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Shwedagon (Myanmar )

Bec
2004-09-18 17:35:07

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of an hour or so and he had not budged. I don't know what his wish was but if it was blindness, then I think his chances of being rewarded are excellent. Ringing the big bell on the right is said to be a good way to attract the attention of the spirits to mortal needs, provided the wish remains a secret. Therefore, I will not tell you what I was hoping for when I executed the ritual bell banging

I spent a lot of time in Shwedagon just observing the people's behaviour in this unreal environment. The beauty, the richness and the magic made possible the collective evasion from reality that I could read in their contented faces.

At this station, the man was refreshing the Buddha that you can just glimpse over his right shoulder and the woman was pouring water on the figure of a rat.

At this point, I met Khin Suu, a young Rakhine girl who was pleased to have an occasion to practice English. We sat down and had a long conversation on religion, on traditional values and their disappearance, on the role of women in her society and so on.

Here, Khin Suu is refreshing the Buddha at my request. It had been a rewarding afternoon, full of wonderment, questioning and meditation topped off with an interesting conversation with a friendly attractive girl. I felt I had gained another little bit of understanding and wondered if I would ever achieve an inner peace approaching that of the old man on the right below.

As we were leaving, I was approached by an athletic looking young man who asked to interview me for "The New Yangon Times". My intuitive alarms immediately rang loud and clear but I did not show it as I asked him to tell me more about his paper which I had not noticed on the stands. This gave him a chance to spin a tale about a new privately owned English language newspaper with Australian shareholders, allegedly doing a series on what foreign tourists thought of Myanmar. It was obviously a phony reporter. I was tempted to tell him I did not have time but, heeding the warning about military intelligence I had received two weeks earlier, I humoured him and gave him the most appropriate answers to his clumsy questions. When he finally let us go, the magic aura around Shwedagon had disappeared as I stood with both feet firmly planted in the sad reality of a police state.

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