Black Swan's Ballet of Blood(Lair)

Shiminay

There is. I should probably turn the sound dampening on to do something about that.

This show is so damn weird, but it's really good too

LadyFenghuang

Black Swan wrote: »

Rocky Horror Picture Show? :cool:

YES! Love it...did you hear they might be doing some kind of come back for the crystal maze?

Shiminay

I heard that too, I hope it translates well, the 90's was longer ago than some of us like to admit

Gremlinertia

Slow night is sloooooow

Shiminay

Not much doing Grem?

Gremlinertia

Kept going but clock just isn't moving at all.

Shiminay

eurgh - THE WORST!

Gremlinertia

Yup but getting there now. It'll be fairly directly to bed for tired grem I think.

Shiminay

New sleep cycle behaving?

Gremlinertia

It's a work in progress at the moment, like all habits it takes a while to adjust I guess. Speaking of sleep cycles have you just pulled an all nighter?

Shiminay

Ah yea, be a few weeks before you're settled into it.

I was all over the place this week, the all nighter will actually sort me out

Gremlinertia

Yeah definitely already slipped back into old ways here and there but it takes a while.

Tokyo

Morning/evening all - long time no see

Finally have internet back again

Gremlinertia

mike_ie wrote: »

Morning/evening all - long time no see

Finally have internet back again

How do and welcome back Mike.. How was the holiday from the information superhighway?.

Shiminay

Hey Mike, good to see you again How's everything?

Tokyo

Gremlinertia wrote: »

How do and welcome back Mike.. How was the holiday from the information superhighway?.

Shiminay wrote: »

Hey Mike, good to see you again How's everything?

Not so much of a holiday - I moved to Myanmar a few weeks ago, so have been trying to get set up here for the past while. Internet access, as you might imagine, is pretty abysmal here, but I have gotten 3G access (of sorts) sort of working here, so at least I can get online with some form of regularity again, which is good.

Other than that, everything is good, thanks for asking It's good to be back here again though. How are things back home?

Shiminay

Well, it's Leaving Cert season, so obviously the weather's hot

What are your first impressions of the place?

Gremlinertia

As Shim said, very humid with a few sunny (eek) days.. No news of any import bar we may have a crazy cow again... Oh and I'm drinking lemsip in June.. June ffs!

Tokyo

Shiminay wrote: »

Well, it's Leaving Cert season, so obviously the weather's hot

What are your first impressions of the place?

I was here in 2008 as an aid worker, and it's changed quite a bit in terms of lettign foreigners into the country. It wouldn't be an easy place to start out if you hadn't spent a bit of time overseas before, but I have to say that for the most part I like it so far. Like a lot of Asia, it's dirty, and the concept of not simply chucking all of your waste in the local river simply doesn't exist. Pretty bloody hot out here at the moment, with monsoon rains every afternoon.

That being said, unlike a lot of Asia, it's very much untouched by tourism (so far), so it's not like, say, Bangkok, where you constantly have people coming up to you trying to hawk stuff off on you. The language is tough (tonal language), but I'm learning enough to get by slowly but surely. The place stinks of colonialism at times though, with locals kowtowing to their white superiors if you go down towards the expensive hotels, which is a hard pill to swallow if you are from the sticks out in the west of Ireland.

On the plus side, beers are about 50 cents, a litre of whiskey is in and around the euro mark. Boards Beers Yangon anyone?

Tokyo

Gremlinertia wrote: »

As Shim said, very humid with a few sunny (eek) days.. No news of any import bar we may have a crazy cow again... Oh and I'm drinking lemsip in June.. June ffs!

Yeah, just caught a glimpse of the Irish papers this morning, saw that the mad cows are back again. If you want heat, come out here for a bit - 30 degrees in the shade, 80% humidity....

Gremlinertia

Even the thought of that sort of temperature and humidity makes me feel weak..

Tokyo

Yeah, it's pretty draining to be honest. It's taken this long for my body to give up on drenching me in sweat every time I leave the apartment - first few weeks were pretty miserable in that respect.

Gremlinertia

What's the time difference like?. What are you doing out there, if you don't mind me asking?.

Tokyo

Gremlinertia wrote: »

What's the time difference like?. What are you doing out there, if you don't mind me asking?.

Time difference is 5-and-a-half hours ahead of home right now, so it's not too bad - for the most part I can still have a chat with family and friends at home without having to sit up in the middle of the night to do so.

I came over here to take up a position with an English school here - I've taught in Asia in the past, and right now I teach all core subjects - mathematics, science and so on. However, my background is in engineering and development, so at the moment I'm also doing a lot of IT and dev work at the same time - I reckon that I can make a good niche for myself here with respect to that if I play my cards right.

It's frustrating though - the school is trying to introduce a cloud based education program in a country with the internet capability of 1994... :pac: So right now, trying to figure out a way of migrating most of the material to local servers without upsetting the suppliers of the educational program, who much prefer to have all of the information on their servers in the USA and Singapore, so that they can keep tight control of copyright, etc.

Shiminay

Ah yea, I forgot you'd mentioned you were there before, apologies, sounds like there are some improvements since you were there last, would it suggest that it's moved at a slow or fast pace overall?

Gremlinertia

Oof that is challenging, fair play to you!

Tokyo

Shiminay wrote: »

would it suggest that it's moved at a slow or fast pace overall?

The best answer I can give you to that is that both are correct, as confusing as that might be. In some ways the place is growing at a phenonemal rate - in one particular area of downtown Yangon, you can watch the high rise buildings inch upwards on a daily basis. you can hire manual labour for a dollar a day, so it's actually cheaper to just throw a couple of hundred local labourers and a shovel each at a building site, than to bring in machinery. Traffic is another thing that has changed a lot - up until a few years ago, there were almost no cars in Yangon, other than those belonging to people high up in the military. Now it's bumper to bumper.

In many other ways though, particularly outside of Yangon, it hasn't changed a bit in the last 500 years. It's a very conservative place - if I made the mistake of taking one of the women I work with for a coffee, she'd most likely be labelled as a whore for some time to come. Cleaning staff in the school bow when they meet me, and stay bowed until they have passed me, because (a) I'm a man, and (b) I'm white, and that is particularly disconcerting. However it's confusing in that aspect, because although it seems to be quite a subservient society, it's not an overly male dominated one, particularly compared to other places I've lived. I was walking down the street the last day, and passed by a woman who was tearing her husband a new one out in the middle of the street, because he'd apparently gotten drunk the night beforehand and came home at an ungodly hour. And he stood there and took it. It's a hard place to get a read of, for sure.

Gremlinertia

Interesting, sounds like a book I read by a man who came from rural India to urban. Massively disparate. You'll have to put up a few photos if your net is able for it..

Shiminay

That's kinda the answer I was expecting in a way so it makes a lot of sense It's always about the money so many times, getting the country hooked on oil is the first step in a tried and tested method of corporate dominance. Then buy the land from the government without the knowledge or full understanding of the native people, employ the people you've taken off the land to build your new towers to economic might and the human cost be damned.

Tourism is good though, that brings cross cultural exposure that can't be controlled and the pressure will be on to get at the very least a functioning 4G infrastructure as a matter of priority to several of the new businesses that'll be moving in or setting up. A population armed with justice and an internet connection can be a dangerous thing.

Gremlinertia

Nearly home.. Feeling pretty nasty at this point. Head is just all fogged up..