Mandalay Day 2

Mandalay Day 2
We awoke to take a boat ride to Mingun, a town up the Irrawaddy River from Mandalay. A previous king had tried to build the largest pagoda in the world, but he never finished. Why? Because the priests warned him that once he was finished, he would die. So he stopped. Over the years, the site has been destroyed somewhat by earthquakes, but it is still bratty impressive. There is a huge bell that was supposed to be part of the complex, but never used. They have it mounted in the little town. It supposedly is the 2nd largest bell in the world. I haven't had a chance to check Wikipedia on that. Of course, there were dozens of teenage girls accosting us to sell something. "Allo! Where you from? What your name? You like my [insert tchotchke here]?" Over and over. When you say no, they say "maybe later", and ask you again in 30 seconds. Earl of our group agreed with the maybe later, and they caught up with him 20 minutes later. He agreed to a Tshirt, but the one he picked was too small. 4 minutes later, she showed up with the right size, and he finally bought it. Ann and Elsa of course bought some pretty skirts and other stuff. We saw cute buffalo taxis. There was also a very large white marble pagoda, but we weren't given much information about it.
After the boat ride back to town, we went to the "Golden Duck" for lunch. Donald out front, where we took the obligatory pictures. Ann actually ate the Chinese food! The picture somehow is too big to upload here, but was able to get to FaceBook. I have been having some problems with the size of pictures and uploading. The iPad doesn't allow me to shrink them from 5-6MB to 50KB or less (at least not that I've figured out), so I am limited in what I can upload. Yes I can change the size in my camera to adjust, but I don't have the time for that. Maybe next time I'll bring the miniPC along and have a real computer.
After rest period, we went to the Gold leaf factory. They take thin slivers of gold, and pound them for hours to make them thinner and thinner, down to 3 microns, or .003 mm. They apply these to little pieces of paper for the gold leaf people apply to the Buddhas. I wondered what would happen if they sneezed!
Then to a Wood carving / sewing / puppets workshop. The very intricate carvings are laid out on a block of wood, and hand chiseled. Impressive. In addition they were sewing the intricate beadwork onto fabric, and making puppets.
Finally to the famous U Bein Teak bridge. This goes completely across a lake, and was VERY rickety. When we got halfway, we descended to a little island and climbed onto little gondola-like boats and watched the sunset from the lake. Down at water's edge, I could see more of how rickety it really was. I could actually see through the pilings from all the rot. I asked how often the bridge collapses, and was told "about every 4 years"! I was glad we weren't walking back.
The sunset was pretty spectacular, though.
We had a hard time getting back to our hotel because of rush hour traffic in Mandalay, made worse by some demonstration and a power outage to the few electric signals in town. Crossing intersections was abominable. When we got back to the hotel, we decided to eat there rather than venture out into town. This was good since I was exhausted, anyway. I was able to get some pizza and slept well for out 5:30 wake up call. But I was up at 4 anyway...


Sent from my iPad