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.

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.

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.

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” →

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” →

Despite that glamorous pool-side picture up there, we just had a fairly boring Spring Break.  We thought things were lame last week when we had the voluntary stay at home order, but the lameness increased incrementally through the week, with first a notice that gatherings of 5 or more were banned (punishment = 6 months in jail OR a £25 fine). Continue reading “Spring Break” →