တွေးမိတွေးရာ (My Musings)

Exotic dresses from Burma , originally uploaded by lwinmoe .

Exotic dresses from Burma , originally uploaded by lwinmoe .

The shop owner from Chatuchak market , originally uploaded by lwinmoe . She sells all sorts of exotic ethnic dresses from Burma at Chatuchak weekend market in Bangkok. Fai Thor Fan Phijittra Photha Jatujak Weekend market Section 25, Room 229

80-year old Karen dress , originally uploaded by lwinmoe . I went to Chatuchak weekend market a while ago. I found a shop where they sell items from Burma. There was an 80-year old Karen dress (the red one in the picture). The price was 5,000 Bahts (1 U.S. dollar = 35 Bahts)

I have been accepted by the Indiana University in Bloomington  at their  linguistics  department. I will be focusing on  computational linguistics . Hopefully, I will get a visa to the U.S. and will be able to go there in August.

Ravi Zacharias , originally uploaded by lwinmoe . (photo taken by Beauty Shwe) Last Sunday, I went to Evangelical Church of Bangkok to listen to Ravi Zacharias , the author of " The Lotus and the Cross: Jesus Talks with Buddha " and many other books.

These kids are great!

golden-happy-hot-pot-receipt , originally uploaded by lwinmoe . The picture is the receipt for six of us from ရွှေကောင်း (Shwe Kaung) hot pot restaurant. You can see a glimpse of what it is like to eat out at a high-end restaurant in Yangon. Note that the exchange rate is about 1,000 Kyats to a dollar.

From " Thai Bloggers Face Jail Without Bail for Discussing Monarchy ": "In the past, people fled to the jungle to share their political beliefs," Suwicha said, referring to a Communist insurgency in the 1970s that was suppressed by the [Thai] government. "Now we have Web sites. If they want to stop it, they must stop the technology itself."

စမူဆာနဲ့ကြံရည် (samoosa and sugar cane juice) , originally uploaded by lwinmoe . Samoosa and sugar cane juice in Rangoon.

ဗူးသီးကြော် (gourd fritter) , originally uploaded by lwinmoe . Gourd fritters in Rangoon.

Mon monk , originally uploaded by lwinmoe . We were looking at the dictionary of Modern Spoken Mon by Harry Shorto .

I just upgraded my hosting platform to Movable Type software. I apologize if you receive some old posts in your feed reader because of the upgrade. I think this new platform will make my life a lot easier to manage posts. I will be able to focus more on content than fixing technical issues. I am still missing some old posts from 1998 to 2003. And I also lost tagging information in the conversion process. The categories are wrong and some photo links are broken, too. I will fix those later. Please bear with me for the moment. :) By the way, I no longer have RSS feed. The atom feed is here .

The flight attendant announced that the plane would land at the Yangon International Airport in a few minutes. I gathered all my documents (passport, arrival card, etc.), got my backpacks and got ready. I was excited. I hadn't been home for about three years. The flight attendant then announced that the time difference between Bangkok and Yangon was 30 minutes. She gently reminded us to change our watches to local time which was 30 minutes behind Bangkok. One western expat living in Bangkok joked that it was more like 30 years difference instead of 30 minutes. Yangon indeed was almost like 30 years behind Bangkok. Crumbling taxis, polluted air, pot-holed road, no electricity and noisy generator's sounds downtown all reminded us of the current situation in Burma. Yangon International Airport was renovated and since had become modern. I heard that the electricity went out occasionally, though. We didn't need airport shuttles like in the old days. We could walk directly

I was having some hosting problems the last few weeks. Now it has all been worked out. I will post some entries later. See you soon.