This is right in the middle of Rangoon. The market is formerly called Scott’s Market but like all good post-colonial governments, they renamed it to get rid of the colonial legacy. Bogyoke Aung San, the person which the market is named after, was responsible for the independence of Burma. He was also the father of Aung San Suu Kyi
I spent about 3 weeks in Burma recently, traveling roughly 2,000 km in Burma by trains, buses, cars, trucks and bikes. I began in Rangoon, went up north to Mandalay, west to Bagan, east to Inle and then back to Rangoon for the new year’s eve celebration. I love Burma. The people there are nice. You can just feel it all around you.
There are so many things to write, but I will just leave this picture here for now. It was somewhere north of Rangoon and far south from Naypyidaw, Burma’s own Putrajaya. It was about 2 or 3 hours into the journey to Mandalay.
Or maybe, I should share this as well: Burma does not appear to be a poor country. Neither does it appear to be a country under economic sanction or under military dictatorship. There is poverty and I saw it in many places, but it does appear Burma is farther along the development curve than, say, Cambodia. I had expected Burma to be as poor as Cambodia but I was wrong. To me, Rangoon specifically, felt modern. There were many new cars on the roads and the streets were paved and smooth. Not as modern as Kuala Lumpur but Rangoon is not a capital of a too poor a country. Upon landing in Rangoon and leaving the airport behind, those facts immediately struck me. My expectation of Rangoon was quite simply off-target.
Maybe what I saw was only the superficial stuff. After all, a foreigner, maybe, would be impressed with Malaysia but if you peeled the onion layers one by one, something would not feel right. The same with Burma I’d suppose. One has to live there, and more importantly, study the Burmese society to know its nuance. And as a foreigner, I may have had certain freedom that the locals may not have.
But maybe, all the modern looks are the liberalization dividend. Several years ago, I was told, things were very different. And there was definitely fewer tourists.
And Aung San Suu Kyi is popular there. No doubt about that. I bought a book from one of the sidewalks in Rangoon and the shopkeeper pointed his finger to a picture of Aung San Suu Kyi on the wall of his makeshift store. He said, “that is our leader.”
Bali was my final destination after two or three weeks travelling all the way by land from Jakarta. As I crossed the Bali Sea on a boat from Banyuwangi, Gilimanuk and this greeted me:
I do not remember the name of this mountain. It could be Prapat Agung but looking at the map, the twin (even three?) peaks might suggest it is not.
When I first read of Prambanan, in my mind there was an amazing structure that overwhelmed everything. But my expectation of it proved too much. I felt too many words had romanticized blocks of big ancient rocks.
Please do not get me wrong. Prambanan, from afar, looks amazing, mysterious. It imposes itself on its surroundings.
It is just that the experience of actually being there erodes the very air that makes it out of this world. It likes being awed by a rainbow but once you have learned that it is merely an interaction between light and water vapor, it ceases to be mysterious. It becomes just physics. And here was Prambanan representing the gods of Hindu built by the Sanjayas, once rival to the mighty Sailendras and Srivijaya: a pile of ancient rocks.
It does not help that I have been to Siem Reap. There, reality was grander than anything I had imagined. Rightly or wrongly, experience informs expectation and Angkor pushed my expectation of everything else that came from that particular era of Southeast Asian history even higher. Whatever expectation I had of Pagan, Borobodur and Prambanan got pushed up no thanks to the Angkor temples.
My expectation was Icarus. Reality was the sun. Prambanan is not as impressive as I had first imagined.
But I am glad that I visited Prambanan anyway. As always, it is always good having something concrete to back up the stuff I read in books to reaffirm that things out there are not just some fancy imagination concocted by the human mind. They are real and once upon a time, they were the centers of the world.
I have not been updating this blog of mine as often as I would like to. I have been busy with work and life in general.
Still, I have lots to say but just not enough time to write. I partly blame Twitter for that, which allows me to blow some steam off so that none accumulates to make me really wants to write anything in full. It is surprising how 140 characters can do wonders sometimes.
The fact that I have stopped writing for The Sun and Selangor Times after the May 5 election does not help in pushing me to write more.
But there is stuff in the pipeline and I want to warm up before things get too fast on that front. So, blogging is a good way to give me a giddy-up moment.
Also, one thing with me is that I feel ashamed if I see somebody works harder than me. And here is a self guilt-tripping for me:
He is a farmer somewhere in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia, some time late in the morning. And he works way harder than me.
This was pretty far off from the main road. I was on a bicycle, exploring the place and took a nap somewhere under a coconut tree. It was an awesome in-between jobs vacation.
Okay. I want to take more holiday. Crap.