Month: February 2016

Our house (vol. 2)

So it looks more or less like my technical issues have been fixed (only took three separate hour-long chats and two emails). Which brings us back to our not-at-all regular transmission.

Here we have a slightly useful tour of our new house, in the standard weird 3D panorama/sphere thing. Probably still including my feet.

This will probably be our permanent home for the next three years, so anyone who visits will also be able to see it in person (and sleep in our spare room, which currently has only a single bed. We will hopefully get this sorted before any couples visit, but in case we don’t, consider this fair warning).

WP Photo Sphere (Entrance and hallway)
Continue reading Our house (vol. 2)

Pyaw

Quite frequently I make notes on my phone of interesting thing to later including in the blog. This is one of those notes from last week:

Listening to a radio play in this taxi which involves a dog speaking Burmese.

Not only was I excited to be able to recognise a few words and thus leap to my–no doubt 100% correct–assumption on the content of the drama, I was exciting to be living in a country where talking dog radio plays are a thing.

Other interesting things heard on taxis’ radios:
– an ad for iced coffee to the tune of “Ice, Ice, Baby”, just with ‘baby’ replaced with ‘coffee’.
– a great deal of loud, somewhat tuneless Burmese pop music.
– probably other things I have forgotten.

Quiet weekend, catching up on photos vol. 4

Here endeth the lesson.

I have no idea if either of these stores are genuine. But they are intriguing. Although not as intriguing as what is hidden beneath the red fabric on the left - it's been like that since we got here.
I have no idea if either of these stores are genuine. But they are intriguing. Although not as intriguing as what is hidden beneath the red fabric on the left – it’s been like that since we got here.

Continue reading Quiet weekend, catching up on photos vol. 4

Hniq’, or “please love me again”.

Burmese is a tonal language, where subtle differences in pronunciation completely change the meaning of a word. But it’s also a language where the same word, spelled and pronounced the same, can have completely different meanings. For example, I give you hniq’ (နှစ်)* which means, variously, ‘immerse’, ‘year’, or ‘two’.**

This is a story about me learning Burmese, and being very far from the smartest person in the room. Continue reading Hniq’, or “please love me again”.

Quiet weekend, catching up on some photos vol. 1

As part of our getting-over-food-poisoning regime, we are having a quiet weekend at home. So I’m going to try to catch up on a whole bunch of photos I have yet to share. I’ll try to spread them out over a few posts to reduce the scrolling/page load times.

Plastic bottle street.
Plastic bottle street.

Continue reading Quiet weekend, catching up on some photos vol. 1