday here in Myanmar which may or may not match up with Thanksgiving. This makes much more sense as our school only has about 15% of its population celebrating Thanksgiving, so it’s much nicer and more culturally relevant to observe the national holiday.