Traveling Myanmar is tough and tiring.. 😉 Especially when you want to cover all religious sites throughout the country.
This is because Myanmar has 6 types of religious buildings and shrines that basically cover every corner of the street:
1. Buddhist Temples (where you can go inside)
2. Buddhit Pagodas (where you can’t go inside. Called a Stupa also)
3. Buddhist Monasteries
4. Nat spirit houses (leftover of Myanmar’s animism, they believe in a Nat spirit for each village)
5. Hindu temples
6. Mosques
Huge Buddha statues, either reclining or sitting, are also commonly found throughout Myanmar. And then there are also the Golden Rock to visit, sacred snakes (believed to be reincarnations), stones for good luck, and what not. Fascinating!
Tired of pagodas, temples and monasteries? Then it’s time to leave Myanmar! 😉
A holy snake in a temple in Bago. Eats 5 chicken a week!
The Shwedagon Paya, Myanmar’s most religious site. Every Buddhist in Myanmar tries to make it to this pagoda once in their lifetime.
An enormous reclining Buddha in Mawlamyine
John
hi Lilian, I studied your drawing THINGS TO SEE IN MYANMAR carefully and the thing that kept popping up in my mind (…you’re fantastic drawing talent aside) how many hairs does a person leave behind in it’s life time? and where are they, the hairs? There have been moments, just a few times in my life, I’ve managed to pull a hair out of a sandwich or even a carefully well prepared beautiful meal. But that wasn’t wasn’t your mothers fault. I love her hair and she wears it long to please me. I have haven’t traveled to the places you’ve been but I seen a lot. So I’m thinking. What if all these years and so many travels, people were finding hairs of mine! And they didn’t know what to make of it. But couldn’t just discard them, that wouldn’t be right. So, lay a couple of rocks around them for the time being, to protect them. And now in then, people would see that stack of rocks falling and sliding apart, and the would re-adjust them, fix it. After a couple of hundred years of taking care of these rocks and restoring them some guy thought: we can built them rocks a lot better and (I don’t know where this is going but I love your posting…. Love , Dad.)