No Time Like The Present
Perhaps there’s good reason. Burma is half an hour behind Thailand. But the town of Mongla, on the Chinese border, ticks on Chinese time–an hour ahead of Thailand. Traverse a mere 200 or so kilometers, south to north, and you zigzag between three time zones. Why even bother with precise timekeeping? In Burma it’s hard to know what year it is, let alone what time it is. The country is stuck in 1962, when it invented a brand of socialism that’s a bit like the abandoned sandals I saw lying on the main road in Kengtung–as if one day the Burmese simply stopped walking with the rest of the world....