Myanmar part 1

I know I have been a complete slacker the last few months on the blog. It's because I have been faced with the daunting task of recording our trip. Or at least a shortened version of recording our trip. In case you didn't know, we took our family to Myanmar and Thailand the end of September and the first of October. It was an amazing experience and I am so glad we were able to share it with our kids. I managed to make a "best of" out of the 5000 or so pictures (no typo, there really were that many pictures taken). I'm not going to try to do a day by day account, but I will try to hit the highlights.

 First stop was in Yangon, Myanmar where we visited Shwedegon. The time change is pretty much opposite there so if we look a little out of it, that's why.

 Shwedegon pagoda is the most famous Buddhist pagoda. It is a huge plaza with tons of temples and pagodas everywhere with Buddha in each one. This is the main one standing in the middle of the plaza.

 Then we went on to Bagan. Old Bagan is a 16 square mile area with over 2000 pagodas and temples. We were able to visit many of them. The boys loved "exploring" the secret passages ways and running through the hallways.

 There is gold everywhere in this country. It didn't matter that the people were poor, they would buy gold leaf and place it on certain Buddhas. Some places the gold was layered a couple inches thick.

 In the evening they took us to a tall temple to overlook the countryside for sunset. Everywhere you looked, there were more pagodas than you could count.

 We took a horse drawn buggy ride to visit some of the different pagodas. Zeke thought he was driving the cart because the driver let him help hold the reigns.

Well, that's probably good for a first post. Just a little more about Myanmar. Myanmar, aka Burma, is located just West of Thailand in Southeast Asia. It has just recently opened up to tourism so we thought we would take the chance to visit this culture rich country.