Work-a-day Mandalay

This was our last day in Mandalay and we used it to explore, on foot, work-a-day Burmese life in the older part of the city  --jade and precious/semiprecious gem markets; marble factories making statuary;  a bronze factory;  kalaga tapestry and wood carving workshops.  The untrained eye can have trouble distinguishing between a piece of carefully crafted jade-appearing mineral costing a few dollars, and another of real jade costing thousands.  The same holds true for other precious gems such as topaz, ruby, and sapphire.  Both the genuine and the imitations are found in the markets.  An innocent scam, caged birds.  You pay the seller a small amount to release one into the wild, freeing their spirit.  The birds have been trained however, to return to their cage.  The seller repeats the cycle.

The slide show opens with an architecturally modern monastery.  It closes, appropriately, with a two century old wooden teak monastery, reached by a horse-cart ride over dirt roads past fluorescent green rice paddies in the countryside.   Appropriately because tomorrow we would take the bus to the Bagan plains with its long history of Buddhist scholarship dating back to the 9th century.