Mandalay: Tomorrow does not belong to us.

It still doesn’t sound like a real place to me. For a long time I think I vaguely conflated Mandalay with Xanadu–ancient, splendorous, in a famous poem. Mandalay is the name of the house in Rebecca, while Xanadu was of course Charles Foster Kane’s estate ( “cost: no man can say.”) Can you blame me for thinking them similar? It’s still such a sonorous name to me, with its echoes of mandala, the way the sound falls and then seems to float away on that last long vowel.

After two passes through Mandalay, I will be the first to admit that I was completely wrong. Is it possible to be more wrong about a place?

Splendorous? “Cleaner, greener land?” Couldn’t Kipling come up with a rhyme for “hot, dusty shithole”?

What’s funny is that Mandalay’s not ancient. It’s not even old; it was founded only 150 years ago by King Mindon, who was trying to fulfill a prophecy that a great Buddhist city would one day exist on that spot. There is a large statue of Buddha on Mandalay Hill pointing the way.

Mandalay spent a short time as the last royal capital of Burma and then, in 1885, the British annexed it after the Third (and last) Anglo-Burmese War and turned it into their headquarters for Upper Burma.

As far as sights go: In the middle of the city, there’s a Royal Palace surrounded by a moat; it was recently restored using forced labor, and part of it is a military base. Mandalay Hill is the only high point on an other completely flat plain. A walk to the top is interesting enough, as you pass through several temples, although it had a listless aura to it when I went: no tourists, a few pilgrims, many hawkers of souvenirs lying motionless in the heat of day.

Yes, Mandalay’s charms are not exactly forthcoming. It could be almost any third-world city, with its wide broken streets, its crumbling buildings and occasional out-of-place new shopping center, its motorcycles and heat. (An aside: I went into a shopping mall and children were riding up and down on the escalators for fun, with such innocent joy it made me love and despair for Myanmar at the same time. Which is pretty much how I constantly felt here.)

On a day-to-day level, Mandalay was probably my least favorite place so far. With a combination of travel fatigue, heat, and the frustrations of Myanmar in general, I found myself on a short fuse. Trishaw drivers would pester me and I’d snap at them. Hotels in Myanmar all want payment in US dollars, and they scrutinize every note you hand them like collectors; a woman at my Mandalay hotel wouldn’t accept a $1 bill because of the tiniest tear in it and I wanted to scream: What’s wrong with your country that you can’t accept a dollar bill with a tear in it? Why doesn’t the Internet work? Why don’t you have electricity half of the time? Why? Why? Why? I was mad at everyone. The government, of course. The people, for not doing more about it. The rest of the world–countries that deal with Myanmar, countries that have sanctions against them.

Despite all this, Mandalay is where Myanmar started to open up to me a bit. I saw the Moustache Brothers (see next post) perform, and their candor felt like the first deep breath I’d taken the entire time I’d been here.

And I made friends with a couple of university students and got to hang out with them, which was great. We didn’t discuss politics in any deep way, but they had a mindset that I sense a lot of young people share–a kind of acceptance that the country is the way it is, and very little optimism about the future. Their hopes hinged on getting out of Myanmar, not changing it. They wanted to go to school elsewhere in Asia, or possibly even the U.S. and were trying to get identity cards and passports. No easy task, I learned, particularly if you’re not ethnically Burmese (Bamar).

At the end of a night out at their favorite restaurant, one of the boys summed up his and his friends’ prospects for the future in Myanmar with a turn of phrase so poetical it made my chest hurt:

“Tomorrow does not belong to us.”