I met Mike before he left and picked his brain about travel in Myanmar: carry lots of US dollars, yes, you can buy plane tickets. Then I headed to the Union of Myanmar embassy to get my visa. What a great way to spend an afternoon: wait in one line, oops, wrong line, get forms, fill them out, why do they want to know my father's name?, wait in the long line that's not moving, pay $20, then out the door. It should be ready tomorrow. Then I went to a nearby travel agent to check my options. It looks like it will be cheaper to buy a ticket to Kathmandu in Rangoon, rather than here. I postponed the purchase until tomorrow. I really hate to leave South East Asia already, since it was supposed to be the core of my trip. But trekking season in Nepal is March and April. Hopefully I'll be back.

That night I went to see a movie. Since I've already seen the Hollywood movies playing, I decided to check out a Thai comedy called "Oh Lucky Man." It defies description, but the basic plot was the God tells a guy to stop womanizing and He'll punish him if he sleeps with a woman he doesn't love. Of course he doesn't stop and all sorts of wacky adventures ensue, involving the Bangkok mafia, a psychopathic knife-weilding murderer, flatulence, and the mysterious disappearance of his "thing." Of course he ended up falling in love with the "unattractive" woman, who sported a huge mole with two feet of hair growing out of it on her face. You've seen it before, only this time it didn't really make sense. The moral of the story seemed to be you can only marry someone if they've had plastic surgery. It was pretty bad. Perhaps it lost something in the translation.

The movie reminded me of something I've been meaning to comment on: the King. Everybody loves him. Before movies they play the national anthem and show pictures of him and everybody stands up. Every shop and business not only has a little Buddhist shine, but a picture of the King and Queen, and probably a calendar too. Every town has a huge picture of him in a gold frame in the middle of the street, and there are billboards everywhere. Here in Bangkok on a main road there are about 12 huge pictures in the median. I think it's great. If you're going to have a monarch, you might as well venerate him, or else what's the point? Entertainment? However the Thais have taken this to a slightly creepy level. Everyone also displays a picture of Rama V, who reigned more than 100 years ago (he's the guy who ceded lots of territory to the British to keep the kingdom free of colonization). People say prayers to and leave offerings to him for good luck. As Mike pointed out, this would be like us praying to Abe Lincoln: "Abe Lincoln, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name..." Weird.