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January 01, 2006
Notes on trip into Burma
Notes on my trip into Burma:
- I never saw a working speedometer.
- Disposable cameras are evil.
- It was sorta spooky, which made me a bit paranoid, but that's just me sometimes.
- When your paperwork is not in order, don’t make a joke of it.
- Most vehicles are right-hand drive even though the roads are the opposite, drive on the right style. Left-hand drive cars are rare and always very new. This is apparently because some astrologers told the government a few years back that they needed to switch sides of the road. Hmmm…Where is Nancy Reagan these days?
- The current government generates an astonishing amount of paperwork because of internal travel by both foreigners and nationals. Brittany and I used the toilets at the Kengtung immigration office and were taken aback by the shear quantity of old, dusty, numbered, collections of travel document photo copies that lined the walls of the immigration office. And I would guess it to be mostly worthless.
- I use the term ‘Burma’ rather than ‘Myanmar’. This is because using the later is considered distasteful amongst those in the NGO-world in Thailand working with the UNHCR-registered refugees and illegal migrants. It also seems to be a linguistic form of resistance. As I understand it, the term ‘Burmese’ refers to the ethnic group that is now in control. ‘Burma’ is defined as the geographical area in between India, Bangladesh, China, Laos and Thailand. It is originally an English term (damn those Brits) but then again we Anglophiles call ‘Deutschland’ ‘Germany’, and the Francophiles call it ‘L'Allemagne’ so I don’t have a problem with it. ‘Myanmar’ is what the ethnic Burmese government calls there own people, and the land of Burma. Much of this is semantics, but it is the nomenclature I have learned to use from those in opposition to the current Burmese-lead regime. All that said, somebody is going to disagree with these points. Whatever.
Posted by stu at January 1, 2006 04:07 AM