Look who sent me mail today. Direct to my home address in Myanmar.
Although at first glance this may appear to indicate amazing powers of the British government to track down its overseas citizens, I did actually give them my address. Along with express instructions not to contact me in Myanmar by mail given that the postal system here is reportedly worse than unreliable. I was clearly very wrong about that.
… or perhaps not. Ant is still waiting for his letter from the tax man.
I love Asian food markets. Everything is always arranged so beautifully, and is usually super fresh! This fish and seafood looked tasty.
This market was a little bit different as it is held on a railway line. So 8x per day a train comes through (very slowly) and everyone pulls up their awnings and moves some of the produce out of the way. Produce on the ground is left there as the train is quite high so can travel over it without causing any damage. It seems a bit strange to hold a market on the railway line, but apparently there are no rental fees for stallholders and now it has developed into a bit of a tourist attraction!
You can just about make out the train tracks in the left hand photo. The right hand photo was taken just before the train came past, so all the awnings have been pinned back against the walls. The crazy tourist are all dangling phones and cameras out.
Train passing through. In the right hand photo you can see the train just in the distance. It had just passed through and the stall holders were already pulling over their awnings and getting back to business.
We did a night bike ride through deserted temples and a huge flower market. Much street food was eaten. Many pictures of the King of Thailand were observed. We even cycled through the grounds of the very swanky hospital where he now lives.
The guide insisted on taking everyone’s photo in front of the creepy sword wheedling ogre.
The wholesale flower market was HUGE, and so beautiful. The majority of the flowers are sold every night – very little wastage, and they are almost all for use as offerings in Bangkok’s many temples. Which, when you actually see just how many flowers there are, is quite hard to imagine. Some of the flowers are sold loose, and some are braided into ready made offerings.
The ginger beard and I have just spent a long weekend doing some fun stuff in Bangkok.
We did a Thai cooking course. It involved making a red Thai curry (as depicted below) and various other yummy stuff.
I also carved a rather fine rose out of a tomato skin. Amazing?!
We went shopping in the super-malls. Bangkok is the future. They even had a special exhibition in one shopping centre all about the UK. Including a Union flag made out a gazillion flowers, a Rolls Royce and pictures of the British royal family and people wearing Barbour jackets (who I presume wished they were in the royal family).
We walked down the famous Ko San Road and felt very old. No worries about getting our ID cards checked (especially not with the beard in tow).
The internet in Myanmar is broken right now… and will be for the next month… yikes. Something to do with a severed cable, so I think I will upload/ attempt to upload some more photos in another entry.
View from our balcony of an evening. Never tire of our golden view.
I don’t think our rather special oven has featured on this blog before. It is a little different from our oven in the UK. Oven options in Yangon are fairly limited and very expensive, but Ant found this one last year at a junk yard. Apparently it used to belong to the British Embassy. Probably back in the 1980s… it is very ancient. For $100 we have an over that mostly works, although the function which limits the temperature does not work, so it can get unbelievably hot – good for pizza. The temperature gauge doesn’t work, so we have to use a thermometer if we want to have any idea what it is, and the oven shelves and grill are a miss match of things they could find/ weld together at the scrap yard…
Here it is in action when we made onion marmalade last weekend. And yes I did slice 3kg of shallots, and yes that did take a long time (2 episodes of Downton Abbey Series 3 I believe). The result is very pleasing. You can’t get a decent chutney in Yangon (outside of our apartment that is).
Being patriotic at the Ozzie club, watching Murray win Wimbledon with some Pimms and strawberries and cream ice-cream. Beards are in fashion again in Yangon it would seem.
Me holding a LOT of money. I think it was about $11,000 in 1,000 kyat notes… so that = 11,000 notes. I happened upon it when finance were paying a supplier at work. It is still very very much a cash economy here, and bank payments are rare. After my photoshoot the suppliers toddled off with the money in bin bags. This place is sooooo safe that wandering the streets with $20,000 in bin bags is no problem (there was a lot more money than I was holding – it was too heavy to carry!).
Fixing the aircon unit Myanmar style. We live on the 7th floor. The man is standing on a sloped metal balcony shade, which may (or more likely may not) be attached properly to the building. Slipping off it would mean certain death. Fortunately this didn’t happen and all is well!
