Days 3 through 7

Since we are such slackers, I will give you guys the gist of the rest of our week long tour around the country. And Marie will fill in with comments and pictures (because a picture is worth 1,000,000 words right?) So here goes...get excited!!

Day 3:
We left early in the morning from our exquisite mountain resort for the airport. After the shortest flight ever (25 minutes tops) we landed at the Mandalay airport and met Kyaw, our tour guide for the area. We drove all the way to Pyin Oo Lwin up in the mountains and got to see the beautiful countryside where they grow EVERYTHING. Seriously, it would be so easy for Burma to be self-sufficient because there is practically every natural resource here. Our tour guide was very proud of the country and knew so much about it's history. In this area we went to a large cave filled with Buddha statues/scenes called Peik Chin Myuang, a small waterfall and a couple monasteries. At the cave, Marie's butt got slapped by an older woman who giggled and motioned that her shirt should not be tucked into her traditional longyi. Apparently that look is just hilarious! Our last stop before dinner was the Kandawgyi garden which had beds of all kinds of flowers, an orchid garden and a (dead) 'butterfly' museum. (I put quotes around "butterfly" because that seemed to be the theme. Unnecessary quotes around everything!)
Lunch here was super fun. We ate at a strawberry farm, got to do our own strawberry picking and feed baby cows with giant bottles!! They were so strong they kept pulling the tops off. And the waiter we had donned a cowboy hat and ran everywhere. "Can I have a napkin?" "Yes one second" Psshhhooo (that's the sound of him running) Our hotel here was so amazing! We had a little house all to ourselves, definitely big enough to live in if we threw in a kitchenette, with our own pool in the backyard!!!! No one else had their own pool hehe...It was also pretty cool because it was on the grounds of the govenor's house. We visited there as well and were greeted by creepy wax statues posted near the door. hmmm. The thing we were least prepared for was the cold. Oh man! That nighttime mountain air was quite a change from the heat of Yangon.

Day 4:
Today we left for Mandalay and toured around the last royal city Myanmar,  the conquest of which signaled the beginning of colonial rule. We did a lightning round of pagodas (including a complex of 100s of mini pagodas that house all of the marble slabs with the rules of Buddhism written on them) and then went to the palace where a surprise awaited us. Rose's friend who we had seen at the opening had driven all the way to Mandalay to meet us! He was on the phone with Rose and BAM he and his friend are behind us! Since he had gone to medical school in the area, he joined us/helped show us around for the day. We saw a workshop where men hammer for 5-7 hours to pound gold into thin leaves to cover Buddha statues with, a whole street dedicated to making marble Buddha statues, and a workshop where 2 women might spend 2 months making one intricately patterned cloth for longyi (the traditional skirt). Everything was super labor intensive but the final products were incredible!
The sunset here was probably my favorite. We walked across U Bein Bridge (translation: Mr. Slim) which was quite an experience. The bridge is about 5 people wide and has wood slats maybe 3 inches apart, so it required some careful walking. A military guy followed us around taking pictures until Marie suggested he take one of all of us with his camera (duh we can see you!). "Bird boats" (I don't know the Burmese translation) were available for hire about halfway across, and rowers took us out in the river to watch the sunset behind the bridge. Very picturesque. One of the guys rowing was super funny and was serenading his passengers like a Venetian gondolier.
We got American food for dinner, then bought a bottle of wine and went to this nice little outdoor cafe on the lake. We tried sitting at a short table but got mosquito attacked so a normal table had to do. And then, at his insistence at learning a game, I taught Sai and his friend Eric how to play Thumper! (Aunt Kelly would be so proud...) It was a struggle but we finally made it through a long round and only got a few stares from our waiters :)

