My second day in Mandaly was pretty much a working day. I spent 5,5 hours in an internet cafe to upload and label all the pictures from Bagan and Ngwe Saung. So please, take a look at them. That was a hell of a lot of work. The internet cafe itself is actually quite a sight.

Imagine a typical asian market: You have people screaming everywhere, the smell of spices and dust hang heavily in the air, everything is crowded and while walking between the stalls you frequently have to avoid small motorcycles that rush through the crowds. Now imagine a big, dirt-yellow building in the middle of this market, four stories high, nothing special. As you walk up the debris-covered stairs you think that this building looks more like a place that will soon be torn down then anywhere you could find an internet cafe.

But then you reach the forth floor and all of a sudden you enter a completely different world: Two old men in uniforms open big glass doors, the floor is tiled with teak, you see pilars that seem to be made of teak and streaks of copper and there is a recpetionist sitting at the end of a ridiculously long lobby, who probably is one of the loneliest girl in all of Myanmar because noone actually walks up to her but veers to the two corridors that are immediateddly to the left and right of the corridors. If you walk along these corridors you feel like you are in a modern business center in central europe or the states. Actually you feel like you are in a pretty posh business center in the west. And you have all these shops that sell routers and graphic cards and everything else you could expect. The only major "anomaly" are the software shops that only sell pirated software. Marcomedia MX plus Photoshop and some other things thrown onto one CD? No problem. 1,000 kyat.

That place (MICT between 33rd/34th and 78th street) and also has an internet cafe. All chrome, very modern and obviously very new. And as yu sit down (800 kyat/hour) they even offer you cappucino or espresso! And this is in a country where you normally only get "3 in 1 coffee mix", i.e. packages of instant coffee that already contain sugar and milk-powder. To get a cappucino here you normally have to go to a five-star hotel. They even have water-toilets at that place. I'm telling you - it really is like being in a different world. Unfortunatley they don't have disk drives. But I talked with their IT guy for a bit and he said that what he could do would be copy my FTP-software to my portable hard disk so that I could copy it form the hard dik to the computer via USB. Stricly speaking not allowed, but - oh well. The fact that I offered him my MP3-collection might have helped. Unfortunately though I couldn't connect to my server via FTP. Maybe it's the governments proxy. I suppose that simply has to wait until I'm in Chiang Mai. Unfortunately - for all the chrome and high tech appeal - the connection was still painstakingly slow. But as the IT guy explained to me, all of Myanmar only has a 25 Mbit-connection to the outside world, so that is not sooo surprising.