Monday, August 30, 2010

Myanmar - Places to Spend


That's a picture of me at my first wine tasting. Did I bother to learn the name of the winery? No. I think it might be something like The Red Roof Winery.


That's a picture of one of the walls at the spa I visited in Myanmar. This was the pedicure floor. The lower floor was for massage and manicures.


And that's a picture of my deep fried soft shell crab that I had a part of my 5 course meal at a four or five star restaurant in Myanmar. Why am I sharing this? Well, I had decided that I would not indulge while overseas, but my instructor had other plans in mind because it was so cheap.

Wine tasting - $4
Pedicure + reflexology foot massage + shoulder massage - $18
Meal at 4-5 star restaurant - $10

Luxury treatment for all under $40 dollars. My treatments at the spa ran around 2 hours by the way. So there was a little bit of an exchange. I had a lot of nights with upset stomach while visiting the second poorest country in the world, but I also got the star treatment on the cheap.

My instructor could not help but chat about Thailand where the massages were $2 for most of the time. Thailand. I would have liked to visit there, but for this study abroad trip. I am happy that I got a chance to witness global arbitrage at it's best.

I was told that the avg. monthly income was $40.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Life In a Day - Realizations



Okay so a couple of hours ago something terrible happened. Well, I am not quite sure if it is terrible or just an occurance. After interviewing two very impressive characters this week on Skype and recording the interviews with Vodburner I went to create the videos only to discover that I was out of hard drive space. Thank you Vodburner for not warning that you average file size is larger than life. Yes, two 1 hour interviews took up more than half of my hard drive, that was 60 GB! I know, no onw should have less than 500 GB these days, but...

What surprized me was that I was more concerned with getting these interviews to the persons that I interviewed and my blog posts set for this month than completing my school work. I not being effective in any areas right now. I have not finished any blog posts. I'm behind in my class work, and I have not began to prepare for my trip in two days from now. Yes, everything is a mess, and strangely, I am okay with it. I've accepted that the class was designed for us to fail in week three. Vodburner is designed to take over hard drives and crash computers, and that I might possibly not care about completing my Master's degree as much as I did 12 months ago. I thought I could keep it together for the two months that I have left in the program but maybe not.

But, I am very proud to have taken part in the life in a day submissions. I felt that it was more important to get this submission in by the deadline than it was to get my reading discussion post in, which was uncharacteristically difficult.