I will be very interested to see what the percentage of people voting is in this election. This will be our fourth US election as a married couple. To my recollection none of the other elections have come with so much discussion over the actual process of voting. The hoops that Americans who live in Myanmar are jumping through to actually vote are both insane and varied.
Continue reading “Election, Fever”
With the lockdown still on in Yangon, the most exciting thing that has happened to us recently is tricking the local Mexican restaurant into making us margaritas, see above! We had heard from a friend that the Japanese restaurant around the corner from us will serve you a beer at their outside tables while you wait for your takeaway order to be prepared. The idea of drinking a beer anywhere but in your own driveway seemed very exotic in these boring times, and sure enough Thursday night when finishing up our dog walk we ran into that friend enjoying a frosty Myanmar outside the restaurant.
Continue reading “The Sleep Machine”
On Wednesday we got the not unexpected news that our 2 week lockdown has now been extended to October 21st. It doesn’t change much about our daily lives except that we are working from home a bit more and there seem to be fewer cars on the roads as the government has mandated that almost everyone (including most factory workers) need to work from home.
Continue reading “Entertainment”
We are three weeks away from the first holiday of the year which is a week in October. In our first year we had a wonderful time in Angkor Wat in Cambodia and last year we went on another great trip to Laos where we saw gibbons and had a relaxing cruise down the Mekong. This year, because of Covid, we could only plan a local beach holiday which, even though we’re not really beach people, I was still really looking forward to as we haven’t been to the beach yet and they are supposed to be lovely.
Continue reading “The Travel Blog with no Travel”
On Friday we got notice from the US Embassy that the local government was going to be cracking down on the lockdown more severely. It urged us to only leave the house for necessary errands and our school sent a notice that we should stop coming onto campus of at all possible. Gav and I had been going into school every day as it is much easier to get work done there, at least for my job as I can go and physically help anyone who is having tech problems.
Continue reading “Lockdown Land”
Well we finally have the blog working again. Something about the new WordPress system made it impossible for us to save posts, but now Gav has sorted it out we think. Thanks Gav!
Continue reading “Back to School”
Whoops, it’s been a while. We ended the school year back in June, but it was the biggest “whomp whomp” ending to a year ever. Not only was it strange that there were no kids on the last day, at least half our faculty were gone as well. Our end of year “party” did take place physically at school, but we were required to wear masks and about 80% of the teachers chose to Zoom in. I did ask the director how I was supposed to drink my beer with my mask on. I did not get an answer. Continue reading “Radio Silence”
…you could be working in the construction industry in Myanmar. On May 3rd, a Sunday and the day before we got Mabel, the house directly behind us started getting torn down. Houses are built right up to the edge of the land here so this house is about 3 feet away from ours. At first they started removing the tiles from the roof and then wooden beams etc. We then started seeing them hammering away at the floor they were literally standing on with sledge hammers.
Once upon a time there was a crazy couple who got way too emotionally involved with a street dog. They walked to the street corner where she lived twice a day to feed her, gave her medicine and (the kiss of death) gave her a name. All was well and everyone was enjoying the relationship until one evening as the crazy couple were feeding the sweet little street dog, a car sped around the corner and hit the dog. Continue reading “A Mabel Fable”
I hope you have seen the brilliant parody some guy has done of Adele’s Hello. Even though we are not actually trapped inside here in Yangon, we are still in the midst of a lockdown which has now been extended until June. Although we did see some road blockades and very empty streets at the beginning of the order, things seem to be slowly ramping up and people are getting out and about more. Continue reading “Hello From the Inside”
