Not Good, But Not As Bad As It Could Be

Once we arrived in sunny, hot Yangon, we waited breathlessly for our bags to show up.  Immigration was a slow process, but we were near the front of the line, so it wasn't too long a wait -- and it was the longest wait we had at any point in the flight -- maybe 20 minutes.  International travel is much easier than it used to be!

The bag fear was that we had checked it all the way through to Yangon from Dulles airport -- three flights and many hours ago.  What if Thai airlines hadn't put it on the Yangon flight after overnighting in Bangkok?  Many bags came around multiple times, and we got quite nervous, but eventually ours showed.  A quick go through customs and out to find our guide for the day.

(By the way, both All Nippon Air and Thai Airlines were fantastic.  Great service, very good food, plenty of flight attendants -- US carriers could learn a thing or two, but they won't.  There were even flowers in the bathrooms!  And, the staff all bowed to the passengers and each other).

(Oh, when the ANA counter was opening at Dulles, they first all lined up and bowed to the passengers who had already arrived.  Pretty cool -- and they had plenty of counters open to move people through quickly!)

Carol spotted the sign/guide first, and we gratefully went over to meet Aye Aye for the day.  (Yes, that's her real name, and the Burmese don't use surnames, so, as she admitted, it can be confusing.).

She called our driver (you would NOT want to rent a car -- traffic in Yangon makes DC look like a summer picnic) and we waited (and sweated) for him to fight through the traffic from where he had parked.  Eventually he (Aung) got there, and we sped off to our first stop.

Just kidding.  When I said "sped" I meant the opposite (see what I did there, quite clever, eh).  We crawled through traffic as Aye Aye briefed us on the day,  Good thing it was after rush hour, because then traffic really doesn't move.  The chaos improved once we got away from the airport, but every so often traffic would come to a complete standstill as traffic lights would have to deal with five and six way intersections.

The street signs are in Burmese and English (a holdover from the days of Brit control), and many of the store signs are in English, which surprised me, given how long Myanmar was an isolated country -- competing with (but losing to) North Korea as most isolated.

We finally made it to a quieter neighborhood, and stopped so we could change our shoes into sandals (Keens for me, Oofos for Carol) to go into our first pagoda.  In the pagodas, everyone must go barefoot, so you want to be able to slip your footwear on and off easily.  You also must have your knees and shoulders covered.  That's a mixed bag for me (which of course I respected), because I don't wear wife beater shirts ever, but I do prefer shorts.  I solved that problem by wearing my zip-off hiking pants (brought multiple pairs of them) so I could unzip the bottom half of the pant legs when not going to pagodas.  Back into the car and off to the pagoda.