There are about four days a year in which a sunroom in Yangon would be human-habitable.
I think this is some kind of government shopfront (emphasis on ‘think’). The Burmese on the green sign roughly translates to “citizen service office”, which seems to work (and the other green sign hidden by the column says “OSS for the people”).It’s important to correct fence your pigeon herd.Esther sits around post date night dinner.We went to a slightly fancy restaurant on the weekend for a bit of a date night. This was my fancy negroni.It’s true what they say – you haven’t experienced bathing until you’ve bathed with a jaguar.Little known fact – Richard Nixon briefly moved to Myanmar after resigning the presidency. Little known fact II – the residual malevolence of his former presence prevents photos taken in this area from being in focus.Strange, often seemingly home-built, electric bikes are surprisingly common here.
I think I found where everyone buys their razor wire.I finally went out for some genuine Myanmar le-hpe’-yei (tea). Which is super strong black tea mixed with sugar syrup and condensed milk. Although there are numerous ways to order along the lines of “sweet, but not too sweet, and milky” or “a little bit milky and a little bit sweet” or “strong and very sweet” and so on. But we just ordered tea and they took pity on us and just made it. As someone who doesn’t really like sweet things, or milk in my tea, I was surprised to find I actually quite enjoyed it.
There is a lot more I could say about tea and teashops without even scratching the surface – but instead I will direct you these two blogposts (from other people!) which give some good basic info. And somewhere there is a great graphic that shows the 20ish different ways to order and what they mean, but I can’t find it at the moment. I guess we’ll just have to save it for another time.
Scaffolding and fastenings not in situ.A chandelier shop by night. I say ‘a’ because chandeliers are weirdly popular in Yangon (probably wider Myanmar) and so there are many more chandelier shops than you would expect for a city of this size.In case anyone wants to turn their hand to learning some Burmese consonants. Two words of warning though: 1) the English equivalent sounds are somewhat misleading, and 2) this table leaves out six rare, but still used characters.Meat skewer.I’m working on a ‘doors’ series, as a companion to ‘gates’.Yet another entry in the “mildly interesting graffiti” database.Is it a gate? Is it a door? Confusion reigns.Just a boat, sitting in a field, waiting for someone to love and/or dismantle it.This probably commemorates an important time in Myanmar history when some people sailed a giant golden rock somewhere. Probably.It appears that road-building techniques have no advanced significantly since we were here in 2012 (or for a great many years before that).And continuing our nautical theme.
More photos of life in/around Yangon.
3 thoughts on “Thematically unconnected photo post.”
Obviously sunrooms in Yangon are as useful as sunrooms in Canberra (and sun roofs on cars anywhere in Australia) – except that after being too hot to use in Summer, sunrooms are then too cold to use in Winter here – probably not a problem in the Yangon winter
Jono! re: your burmese characters… check out khmer ‘moh’ ម , ‘loh’ ល, ‘yoh’ យ. And the khmer ny, ng, n, m, sounds sit in a similar position on the character table! Hurray for sanskrit/pali connections, I guess! But maybe the similarities only extend as far as script, because wikipedia tells me Burmese is a Sino-Tibetan language, and the khmer folk didn’t come from that direction.
Obviously sunrooms in Yangon are as useful as sunrooms in Canberra (and sun roofs on cars anywhere in Australia) – except that after being too hot to use in Summer, sunrooms are then too cold to use in Winter here – probably not a problem in the Yangon winter
Jono! re: your burmese characters… check out khmer ‘moh’ ម , ‘loh’ ល, ‘yoh’ យ. And the khmer ny, ng, n, m, sounds sit in a similar position on the character table! Hurray for sanskrit/pali connections, I guess! But maybe the similarities only extend as far as script, because wikipedia tells me Burmese is a Sino-Tibetan language, and the khmer folk didn’t come from that direction.
That is pretty cool – it’s also probably connected through Mon script (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mon_script), which the Burmese script was adapted from.