bagan, myanmar

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.

Hi Gil,
Thank you so much for hooking us up with your brother-in-law and his family in Myanmar. We can not say enough wonderful things about them. They took us in like we were family, let us stay in their home, lent us their car, gave us rides to and from the airport, fed us, gave us travel information – I could go on and on.
Also- thanks to you for all the shots and meds. I am happy to say that after one and a half months, we are all still healthy (knock on wood!)
Hope you are well and that you’re checking in on our blog from time to time!
Nothing but love and all things good.
kim and crew

You walk into a building that looks like a narrow, run down, old warehouse that is pretty dark. As you walk along you catch glimpses of The Reclining Buddha through doors along the way that are opened just a crack to let in little remnants of sunlight. When you get to the end you see a beautiful, enormous head. Wowsers!

We rode bikes through a monastery to get to a picturesque lake. Many nuns came out to see us pass and two dogs chased us up a pathway! (The nuns wear bright pink robes and shave their heads bald. Their robes perfectly matched the setting sun.) When we got to the lake we saw a woman doing her laundry and three boys swimming around naked. We got closer and they ran out and put their clothes on to sit and stare at Em, Maddux and Lennon. They looked at them and would whisper and laugh, then one tried to tell me about a boat (by using hand signals.) Another boy skipped rocks with Maddux. When we started walking back, two old women stopped close to us while balancing bunches of leaves on their heads. They just kept smiling and saying “minglabar” to us (it’s like saying hello.) Some of these people seem to truly live in the moment. You catch glimpses of pure joy everywhere you go.