Sweet Mantis Video

Above: A praying mantis chows down on a beetle. Caught on tape!

I am in KL, Malaysia right now on my way to Indonesia to see my sister and a bunch of friends. I expect to visit among other things, the Komodo Island (and its famed Komodo Dragon monitor lizards), volcanoes and additional sweet beaches. But until then, I am in Kuala Lumpur, which is arguably the world's largest shopping complex. For anyone who maintains the bizarre notion that conspicuous consumption is a western or American failing, please take note: you have seen nothing until you have seen KL.

It's actually disgusting, and I have been to Beverly Hills.

I mean, how many Cartiers does one need? Apparently quite a lot, and not only that, one needs access to such fineries at multiple locations within walking distance of one another. On a related side note, I think that Luis Vuitton is really pretty ugly stuff.

Anyway, please enjoy this sweet Praying Mantis video that I shot the other night in Thailand outside my room.

Are you disappointed?

Why be sad about tiny images? Click above to see the Himalayas in all their glory!

Something that I am not completely excited about in Blogger (the site you are on right now) is that my sweet travel photos are tiny....

Well, if you ever want to see more detail, just click on the picture and make it big! Easy as 1-2..

Burma and the Water Festival

A street kid who hung around our guesthouse. He didn't beg really, but would accompany us out and sometimes we would buy him food.

Burma is the sort of place that, upon arrival, you are left with the feeling that you have made a mistake. The error is not one of having come there, but one of having not come there sooner and for long enough. I was feeling pinched for time in the timeless Yangon upon arrival with three weeks still to go.

A view of some of the temples of Bagan (more on this later)

Although the internet and TV have finally (and pretty recently) come to this very isolated country, it still maintains its own pace and time in the universe. At times, it is perfectly in sync with the rest of the world and at others I feel as if I am in a Rudyard Kipling novel. DVDs are sold by the truckload in the market right next to a man who polishes brass by hand on a cloth on the sidewalk. My beard has grown long and neglected, so I pop into a dirt-floor barber’s shop (which is directly across from the Samsung showroom filled with new flatscreen TVs and freezers) and treat myself to a 20-cent trim. The young male barber works cleanly and precisely with his scissors, frequently snip-snipping them for added flourish when they are nowhere near my beard, and makes me perfect in the length of two Celine Dion songs.

Later, when I was preparing to leave the country, I stop by again to get spruced up. The same young man trims me, but this time the power is out and a storm is coming. While he works by the light of a dim LED desklamp with hand-operated antique trimmers, the rain kicks up. I don't notice at first due to the dim conditions, but water is flowing into- no, through- the shop. The sewer has overflowed somewhere deeper in the block of buildings and now a small river is escaping to the street right through the lean-to shop. Cockroachs, mosquitos and some some alarmingly large red centipedes come up from somewhere below my feet to avoid the rising black water to seek shelter on the wall in front of me. The barber works on, ankle deep in the streaming tributary. He gets me a stool to put my feet on. He finishes and I pay my 20 cents, grudgingly dropping my feet into the filthy torrent. I walk home in the rain because I just want to get clean.

A tin-roof Buddhist monastery where we slept.

When I was doing a bit of research on Burma in Bangkok to prepare for our arrival, I saw that the weather forecast for Mandalay was to top 107 degrees. Slightly concerned by this fact, I packed as little as possible in my bag so that at least I wouldn’t have too much to lug around in Bikram-yoga heat. I was in for a pleasant surprise when we arrived in Burma- the Burmese New Year was about to begin. Normally I think festivals are over rated. Either you get some sappy made-for-tourists ethnic dance routine or, frankly, you (the common tourist) are not invited into the Byzantine rituals of the locale. This is certainly not the case in Burma. New Year is one part street party, one part music festival and one part water park. Little boys, young women, old men- everyone produces buckets of water to dump on everyone else. Southeast Asia knows a thing or two about fantastic quantities of water from above, so believe me when I say the days are wet. The idea is that it cleans the bad luck of the past year, but I less than secretly suspect it has a lot more to do with just having a good time. After all, if water is to wash away bad luck, what is all of the whiskey for?

Arturo takes a break from all the action in Burma at a tea shop. Ok, it's true, we spent at least half of our waking hours in tea shops...

Everyone is invited (a little too enthusiastically, sometimes) and if it is a show for tourists, it would have to go down as the most ingeniously executed tourist show of all time for we foreigners, as always, are few and far between in Burma.

Arturo asked the question: ‘Where is the line between homosexuality and simple aggressive fun?’ I still don't know the answer to that one. In their enthusiasm, many elated Burmese guys pull us by the wrists into the street, in front of the stage where bands played and dozens of volunteers spray endless quantities of water on the parading traffic and revelers. We would dance there in strange waltzes, jigs and water stomping dances in the inches-deep accumulated water in the streets. If I could describe Burmese music, it would be like this: Burma is a country that has lost the words to a comprehensive collection of American hit songs from the past 4 decades and is perfectly happy to just make them up. Nearly every song is familiar, but sung in Burmese and many people you talk to don’t even realize that these are not the originals.

Strangely, for a country strongly affected by the monsoons, Burma's roads love becoming small lakes.

As foreigners, we are almost like visiting dignitaries and manage to get into all the VIP water spraying stations. We get up on the large stage and are handed firehoses. I open it up on the dancers and open top trucks and jeeps bursting with people which are trawling the grand avenue in front of us. It is a serious amount of water and joining me are dozens of others dowsing the revelers below as the band plays on to our left. A helmeted police officer tries to make sense of the scene and direct traffic to move along as there is a jam waiting to be sprayed for at least an hour behind them. It is so crowded that even though the street is six lanes across plus a generous median, I have difficulty passing through.

Miles of smiles- People are really happy about the water festival. I mean it.

At six pm, the festivities promptly draw to a close for the day. This is fine by me, since the guys are getting a little drunk and rowdy. We start walking back to the hotel and a young boy, perhaps five years old, spots me. He is holding a jug of water, and I am holding nothing except a towering stature over him. He starts toward me with the jug, and playfully, I start toward him with mock bravado. I lunge straight for him with my arms high above my head. The kid howls and diverts off to the side with a comical timing, I could not have scripted something better. A policeman looking on cracks a smile and reveals his red and deeply rotted betel nut stained teeth.