A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
Myanmar

You may believe that I am an observant person since you're busy reading all my observations, but my family knows better. If I have my mind on other things (if polled the family would describe this situation as "frequently" or "almost always") or am engrossed in a good book (also a huge chunk of my time) I could sit through an earthquake and later wonder where all the bricks came from. Basically I have to want to observe things. That's one of the reasons I love to travel -- everything is so different and interesting that I constantly want to drink it all in.

All this is to give you an idea how I was in Myanmar for five days before realizing that they have a different time zone there.

I have no excuse for this oversight. It's not as though the clues weren't there for a crack mystery reader like myself to decipher. For example, my buses always seemed to leave a half hour late. Had I just arrived from the states this might have tipped me off, but I had been in Asia almost 10 months. I expected buses to leave late.

My second clue was that everyone's clocks were wrong, and by "wrong" I naturally mean "different from my watch". You'd think that after the third or fourth time spotting a clock running that late some remote forgotten corner of my brain would have jerked awake, but I didn't really think about it at all. I mean, isn't it possiblethat the Burmese are just bad timekeepers? And the electricity is terrible there. I had power outages each of my first 4 days in Myanmar. That could really throw things off in the clock department.

Now if you think that anyone with a dozen brain cells to juggle could have cottoned to this time zone thing with these rather obvious indications, you're really going to question my ability to tie my own shoes when I tell you my third clue. Actually, it might more accurately be described as the first, since it was offered during the plane ride from Chiang Mai to Yangon. And to be fair, it might not be considered so much a "clue" as a "screamingly overt statement of fact." It went like this. The captain gave a little speech, in which he mentioned the time in Yangon. I looked at my watch in confusion, inspiring my seatmate, an expat teacher living in Myanmar, to state the following: "There is a half hour time difference between Thailand and Myanmar." "Ah, how strange," I commented.

Did I take this opportunity to change my watch? No. Did I store this valuable information away so I would remember to turn the clock back upon arrival? No. I dismissed the whole issue from my feeble mind like an old phone number. It was not until I was sitting at a tea shop waiting for my bus and facing two clocks, both of which informed me that I was 40 minutes early, that the dense clouds of obtuseness began to dissipate. After five days, I changed my watch.

You know the most remarkable thing about this whole situation? Not my stunning idiocy in practical matters -- that was known already. No, it was the fact that the buses in Myanmar had been leaving on time! Who would have thought it possible?

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren







posted by Katy at 3:48 AM