Word: maymyo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...neighbors. In 2005, the junta mysteriously moved the nation's capital from Rangoon to a new city called Naypyidaw, carved out of the jungle at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. A lavish military retreat complete with a man-made beach is also being built near Maymyo, where the Defense Services Academy is located. While the military élite bunkers itself in rarefied surroundings, ordinary Burmese are suffering. Educational funding has dried up, and the World Health Organization estimates that the junta annually spends a maximum of $10 per person on health care. As a result, killer diseases...
...locking out the modern world, the country has also, in effect, locked in the legacy of its British past, and with it an air of sweet nostalgia. In the pine-scented hill station of Maymyo (named after one Colonel May), tidy rose gardens still grace half-timbered houses with names like All in All and Fernside, and horse-drawn victorias recall a gaslighted London. The town's central clock tolls with the exact chime of Big Ben, and the local rest house, formerly the chummery, or bachelor's quarters, of the Bombay-Burma Trading Co., still serves roast beef each...
There is the Kindly Burmese bound for Maymyo who offers Theroux fried sparrows for lunch. On the way to Kyoto, he meets a Japanese professor whose specialty is teaching a two-year course on Henry James' The Golden Bowl. Depressed by the breadlines in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) he is reassured by a chauvinist from Calcutta: "You call those bread queues? In Calcutta, we have bread queues twice as long as that." During the long, icy trip across Siberia, Theroux is befriended by a Russian who wants to hear all about North American hockey teams, including the "Bostabroons, Do-ront...
...sent them to rule you," he said of Burma's departed British colonizers. "The English were sitting on your necks and were robbing your people." At road stops, he made much of geography-"Our country is both European and Asiatic, and territorially it belongs more to Asia." In Maymyo, to an audience of Burmese soldiers long engaged in fighting Communist guerrillas, he thought it best to speak on disarmament...
...When Maymyo went the way of Yenangyaung, Belden and a British doctor were last to leave-fired the scout-cars, burned the official documents, finally lit out after the General with a tin of cheese and no water at all. He was with Uncle Joe's polyglot army of 400 all through the desperate 140-mile trek through the almost trackless jungle and over the head-hunter-infested mountains into India. He tended the wounded, chorused Christian hymns and American jazz with the Burmese nurses to keep up morale, escaped getting dysentery but lost so much weight the rings...