Tag: Travel Narratives
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After NaNoWriMo Passes, Inertia Sets In
First of all, I finished that novel(la): So yes, yes I did write that blasted thing. At work, my stack of writing to mark grew to unfathomable heights (sorry kids!) and my mornings and nights and weekends were spent trying to squeeze out just a few more words. I didn’t know I had…
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Absolutely Nothing to do with Shanghai and Everything About Writing
So I am knee deep in Nanowrimo, or perhaps only shin deep, as I am not sure 15,059 words out of 50,000 can count as a knee. I’m also still sicketty sick sick, which has made me a barking machine. This means I’m not posting here. It isn’t that I have nothing to say, but…
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Huh? Efendim? Ting Bu Dong: Opening Your Door to People You Can’t Understand
In Istanbul, at the last flat I lived in before we left Turkey in 2008, my upstairs neighbour- a middle-aged woman in a house dress and slippers- used to ring my doorbell repeatedly at all hours. If I was in the shower, she’d keep ringing it until I was out and dried and dressed. Sometimes…
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Awesome Things We Ate in Myanmar
Before we went to Myanmar, we really had no idea what to expect, food-wise. It wasn’t a cuisine that was well represented in the South East Asian culinary repetoire internationally. We knew it was just across the water from all things Indian and Bangladeshi, and surrounded on the other side by Thailand and China, with…
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Can I Show You a Bit of Myanmar?
And we’re back. And I’ve been floored with a tummy bug that whacked me over the head sometime last night, after we got back into Shanghai in a taxi that thought it had a jet engine. After 7 white-knuckle flights in a month (3 of them on Yangon Airways, whose motto is, unnervingly, “you’re safe…
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On travelling and on staying put
We’ve been in Myanmar about two weeks now, travelling close to the ground (usually about 6 inches from the pavement when facing backwards on a trishaw) and grinding our way from Yangon to Moulmein to Kyaiktiyo to Yangon to Mandalay to Hsipaw and I’m tired. For about two days I have been wanting to stay…
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On the road to Mandalay, eventually
You can actually fly to Mandalay from Yangon for about $75US, so the romance of the road is somewhat lessened. After bouncing around the Mon State south east of Yangon for the past week, I’ve come to value the brevity of flights. I’ve learned a few other things here, which I’ll note briefly. I’m saving…
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Notes on Yangon (which is also Rangoon)
1. Burmese script initially reminded me of the patterns woodbugs make when tunnelling into a two-by-four, then I decided it looked like binary code without the 1s, as seen through a wonky dot matrix printer, and now I’ve finally reconciled myself to the idea that it’s really just a series of counterfeiters’ adaptations of the…
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From Yangon, with sanity
Obviously no one briefed the censors that I was coming. This site is one of the only things out there that isn’t blocked. Thank you for your trust, Junta. Appreciated. We arrived yesterday morning after a long (and yet not long at all) journey from Shanghai: our flight out to Guangzhou sat on…
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Best Little Whorehouse in Cairo
In Tahrir Midan, the Picadilly of central Cairo’s circuses, after a long, hot, dusty day spent being shadowed by touts and hissing men, we searched for dinner, for a beer, for a rest. But trouble in Arabic was brewing above a teahouse on the corner and robocops were filling the side alleys. We hadn’t…
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Harbingers of Dumplings
“Привет!” Our presence in the tiny Russian cafe was heartily acknowledged by the old Chinese man in the fedora who had just entered, elbows linked with his small, silent wife. “Er, nihao? Hello? Hi?” “Я думал, ты русский” I thought you were Russian, he explained (in Russian). We don’t speak Russian. Our Mandarin is pitifully limited…
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Rose Petals and Orange Peel
Sometimes a girl just needs a jam jam jar filled with steeping, fragrant blossoms