New Year's Eve -- Downton Abbey mystery -- and mystery solved

New Year’s Eve

New Year's moon

 Dear Everyone,

The night of December 31, there was a beautiful large ring around the moon which had emerged from the clouds.  A novice wished me Happy New Year’s, and a group of young novices formed around me, giving me the Myanmar words for the ring around the moon, and the sky. Later that evening I sat by a couple of trees partway up the hill above the monastery for about an hour, until the clouds closed in again over the moon.

New Year’s Day had a little sun mid-morning, then grey and bleak, with a spritz of rain in the early evening.  

Jan 2   Loudspeaker Music Again All Night

The ubiquitous music is playing top volume on loudspeakers again. There had been a several night respite from the all-night, top-volume loudspeaker blaring of Buddhist texts, and it had been good to get a little rest.  The last night without the loudspeakers, though, a pack of dogs were barking wildly about something for a couple hours in the middle of the night.

The school I had confirmed going to Sunday in Mandalay just emailed me today that they’re going to take a one week break next week (though they just started school today) for a monastic meeting. So that means another week here.  The retreat possibilities for the last week of my stay both here and in Thailand, also fell through, though that at least leaves me free for the Mandalay school for that week.

 Jan 3  

 The skies have cleared, and today was beautiful. Electricity went off here this evening, and it was out this afternoon at the internet café in town also, where I’d gone after Thuzar helped me buy some good-bye gifts.   

Have just figured out how to get out of Burmese script when I hit some wrong combination: control-shift.

Hope all your new years have been good so far.  Things are going well here, and it’s been a good week. 

This coming week school starts again, and I will be teaching two grade 10s, grade 6 and 7.

Richard showed me his dvd collection last night, and I was very excited to get from him the dvd set for the coming season of Downton Abbey.  But, playing it tonight, it is so disappointing—it keeps getting stuck!  Also, it feels very disorienting—it starts a couple years later, people are in whole other situations, with no transition from where last year left off.  Not sure if that’s just the way it is, or if they dropped a scene or two out when they pirated the show.  (Assume it’s pirated; the dvds come from Mandalay, and are about fifty cents. I met someone from Asia or Africa a few years ago who said they watched dvds of movies there before they’d even come out in the theaters in the U.S.)  The weirdest thing is watching it with the English subtitles—they don’t match up at all.  It’s most bizarre.  Someone’s saying something about something and the subtitle talks about a snack shop.  Or they read the opposite of what the dialogue is. For instance, after translating “Marigold” as “Mary is gone”, they translate “I can’t give her up” with “I can’t stand her.”  Many are even more bizarre and unrelated to what’s being said. 

I try calling Richard  but apparently it's off or out of area, and leave him a text. Later I get a text back asking if it was working better (no).  Cell phone performance here are not much better than the Internet. Thuzar's smartphone won't work, for instance, when she's in the guesthouse.  They also don't take messages; when the circuits are busy as they often are, a voice will say, "Sor-ry, the party you are calling is out of area" or "Network is busy now." So I'm learning how to text now, with growing dexterity, in response to Richard's after-school texts about dinner with him and Lin Kyu, or whatever (such as dvd performance--or non-performance, to be more accurate).

Jan 5  Downton Abbey Mystery Solved

Mystery solved re Downton Abbey :  even though the disk I was watching last night said episode 1, episode 2, episode 3, episode 4, when clicked on, each was the same,  and it turned out the whole disk was just the first half of season 5 's Christmas special.   Apparently England watched its season 5 this fall, which then airs in the U.S. in the spring—and the episode I watched last night was the Christmas special concluding that.     The list of all the episodes and there being 3 disks had me so confused that once i learned about season 5 having aired and googled the synopsis of the season's "finale" which clearly preceded what I'd watched, I thought it was season 6 and that I was not just nearly 22 hours ahead of you but a year ahead downton-abbey-wise!    It wasn't until we discovered all the disk's four "episodes" were a repeat of the first, that we figured it all out.

Anyway, fortunately the dvd played fine on Richard's laptop and having googled the synopsis of the season 5 finale, everything in last night's already choppy, bizarrely mistranslated episode had more of a context.    (i was sure last night there was some gap, something missing—nothing about questions we were left hanging with,  a character having gotten married, or what strange Russian princes were doing having tea with the dowager—there is more too, I won't share how the episode startlingly started, which had a deja vue feel, to not be a spoiler alerter).   So anyway, when I watch season 5 this spring back with all of you, it'll be with the clairovoyant knowledge of how it all ends.

Love to all of you,

Zoe