travel report 28: dead airports and fat ducklings

I wish I had had more room on my memory cards. I would have loved to show you the Mandalay Airport. It is a rather foolish looking contraption. It was built in the 90s when the Burmese Junta thought it would do them good to invest in modern large scale tourist infrastructure. This was foolish because the large scale tourists (I am referring to numbers here, not girth. Americans do not travel in Burma.) never showed up. And since Cyclone Nagris, the Junta's ridicolous response to it, which was marginally worse than Bush's response to Katrina, and the subsequent demonstrations that Buddhist Monks started nobody visits the country at all. In fact one only meets foreigners that either are on some sort of humanitarian business in the country, or that don't feel bound by international sanctions (read: Chinese).

So this airport is built pretty large, and rather badly, and like most things Junta in Burma it is in shoddy condition. Volker and I sat in this huge lobby with nobody but us in it. Couple of local functionary's kids hanging around a "Cafe" which did not deserve that title. They are supposed to work there, but if no customers are buying none of the none-existing wares that are not on display it is best described as hanging around instead of working. Imagine your run of the mill Communist Russia store, with one piece of bread in the window. You get the picture, if not any sustenance. I Should not have been surprised at the spider in the window of the airplane I was about to board.

It is such a strange thing, to be in a country in which normal every day occurances are, well, normal everyday occurances. Markets are loud, streets are packed, chaotic typical representations of South East Asian cities, men drink green tea in copious amounts, women are gracious and girls ride three deep on scooters. Then you enter anything government, an airport, the palace in Mandalay, the embassy in Phnom Phen and it seems as if you are stepping into a Mausoleum. It is dead. The buildings seem dead. The eyes of the people seem dead. There is no life. Yet the Junta, and by extension its tentacles reaching into this society, maintains that status. It is as if an invisible fist is directing the country. One does not see who it benefits. The Generals do not bask in false adoration as Gaddafi used to. They hide in their bunkers and, I don't know, take baths in rubies and gold. It is the ultimate Scrooge McDuck existence. Apart from the occasional silly leather jacket and sillier government proclamation of serving the country one does not easily witness the perversities of the country.

One time I was on Shwedagon and saw a few burmese women walk around the pagoda. They were fat, waddling, ungainly things that also wanted to partake in the blessings of their religion. Only after seeing their fattness did I notice the human walky-talkied security cordon around them. I guess they were worried that the average - in this context meaning malnutrioned - Burmese person would try to ask them where they could also get calory rich diets. That fat needs to be protected from the unruly skinny masses. They might want to carve out a piece for themselves.

The eternal smile of the Burmese can apparently not even be wiped of their faces by the Junta's repression. But instead, I will suppose freely here, the Junta themselves are perhaps the unhappiest people in the country. At least those fat ducklings at Shwedagon seemed unduly stressed out. Whether the cause is the weight on their hips or on their soul I will never know.