Through the looking glass

I am going to Yangon to take John Okell's Burmese language course. It is an intensive course that promises to have you reading and writing Burmese at the end of 10 days. We arrive in Yangon on Sunday, May 16, the 'we' being 5 women who work on the border and who want to learn Burmese. Our guesthouse, Motherland 2, has a cartoon school bus ready to take us from the airport to our new home. The young male staff practice their English and point out Shwedagon Paya, and Kandawggi Lake on the way in. It's breakfast time when we arrive so after getting our room keys we go to the dining room, which is long and narrow, like a railroad car, where we help ourselves to a Tang-like orange drink, coffee with powdered creamer, toast and sweet bread, bananas, and eggs anyway you like them. My 4 minute egg looks like it has just left the chicken; this will become and ongoing challenge during the coming days!

Love those 'princes' for laundry service!

Our guest house is not far from the river on Lower Panzandaung Road, in the eastern part of Yangon. There are lots of marine shops in the area, selling boat propellers, anchor chains, and mysterious oily engine parts. The wares are spread out on the sidewalk for all to see and step over/around. Work goes on here too: welding with only sunglasses for eye protection; washing bits of metal in something dark and murky, young women weaving nets at the speed of light while chatting away with their neighbors. Everything is labor intensive because there are lots of laborers available.

And then there is the 50th Street Bar & Restaurant, a short walk away but in another world. Wi-fi, brick walls, comfy booths, a large U-shaped bar, big plasma TV screens tuned to the latest football game, pool table, pizza, good bread, and real coffee. This is a hangout for ex-pats, a place to skype family and friends, check email, while sipping a cold Tiger beer or iced latte. Of course it comes at a price, but after the rigours of slow internet, spotty electricity, and monsoon rains, it is heaven!

Ka, k'a, ga, nga

Head off to the Alliance Francaise for our first class on Monday, May 17. We have a 200 + page booklet, script sheets, reading sheets, and hours of audio files. My friend initiates me into the mysteries of the Yangon bus system: we need to take the # 48 but there are more than one #48 and they don't all end up in the same place. So we hop on and hope. The fare is 200 kyat, roughly .20 cents US, although once I was only charged 100 kyat. I thought it was a senior rate, but my friend says it's probably because conductor guy has no change. Ah yes. The change.

photo by David Zet

There are no Burmese coins; the currency is entirely paper, old paper, paper held together with cellotape and a prayer. My friend calls it 'armpit' money, because often women will store it under their arms. It is folded and folded again, then offered to a bus conductor or shop keeper. You often see people with bricks of 1,000 kyat notes, the most common large note.

At the Alliance we meet our fellow beginning students; about 30 of us, so we are divided into two groups. We will have script and writing in the first hour with Justin Watkins and reading and speaking in the second hour with John Okell, then the teachers will switch groups. John is a gentle older man who has designed and taught this course for many years; he teaches at SOAS, University of London, UK. Justin is younger, with a doctorate in esoteric languages. Their teaching styles are very different so it's a tgood combination of pushing us hard and encouraging us when the going gets rough. Which it does almost immediately.





The script is based on clockwise circles which at first all look exactly alike to me. Justin explains that because the writing was originally done on palm leaves, straight strokes tended to split the leaves, while circles did not; ergo, circles. We are told to practice writing the consonants and vowel combinations we learn over and over and over. And there is something very meditative about it. Now if I could only retain the shapes until the next class!

John has us talking about how hot it is, teaching us basic sentence patterns that we can slot new vocab into. And since Yangon has had 40 days of + 90 degree weather this is very relevant. When we trip over rhythm and pronunciation he will say, ' Wonderful! Now could we have the definitive version of that please?' We learn to count and to read the numbers, essential for those bus routes!
Those are numbers: 5, ka /1, 6, ya, 2

Before class you can see students at the Alliance with ear buds in their ears and flash cards to hand. After class, we ask for coffee or beer in our newly acquired Burmese, much to the amusement of the staff.

Studying is essential; we are told to put in at least 5 or 6 hours a day, which leaves little time for anything else. It's doubly hard on people who are taking time from work here to attend the course.

Slowly, slowly, we struggle to read things like, ' What do you want to order?' ' I would like two Cokes, and some fried noodles.'

But by Day 10, we are feeling quite proud of ourselves. As Justin says, 'Remember when you came in on day 1, you couldn't read or say anything in Burmese.' It is also helpful to hear Burmese all around us on the streets. Now all I have to do is practice, practice, practice. Both Johan and Justin say that if we don't practice a little each day for about a month, we won't retain anything.

ps: Bama saga means burmese language

The alpha and the omega

About day 6, rainy season arrives with a downpour. The streets flood instantly up to one's shins. Doesn't bear thinking about what is in that water. Cars stall in the middle of the street, taxis refuse to go to certain areas, buses are overflowing with passengers. So after class we head for the Governor's Residence, and a glass of wine ( or two ).



Quoted from the hotel website:

'The Governor's Residence Hotel in Yangon, Myanmar is an imposing luxury teak mansion hotel dating from the 1920s within the elegant Embassy Quarter of Yangon and close to the spectacular Shwedagon Pagoda.

'Built in 1920, The Governor's Residence by Orient-Express is an imposing Burmese two-story mansion built as the official home of one of the governors from the southern states of the country.'

Life is lived on the streets of Yangon; eating, sleeping, selling, buying, talking, talking, talking.

Tinkering with the ubiquitous generator. They are everywhere; noisy, smelly, and essential to conducting business.

The tri-shaw. I was rescued by one after class one evening when I took the wrong #48 bus in a downpour and ended up very lost. Tri-shaw guy says with a big grin, 'Auntie, where you go?' I pull out my water-logged guest house card and he says 'OK, OK, 500 kyat' (.50 cents US). I would have paid him $50 US at that point; dark, wet, and lost. He pedalled me home, handed me up the muddy curb to the door, and said, 'Buy new umbrella!' Mine had succumbed to too many gusts of wind.


I think Burmese love to read. There are many, many of these street booksellers and they always seem to be busy.

Look at the titles carefully.