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.

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.