Day 5:
After a good-bye to Kyaw and another super short plane ride we ended up at Heho airport to meet our last guide, Auntie Augustina. She is from a different ethnic group (Kayin) and is actually Baptist, not Buddhist. She also spoke English really well since she used to be a school teacher, and was very grandmotherly. Our first stop was Pindaya, where legend has it an enormous spider captured 7 beautiful princesses while they were bathing and stuck them in a cave. A prince came and killed the spider, his reward being marriage to the most beautiful youngest daughter. Lucky him...she probably wasn't very bright if she got captured by a spider :) Now the cave is filled with 8888 (yes 4 eights) statues of Buddha. I felt like I was being watched... We also saw a paper making workshop and a 100 year old Banyan tree (the kind that Buddha used to teach under). If I was younger, those would be so perfect for climbing!
The roads in this part of the country were super terrible and along the way to our hotel, we saw two guys on a motorcycle wipe out. The driver wasn't moving at first and it was so scary!! It was even worse because everyone who came to help were moving him and didn't seem to know that was probably unwise. It was frustrating to have all this first aid knowledge and have a huge language barrier  be in the way (even Rose said their accent was too different to be able to understand). He was OK though thank God and we kept on to the hotel. It was in the mountains (and therefore also very chilly) with a lodge atmosphere. We coerced one of the young hotel staff to drive us around the grounds in the golf cart, and I think he had as much fun as we did whipping around the turns and going down narrow paths. He certainly didn't seem sad to have 4 giggling girls on his hands haha. Dinner got a wee bit cold so when we asked for blankets while eating outside, they brought us bath towels! Well at this point we are used to looking ridiculous...

Day 6:
Hold in there, only 2 days left! After a short visit to Taunggyi and the local market, we went to 50% of the vineyards in Myanmar (mostly because there are only two) for a morning wine tasting! We met the owner, a German, and his adorable 10 year old nephew Max ("but my real name is Maximillion"). Noms, they were all really good and of course we took one to go :) On to Inle Lake. This was like a whole different world. On this huge lake, everyone's houses are over water and so transportation is by boat instead of by car. The fishermen have adopted this method of rowing with their leg so that at least one hand can be free for dealing with nets. On the lake we saw a workshop for making cloth out of lotus stems, a Burmese cat sanctuary, a blacksmith, a chiroot cigarette making workshop and a boat making workshop. Once again, all the work was repetitive and labor intensive, but the outcomes are amazing! You can't be on the lake after dark, so we headed to the hotel pretty early, passing miles of floating plantations (tons of tomato plants and other crops just floating away in the middle of the lake).
Ok so we had stayed at nice places the whole trip but this one...wow. Inle Princess Resort wins I think. We had our own little gated courtyard leading to our "room", which was HUGE with it's own fireplace and a bathtub shaped like a little boat! It was definitely the honeymoon suite since there were flower petals everywhere...which was a good excuse for Marie and Rose to wear their bathrobes to watch the sunset at the arrival jetty. We greeted all the arriving travelers (a biking tour) and got more than a few odd stares in return, with a couple polite greetings in return. Dinner was delicious and we had our own very attentive waiter who we made fast friends with. By the time we were all done eating, he might as well have sat down with us since we were all chatting so much! Oh we also met a man who went to Hopkins when it was still a men's college and who now lives right near Sasha. Small world!

Day 7:
Sadly, the last day of our trip, but it was nice that we didn't have to pack up and leave the hotel for once! We visited a couple markets and spent the rest of our kyat. I even bargained with someone!! At one booth I was going to get something then changed my mind. The salesman thought I was just playing hard to get and chased me almost 100 meters to give me my asking price. Ha! Take that! (even though it wasn't my intention to make him run...) Auntie taught us that tourists should ask for a third of the asking price. At one of the markets we saw two amazing men who were born without the lower half of three and two limbs, respectively. The first one was painting pottery with his only set of toes and the second was drawing Buddhist sketches with his residual limbs. Both were way better artists than I will ever be!
We did a mini hike along some of the backwoods and saw some of the local people's living areas and a bunch of naked little kids running around in the water. No shame! :) The rest of the day was spent seeing a couple other sights such as the floating monastery and the "hot springs" (hot water piped down from the top of a mountain to a hotel...fail.) After we just headed back to the hotel to enjoy it while we could. We had the same waiter for dinner, who gave us a Burmese version of guacamole as an appetizer (sooo good!) and was once again very attentive. We even got him to grab his guitar and play for us! He knew Tequila Sunrise by the Eagles, but I couldn't get the lyrics to load before he had to go back to work so we just enjoyed some Burmese tunes. So fun!

We had to get up pretty early the next day to catch a flight back home, so bedtime was early, but it was such a great trip. Good job Rose! Be looking for pictures by Marie :)