"Just a little shaky-shaky"

Myanmar, Nov 11

Cynthia:

0645: our rickety " upper class" sleeper train from Yangon rolls into the city of Mandalay. We are bleary-eyed and tired having endured a night of jolting and bouncing and half sleep, having been awakened by Burmese vendors at the train windows at the hourly stops along the way.

0715: we make it to the hotel in central Mandalay. The hotel is actually several stories above a market that has started to open up for the day. The train carriage had been incessantly bouncy and our bodies are still readjusting to the stillness of the ground. Like a seaman that hasn't been on solid ground for days, we still feel like the ground is moving under us. We have reservations at the hotel but we arrive so early we are advised to wait in the lobby as our rooms are prepared.

0742: the sound of rumbling and quivering of walls and glass. I think to myself, "Great, just our luck that a streetcar train runs right through our hotel", already preparing myself for yet one more thing to normalize in my brain, like putting toilet paper in the garbage can and not the toilet bowl, or hearing myself tell the boys to get ready to " run fast across the street in the 20 foot gap between the clusters of motor bikes". The fact that the city of 1 million people doesn't have electric street lights let alone any form of organized public transit beyond stuffing people into pick-up trucks doesn't occur to me at the time. The noise and shaking progresses and after about 5 seconds I notice that the locals looked panicked and are heading for the door.

This is an earthquake.

The shaking and noise has stopped after about ?10 seconds but people are still leaving the building. A worker at our government run hotel is heading for the stairs. With mantra of "warm welcome to visitors of Myanmar" drilled into him, he exclaims to Greg, " no worry-- jus an earthquake...jus a leetle shakey-shakey!"

I tell our boys, their attention momentarily directed away from their electronic video games, to get out of the building. For the first time in my living memory, they respond to my initial instructions and we gather with many others on the street.

Eventually we gather up courage to re-enter the multi-level ?50 year old cement structure that is our home for the two days. I'm still seeking some reassurance that the trembling we just encountered is something commonplace around here and nothing to worry about. I chat with the hotel worker and he says he has never experienced anything like what happened this morning. We are eager to get out of the city and spend the rest of the day touring the sites of a few small towns outside of Mandalay.

1745: we arrive back at the hotel and have nearly forgotten our earlier concerns regarding the tendency of the earth to randomly buckle up at the fault lines of its crust. We enter our room and within five minutes we feel a few seconds of trembling. I poke my head out the hotel room and see an Asian woman the next room over mirroring my expression of "not again". I give her some kind of universal sign language for "yes, I also felt the building shaking just now" and we all make our way outside again only to return moments later...after all, it really was only just a little "shaky-shaky".

Dang it, I knew I was forgetting something. Please add "perishing in an earthquake" to my top ten list of fears.

Tomorrow we depart for a small town and it can't come soon enough.

Greg:

Here's a link to give more detail about the earthquake and the two aftershocks that we felt.

http://earthquake-report.com/2012/11/11/extremely-dangerous-and-maybe-destructive-earthquake-in-central-myanmar/


Other than the quake, Myanmar impresses us with its warm people, crumbling infrastructure and evidence of deluded leadership. So far we've been in the two largest cities: Yangon, which was the capital until the 1990s when the generals decided to move the capital to some isolated location to the north, turning many former ministry complexes into empty buildings; and Mandalay, which houses a huge vacant former palace of many square kilometers right in it's centre.

We are in a government run hotel and the whole place feels iron curtain. Actually I was in East Berlin and Budapest before the wall came down and those places did not have the same signs of decay.

I tried to include a couple of photos with this post, but the server timed out before it could complete the upload. Will try another time.

Tomorrow we are taking a "fast boat" to Bagan, of which Lonely Planet writes:

Gather all of Europe's medieval cathedrals onto Manhattan island and throw in a whole lot more for good measure, and you'll start to get a sense of the ambition of the temple-filled plains of Bagan.

We'll let you know how it lives up to the hype.

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