Benjamin Disraeli, a 19th Century British Politician once said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” I have been copying daily stats from the WHO Situation Reports on to my own spreadsheet tracking the major countries affected by the virus. Continue reading “The Undiscovered Country”
We are now officially on our April break. Our original plan had us taking a train from Beijing to go see the Terracotta Warriors today. Then our second plan had us getting on a houseboat in Halong Bay today. The reality is I am sitting on my front porch in Yangon, watching Gav potter around in the “garden.” Continue reading “Lockdown”
Things have escalated quite a bit since the last time I did a post. Last weekend we had no internet at the house, so you missed an in-between post, but Myanmar officially reported its first two cases about a week ago and since then the number has risen to 20. Continue reading “It’s Happened”
Tuesday at 3:05pm, right after classes had finished for the day, we got the news that school would be moving to virtual learning effective immediately and lasting until at least May 4. It was not super surprising as there had been a growing feeling of unease among the expats in Yangon and some embassies started asking non essential employees to repatriate. Continue reading “It’s Happening”
Well it seems like the entire world is stumbling towards the zombie apocalypse! Although there are still no cases in Myanmar (ha ha ha), government officials have forbidden any “large gatherings” (but have not defined what constitutes large) and cancelled all Thingyan celebrations in Yangon. Continue reading “Creatures Great and Small”
We decided to spend our luxurious three week 2019 Christmas break in Sri Lanka. I had been there years before in about 2000 but not since. I remember the great birds, some great sites but terrible food. On that trip there was a week long part on the beach but this time we did no such thing travelling around the whole time. Like with our trip to Laos we probably packed a bit too much in but thoroughly enjoyed it regardless.
Continue reading “Santa in Sri Lanka”
On Friday night our school had it’s annual fundraising gala. Gav is kind of in charge of it, although one of the people he works with has a lot of experience in event management and does most of the planning. Gav is in charge of the running of the evening and is the master of ceremonies, so the run-up to and night of is kind of stressful for him. It went fantastically though and now he can breathe a big sigh of relief that it is over for another year!
Well, we are still alive here in Yangon. And Myanmar seems to still be avoiding any cases of Corona Virus which is very suspicious, but never mind. Life moves on and we have been doing some interesting exploring around the Yangon area! Continue reading “Day Trips”
Well the old coronavirus severity has really ramped up since I was laughing about it on here a few weeks ago. I don’t know what the atmosphere is like in the rest of the world, but here in South East Asia people are starting to take some rather drastic steps to curb its spread. Continue reading “The Virus”
The audience for this post is not really our regular audience so feel free to give this one a miss. If however, you are interested in the birds of Yangon then I hope this will be useful. What follows is not an exhaustive list of every bird but simply every bird I have been able to identify so far. The region of Yangon is actually quite large and includes, for instance, Hlawga National Park however, I am not including birds I have seen there. This is really just for the city area of Yangon. I will try to keep it updated with new photos that I have taken and new birds as I discover them. For birders more expert than me (which is just about anyone) feel free to comment with corrections and missing species.
Continue reading “Birds of Yangon”