Our Trip to Burma

Yangon:
Because the boys are in school a lot of the year, we plan most of our travels around their summer holidays. So a week after getting back home from Canada, we headed off to Myanmar or Burma. This time we were attending the Bo Tree Seminar in Yangon to learn more about Buddhism. This couple, one Buddhist, the other Christian, were guest speakers at the conference.


What are the Burmese reading these days? A Purpose Driven Life.







Mandalay:
After the seminar, we took a family trip on the weekend to Mandalay which is in central Burma and is much dryer. Here are the boys traveling through the streets of Mandalay on rickshaws.












In Mandalay, we visited the world’s biggest book (below). It consists of 729 marble slabs (one is in the house or stupa behind us) on which are inscribed the entire Tripitaka (Buddhist canon). If one person read aloud for 8 hours a day it would take 450 days to read the whole book. Unfortunately, we couldn't read any of it.






Arthur had some fun barganing with these women before he finally settled on buying the larger gong.