Mandalay Hill (Sunset)

The electricity kept going on and off last night. Breakfast was toast with a egg. We were the last in and there were girls a couple years younger than us practising there singing. Out here all the men wear long thin tartan skirts. We moved to Nylon Hostel. We are on the top floor or roof! We get a good view from the top. The room is bigger than the last and has a strange air con system that turns on and off every couple of minutes! We went to the 'travel agent' which was the only one we found after our long walk around town yesterday. We booked the 3 city sightseeing for tomorrow at 8am as it was too late in the day for us to start. We were going to go and do something cultural but Morag read her book and I caught up on some much needed sleep! The room was boiling though. We took a trishaw to the bottom of Mandalay hill. We had to take off our shoes and walk barefoot to the top. It was completely different to what I expected. There were sets of stairs all the way to the top. There were lots of stops on the way up before taking the next set of stairs. There were gigantic Golden Buddhas. We stopped at where we thought was the top and had a long chat to a lovely monk. The view was incredible. Apparently the monks favourite song was Baby-Justin Beiber!! Which Morag and I both found hilarious. About 10 minutes before sunset the monk told us that he was going to walk to the top. We had no idea there was more so followed him up. We were both scared we were going to miss it as it was still quite far to go! When we made it up there you got a 360degree view. We said bye to the monk as he was going to walk back. The view sunset was amazing. Chatted to lots of locals on the way down to the bottom and bumped into our monk! We walked along the palace wall for a long time until we decided we should get a trishaw. So many motorbikes stopped for us but thought it was a bad idea. We walked for 20 minutes until one stopped for us. We saw a car follow us and when we stopped to get off the car stopped 100 metres behind so Morag and I swiftly walked ahead. But the car drove next to us and asked if we wanted a lift. But they didn't leave us unlike other ones. So we quickly ran away and went to into the restaurant we went in yesterday for lunch. A local man came to join us that spoke amazing English and sounded like he was from Australia. We learnt masses tonight about the culture. We noticed that on the streets there were masses of pink stains. So we asked what it was and he told us that it was instead of smoking people chew on (battle) and then spit it out. Apparently it makes you high. It leaves them with red teeth as we have noticed! We also asked how you become a monk and apparently every boy that is born a Buddhist has to do 3 weeks or 3 months as a novice monk in the monstery before he decides to continue or not. 88% people in Burma are Buddhists.