In monkish company

[mistress_elaine]

I have lots more Turkey photos to share with you, but as you all know, I like a bit of variety. It suddenly occurred to me that I never finished uploading my old Burma photos. I would like to have some closure on that score (Eru knows I have enough *other* old travel photos waiting to be posted here...), so here, to kick off the Bagan series (Bagan

Comments

[cosmiccircus]

That's kind of funny that there's a place named pagan...

Good photo of you though!

And why wasn't the monk "nearly as sweet as he looks in the photo"?

[mistress_elaine]

I assume the unholy connotations are one reason why the name is frequently spelled "Bagan". In fact, Lonely Planet spells it "Bagan", too, so I'm not sure why I didn't. I will change the spelling forthwith...

As I remember it, the novice was a cheeky monkey who first offered to pinch my bum and then got rather rude when I refused to give him any money for posing. I think he ended up spitting at the Israeli girl who took the picture. Nice lad, eh?

[mistress_elaine]

"Novice jerk" about sums him up, I think. All Burmese boys are expected to serve as novices for a few weeks as teenagers; I doubt this one made the cut to become a real monk.

Funny you should say that about my looking Russian. I don't think I look Russian at all, but we used to have some very Russian-looking faces on my father's side of the family, which is interesting, as they didn't have any Russian blood running through their veins (my father is a keen genealogist who has traced his ancestors back several centuries, and he hasn't come across any mention of foreign blood). My paternal grandfather looked completely Russian in later life. He somewhat resembled Viktor Chernenko (president of the Soviet Union for a brief spell in the 1980s), although he smiled rather more.

[taotianone]

what a nice surprise, a photograph of yourself. i had wondered what you looked like ever since i first stumbled into your journal. now i know! thanks for including this. btw, it's a nicely composed photograph, without regard to whom the two people actually are.

[mistress_elaine]

Thank you, and glad to oblige! I can tell you're an intermittent visitor to this journal, though, as I've actually posted a fair number of pictures of myself lately. Here are a few more to satisfy your curiosity...

Turkey 2006
Laos 1998
Tee hee hee!

[taotianone]

wow! a visual feast. thank you

[mistress_elaine]

You're welcome! I'm glad you enjoyed the pics and the meme.

it turns out that you're not a native of china, raised in england, educated at cambridge, and now living in holland.

Tee hee. No. You could be forgiven for thinking so, though. :-)

sorry about the lack of capitals.

Don't worry about that. I'm getting used to receiving uncapitalised comments; as I mentioned in the meme, I have a staggering number of LJ friends who don't use capitals. I'm learning to come to grips with it. I'll draw the line at bad grammar, bad punctuation and chat speak, though. I'll never add anyone who posts in unpunctuated chat speak. Thankfully, I seem to attract mostly highly articulate people like yourself. :-)

I totally agree with you on at least trying to communicate with the locals in their language. Even if you butcher their language, you're at least making an effort, right? It seems such an obvious token of respect to me that I was quite shocked recently to see that it took K nearly three weeks to learn how to say "Hello" in Turkish, and

[ex_humanfema327]

lovely picture especially considering somebody else took it! Did you have to crop it?
nice to see a picture of you! so blonde! I'm going to dye mine black in spring i think..

[mistress_elaine]

Thank you! Yes, I did crop the photo. I cropped a fair bit of wall and part of myself. I thought it would improve the composition (ahem).

As for the "so blonde!" bit, once upon a time that would have earned you a hearty "harrumph!", as I consider myself a redhead. I'm definitely fading though (and have been for years), and travelling in the tropics definitely had a bleaching effect on my hair. I guess I was probably at my blondest in Burma (physically, anyway).

I used to want to dye my hair black as a teenager, when I was going through my goth phase, but never went through with it. I have great respect for people who do. Especially when they actually look good with black hair.

Why won't you dye your hair black until spring? Isn't spring the time to be, you know, blonde...?

[ex_humanfema327]

Ah yes i looked at the other earlier linked pictures afterwards and you've definitely got redder hair there. Strange you deny blondeness in favour of redness; people sometimes claim i have red hair but it's definitely blonde. Black looks odd on me, especially when the blonde roots grow in. I just get bored of it.. And it's already at its darkest in spring after a winter with no sunlight, so i feel like it might as well be black then. Oh, i dont know. Stupid hair.

[mistress_elaine]

Ah, but the red you see in the old pictures wasn't completely natural, either. I wasn't allowed to dye my hear black at the time (one of only two things my parents have ever forbidden me), so I hennaed it bright orange instead, which was allowed as it wasn't too far from my natural colour. My natural colour was/is slightly less bright and orange-ish.

I can imagine black looks odd on you, if your hair is anything like mine. I once tried on a dark brown wig and looked an absolute fright. It all depends on the colour of your skin and eyebrows, though. If you have reasonably dark eyebrows, you can probably pull off black hair. At any rate, I look forward to seeing pictures of it.

As for preferring being red to being blonde, I guess it has something to do with the fact that I was teased a lot as a child for being a redhead. After that, I kind of came to embrace my own redheadedness and flaunt it, as indeed it should be.

[mortsleam]

Well, the poor kid has no chance of remaining a monk after meeting you. You can see it in his face.

[mistress_elaine]

Aw, so you think I led a poor, uncorrupted innocent astray with my lovely cooked-lobster complexion?

*considers this*

Well, I have to say I rather like the idea, even if it's patently wrong. It was obvious to me that the boy had met other strawberry-blonde, cooked-lobster-complexioned women before me, and got a little too close to them. But yes, it's quite possible that I was the one who caused him to turn his back on the monastery. In which case I should probably go back to Burma to find him, as I tend to like young Burmese men. :-)