Who'd of thunk it.

Terminal 21 is a huge multi-storey shopping mall in central Bangkok.

You can get anything there

Get em while you wait.

Do you really want your airplane running Windows?

We are in Yangon again, getting ready to fly to Bangkok in Thailand.

We left Inle Lake early yesterday morning. It was cold and raining
when we left at 6:30 AM in the open longtail boat for the 45 minute
ride to the 60 minute taxi ride to the airport. We bundled up in
double clothes, put on plastic ponchos and Susan even put ziplock bags
on her feet which were already wearing double socks. We definitely did
not want to get sick again on our way out of this country. It took us
almost two weeks to shake the colds we had when we left Malaysia. The
people at our hotel in Inle were so wonderful - four of them stood on
the dock in the rain singing "Black Eyed Susan" to us as we pulled
away. We would have taken a photo but we were huddled under umbrellas.

We are in a lovely "boutique" hotel called East Hotel. After showering
and warming up we went out and had some wonderful street food and took
a lot of photos as the sun was setting. The streets were full of
people.

Our flight is at 8:30 AM so it's wake up at 5 again. Next stop is
Bangkok where will meet up with good friends from Toronto who have
been visiting Thailand and Cambodia the past two weeks. They are
heading home this weekend but at least we will have a couple of days
of eating and shopping together in Bangkok.

We will weite next from Thailand where hopefully the Internet is more
stable. It has been spotty throughout Burma often approaching speeds
of 0 kb/s. Sometimes only working at 4 AM, often dropping connection
in the middle of sending an email, often losing emails in the great
bit bucket in the sky. Many times I had to retype entire emails which
got lost after I pressed send. Hopefully this will be better in
Thailand.

The last photo in this series is the view from our room.

Burmese silk is world famous. The silk factory is another one of the
obligatory stops the boatman makes on the trip to the indigenous PaO
village at the south end of the lake. First they toured us through
the factory where several young girls at old looms are demonstrating
the process. We wound up in the shop where we found the product to be
ordinary and of mediocre quality. Pretty much for the tourists. The
next day we found another factory that had much better quality goods
at one third the price. Most of their product is exported to U.S. and
European stores

These photos are from the first day's visit.

We took a long tail boat trip to Samkar, an indigenous village at the
south end of the lake. The boat driver made several obligatory stops
at the factories that sell stiff to the tourists. Among them was this
cheroot factory where cigars (cheroots they call them) of various
styles and sizes are being made by hand.

We spent the day yesterday in a longtail boat travelling down the lake to Samkar and back stopping on the way at several old pagodas, a silk factory and a waterside restaurant for lunch.

Just a note to wish you all the best of the holiday season and a happy
happy New Year.

I created this panorama on my iOS device with the Photosynth app,
http://www.photosynth.net.

You should be able to pan and zoom the photo after you click the link
(not the photo below - the link above).