Author Archives: jkmarsch

Monkeys were jumping on the metal roofs and they would sneak up beside you to try and get food. We sat for about 20 minutes, watching two sets of monkeys groom each other. One was a mom and her baby. She kept putting the baby in a headlock to pick the bugs off. The other pair was a very aggressive female that was picking bugs off her fella’ and eating so quickly and roughly that her mate had bald spots all over his body. He seemed to be loving it.

Emerson was nervous about the monkeys. She usually thinks they’re so cute, but she was really freaked. In the top picture I am telling her that the monkeys at this temple are super nice so I went to strike a pose. The monkey turned around and hissed at me and showed me her teeth. I jumped back and Em said “Yep. They’re super nice, mom.”

The kids got a free ride on the peanut oil making apparatus. Pretty fun!

The cow walked in circles to press a batch of peanuts. Out through a little spout came peanut oil! A pretty ingenious system – although I didn’t like the rope through the cow’s nose.

We stopped at a tiny market where a group of kids was sitting at the side of the road. Maddux just got a new shirt with the Burmese alphabet on it. The kids saw it and started saying all the characters in unison. I started singing the alphabet and one little guy (about 4 years old) knew the whole thing and sang it with me a few times.
When we talk to people that know English, everyone has a story about how they learned it. One guy said that his Indian mother came over with the British army. She ended up spending her life in Burma. She believed it was very important for her children and grandchildren to know English so she taught everyone. His English was better than ours!

So you had to climb up stairs that were vertical and about two feet high each. Once you got to the top, there was a ledge that dropped about three stories straight down. Crazy! I don’t mind heights, but I got a little light headed looking straight down.