The first question to get clarity on upon arrival is “What do I call this place?  Yangon or Rangoon?  Myanmar or Burma?”  It’s a complicated question, not without risk of having one’s political tendencies assumed depending on which one you use.

At the risk of oversimplification, before British colonialization, the city where I am was in the country Myanmar.   The Brits renamed the country Burma and this city Rangoon.  In 1989, the military regime changed the name Burma back to Myanmar, and renamed the city Yangon which means literally “end of strife”.  The democracy movement tends to speak of Burma, simply to make the point that they do not accept a unilateral decision to change the name of the country.  I’ll use them interchangeably, as many here do, while my sympathies lie with the sensitivities of the democracy movement.  See more on this question of names in this BBC article, which is helpful at least in describing the complexity!

It’s easy to feel quickly at home here, as it’s quite reminiscent of Kolkata, India with a good dose of Kathmandu, Nepal thrown in and a little splash of Thai religion.  The streets are crowded due to a massive influx of cars in the past two years and a traffic system that has yet to catch up.  One can easily see a remarkable amount of ethnic diversity that is Burma.

In a brief tour of the city, our new Anglican priest friend, Reverend Allen, took us to what feels like the two hearts of Burma:  the Shwedagon Pagoda and the house of Aung San Suu Kyi.  It was in this compound that she remained in house arrest for 15 years after winning a democratic election in 1990 before the military regime discounted it and imprisoned so many of those who were a threat to its power.

It was at the Shwedagon Pagoda that Suu Kyi launched her political career in 1988 with a famous speech that drew half a million Burmese here to listen.  This pagoda, or place of Buddhist worship, has been an important site to this largely Buddhist country for 2,500 years, since the days of the Buddha himself, and peers out over the city like the Bodnath Stupa in Kathmandu.  The gold leaf that thickly covers the pagoda gives rise to the nickname for this country, “The Golden Land.”

First impressions?  Beautiful land, beautiful people, complicated history, immense changes.