a couple months in

    People are friendly here. Though most of the unsolicited conversations I have go something like one of these:

    Man: Hello!
    Me: Hi.
    Man: Where are you from?
    Me: Uh, America.
    Man: Obama!
    Me: Yesyes, Obama.

    -or-

    Child: Hello!
    Me: Hello.
    Child: Helloo!
    Me: Hi.
    Child: Minguhlaba! [Hello]
    Me: Yeah, hi.
    Child: [Burmese]
    Me: What?
    Child: What?
    Me: Yeah.
    Child: Hello!
    Me: Hello there.
    Child: Hello, hello, hello!


    Music is passing slowly by on the street, and it sounds like a haunted carnival. Various loudspeaker announcements, probably ads, echoing through the neighborhood are something I'm used to in Asia, but they still make me feel like I'm having some bizarre Orwellian hallucination. Or that I'm dreaming while asleep in a hospital bed.
    The top of the pagoda is visible from the balcony outside my room, encased in bamboo scaffolding to touch up the gold paint. Below is the school playground with its newly laid brick walkway and rusted monkey bars, and an old bathtub filled with stagnant water and turtles. And the sandbox where the cats hide their business. Next is the main building, with walls that are not walls and the kitchen at the back, behind which the staff bathe from a concrete tub of water.
    The ants march dauntless across the tile of my bathroom wall, while I sit on my bed under the mosquito net and type the weekend away. When night falls, the packs of dogs outside will set to howling.

    On the long trip to Myanmar, panic lasted until I reached the international terminal at LAX. That's when that familiar feeling of being lost and homeless hit me, and I realized I'd been there before.

    My first week was a blur of unbearable heat and mosquitoes. A fever wracked me at the start of the second. I lay in my bed in the heat from inside and out, and imagined I must be dying.
    I took a field trip to Bagan at the end of the first week with the students. After an 11-hour drive filled with laughing, shouting children, we arrived at the motel at 4 am. There weren't enough rooms. I was stuck in a room with another teacher and two students, who invited their friends over. At 5 am, there was enough room for me to lay down on the bed. At 6 am, they called us for breakfast. We saw countless pagodas that day, each more impressive than the last. At the national museum, as a foreigner, I was asked to relinquish my phone to them before entering. I suppose because of the camera.
    That night, there was enough space to move me to a room by myself, though it had no bathroom. What it did have was air-conditioning, which I had not experienced outside of the tour bus since arriving in the country. In addition, Bagan was cool and rainy compared to Yangon. The edge of Heaven, really.
   

    I was invited to use an extra invitation to the Thai king's birthday party at the embassy. I showed up ready to go in my jeans and sneakers. "You're going like that?" asked the head of the Precollegiate Program. I was talked into wearing a longyi, the traditional Burmese dress, which I was incapable of tying by myself. "You won't see anyone there wearing jeans."
    As happens anytime someone has said these words, within 5 seconds of entering, I had spotted 5 people wearing jeans.
    Flowers from the other embassies lined the walkway. Corporate snack stands lined the courtyard, giving out free food. I made the rounds. I found an empty pocket of grass in which to sip my wine and watch the smooth jazz band on the stage.
    "Which type of curry would you like, sir?"
    "Just mix them all together."
    Amidst the elegantly dressed ladies and diplomats.
    All sorts of people were there, really. One fat, ginger kid strolled the crowds, and I wondered where he came from, wondered where everyone came from.
    The band evaporated, still shots of a palace on the screen, a man in what I assumed would be the clothes of a farmer from several hundred years ago wandered out on stage, miming playing a pipe to a recorded track. Next, several ladies stepped out in slippered feet, golden cones on their heads, arms like drugged serpents; and several not-ladies, round-faced men dressed in identical clothes and makeup mixed among them. I called on the cultural relativist portions of my brain to keep the more judgemental parts in line.
    It was hot. Boy, was it hot. But then again, it's always hot. I tugged at my collar and regretted the spicier foods I'd eaten.