Back to Burma tomorrow

We've finally gotten our visa. That is, after we had the invitation letter from the school were Sandra taught, it was done in a day. it took us a little while to convince the person who was helping us that it didn't really matter so much that the invitation letter was a copy send to us by email. He was complaining the email address wasn't visible. Sandra said that it had come as an attachment which she had printed. After all, they already have several original letters in our file. it isn't like it is the first time we were there. And he didn't like it that the signature was UNDER the name instead of above and asked Sandra if she knew who's signature it was. She said that she assumed it would be the signature of the person mentioned as writing the letter but since it was a fairly unreadable signature.. how did she know. The guy eventually went of to consult someone else (read: higher in the hierarchy) and it was decided it was OK. So in the afternoon we went back to get our stuff. Happiness. Until we tried to book tickets back to Yangon. Tomorrow we'll fly with Air Bagan who is one of the few that still fly every day 9even though there is hardly anybody on the plane). The Air Asia flight for tomorrow is canceled (again) and apparently they don't need to book you on another flight. Glad i hadn't booked that one yet. We did meet some polish women who wanted to be on that flight. They are staying in the same guesthouse and we saw 1 of them at the embassy on wednesday. That girl hadn't been back when i spoke to one of the group members today and they still don't know if they have gotten a visa or not. They already applied 10 days ago. Tourists are really being frustrated getting into the country. Tourist visas are given to only a very few people.. hence all the cancellations. Although Myanmar Airways doesn't say they've cancelled flights. But in the systems for travel agencies the flights come back as 'fully booked' ;-) Yeah right....

Anyways, we'll be flying back tomorrow. Not sure when (and if) we're able to update our blog. Apparently it is made almost impossible to get through proxies and all that. So email and blogstuff can be hard (they aren't particularly fond of gmail/yahoo and hotmail over there....). But i'll try my best.