Some interesting things happened at the Pagoda! The first was that some Burmese people spotted us, and wanted to get pictures with us! I wish that I had gotten a picture of just them. One was a man, who stopped me and pointed to his camera. I had no idea what was going on, until one of the women came up to me and stood next to me! One of the ladies was too embarrassed, so the other one took me to her, and Jessica got in on the other side, and we all got pictures. The whole time we were there, people would look at us! The little kids loved to smile and wave; they would giggle if we waved back. It was so exciting to them. We stopped and sat down at the pagoda, because many of the Burmese people had. People would do double takes when they realized we were foreign. They were all polite though and were constantly smiling at us. The last was that two monks stopped us and asked to talk to us! They wanted to practice their English. One had been a monk for 4 years, the other for 2. One of them told us his name, so we shared ours with them. They did not understand how we spoke English so well; we had to explain that it was the language we were raised on. I don’t think they understood that people around the world don’t all speak the same language.
After, we stopped at a nearby hotel to exchange money. We had planned to walk there, since it was only a 15 minute walk, but we realized that street lights don’t exist here, so we just got a taxi. It ended up being a good thing that we did, because if we had walked, we never would have found our way. We exchanged only some money, because the hotel only had so much to give us, and then we went to dinner across the street. It was an open building (only three walls), and they sat us down at a table with two other people from Myanmar. They brought us rice and soup, and you got to pick a meat to go with your rice. I got chicken, but was very sad to see that it had bones in it. I tried to eat around the bones, but anytime that I found a bone in my chicken, I felt like I was going to be sick, so I had to give up. I ate the rice with the chicken’s sauce, and some of the soup broth. We also got Pepsis to drink. The whole meal only cost the three of us 9 dollars.
There was about 15 minutes before the next bus back to the ship left, and if we didn’t get that one, we would have to wait two hours for the next one. We caught a taxi pretty quickly, because a man from the restaurant was there helping us. After a fifteen minute ride, we saw the bus; it hadn’t left yet! I paid the man for the taxi, which was only 3 dollars, and I tipped him 500 kyat (pronounced chat). He had the biggest smile on his face; he looked so happy, it was precious. It was only 60 cents! His face just lit up. It made my day.
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