A Good Walk, Unspoiled

Thursday morning (Wednesday night to you time slackers in the States), we met as a group for the first time after breakfast.

Breakfast was a mix of US-style, Burmese, and English breakfasts from a buffet.  Had a variety of foods.  The small slices of butterfish were relatively tasteless, so I don’t need to have that again!

Anyhow, we’re here with an Inspirato group – just ten of us, and we met Ye Ye upstairs above the breakfast restaurant promptly at 8am.  Inspirato is the travel club we belong to – the group we went to Antarctica with, as well the ones we rented quite beautiful houses/resort condos from over the years.  Ye Ye (pronounced “Ye Ye” – bet you are glad I clarified that for you!) gave us a 20 minute briefing after we had all shook hands and introduced ourselves.  Interestingly, everyone is either from the East Coast or the West Coast.

We boarded a small bus (it’s only ten of us), and headed downtown.  We passed many of the sights and buildings we went past yesterday.  Ye Ye was giving us a briefing on Myanmar.  Even though Carol and I had heard some of it the day before, it was good to hear it again.  Maybe some of the info will sink in.

The bus stopped in the middle of downtown and let us out.  We followed Ye Ye past street food vendors, and turned down a smaller street.  He showed us a typical apartment building – eight stories high, no elevator – so the higher the apartment, the less it cost per month.  The ground floor is commercial, seemingly all selling some sort of wifi/phones/sim cards/etc.  There are doorbells dangling down from the apartments above – so you can ring the doorbell of someone on the seventh floor without having to hike up the stairs only to find no one home.  There were bags on ropes for newspapers, so you can haul up your paper without coming down/going back up.

There’s also a lot of laundry hanging out to dry on balconies.  As we walked, we talked, getting to know people in the group.  The fun part was dodging cars as they came down the street – it was narrow and crowded, so the cars weren’t able to go very fast.  It seems unlikely, but we spent two full days in Yangon and never saw a pedestrian hit by a car.  After the first hour in traffic on Wednesday, I set the over/under at five pedestrians hit, so I would have lost that bet.

The bus was quite conveniently waiting for us at the end of road, and we headed off to the monastery.