I love this place…unless it kills me.
I have no pictures of it. The alley was too dark, and the only time I could see the piles of garbage rotting in the eternal puddles was when cars would drive by, their headlights shining straight into my eyes where I sat on a child’s tiny plastic chair.
I am in Rangoon, Burma, which is all grown up into Yangon, Myanmar. It is nothing like anywhere else I’ve ever been. Taking Kathmandu and adding large spoonfuls of Guatemala is a good start, but not the whole recipe. Off limits to tourists for a long time, they are just starting to tap into the mana stream that is tourism. They seem impressed with the number of tourists they get now, and hotel prices have spiked relatively sky-high as a result, which I normally wouldn’t complain about here, but there’s another feature about Myanmar I didn’t know until right before I came.
Apparently you can’t use your bank card here. Foreign cards are not accepted.
This means you have to bring your US dollars with you. Good thing I was more prepped for dollar usage on this trip than previously, but I still had to withdraw a stack of rupees in Sri Lanka then change them into dollars at the airport. That was fun, walking across Colombo with a phat wad of cash in my pocket.
Once you’re here you have to find a black market changer on the street, since the banks give you a crap rate. So I got to change that wad of rupees for a slimmer wad of dollars, which I converted on the street into a ludicrously large roll of Burmese kyat.
Ludicrously large. If I wore it in my money belt I would look pregnant.
So now I have what I have, and can’t get more. That’s why I walked around in the rain for nearly an hour when I got here, looking for the cheapest place that didn’t look likely to give me leprosy. I found a place for $10 a night that will only give me cholera, so I count it a victory
But the street food is still priced for locals, so that’s what I eat.
And it’s amazing.
The first thing I had was a fried banana for $0.10 and two weird fried-corn things that looked like either peanut-butter-brittle or dog barf, depending on your frame of reference. $0.15 for each dog barf.
A miso-based soup of well-boiled noodles that was sweet even before she added condensed milk.
Samosas chopped into pieces and served with a thin lentil gravy, with shredded cabbage, yellow radish, fried chickpeas, and mint leaves going off like bombs every now and then.
For about $0.30 various people have grabbed handfuls of noodles, tossed on chili powder, an assortment of mysterious red sauces, and sliced fried tofu with scissors into a bowl which they then stirred with their bare hands. Frickin delicious.
Dinner just now, back in the unlit alley where stray dogs nosed around and a guy stopped to pee across the street from my tiny table, I had a bowl of rice with a few pieces of pork, more than half of which were pure giggly yellow fat. It came with a small bowl of fish & vegetable soup, a plate of bizarre veggies, and as always, there were thermoses of tea to pour into the tiny cups which sit in a bowl of water on each table, the only washing they get between customers. $0.60.
The vegetables included leaves like spinach on steroids that were somehow spicy, pieces of cucumber as translators, and things that looked like pickles but tasted like… Okay, imagine there was a Russian vegan with a fridge full of hardcore Russian vegetables. This Russian lives next to Chernobyl. Chernobyl is as Chernobyl does, and soon you have a squishy vegetable monster that oozes up through the shower drain to attack you. Chop off one of it’s slimy fingers, and that’s what the pickle-things tasted like.
There was a dressing for the veggies, but it tasted the way the gutter outside a fish market smells, so one try was enough, I had the rest of my vegetables and monster fingers naked.
People speak less English here than anywhere else I’ve ever been, and ordering consisted of pointing and nodding. The owner guy was gruff and unsure about me at first, but once I’d cleaned every dish I seemed to win his approval.
He smiled at me from around the cigarette he was puffing on while he cooked up the next batch and I think his gestures were an invitation to come back tomorrow.
I think I love this place. As long as the street meat doesn’t kill me.
Hope you brought your antibiotics 😉
Sounds great though, especially since you get to see everything before it gets changed.
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This place is changing so fast, last year’s guidebook seems out of date enough to be from 5 years ago. I can only imagine what 5 years ago actually looked like, nor what 5 from now will be. Knowing this is a precious and short-lived stage makes the maddening and unpleasant details much more bearable.
And yup, I have a little bottle of Cipro rattling around somewhere in my bag as a last resort, knocking on wood that I won’t need it though!
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Dude, you definitely got the genes for traveler’s belly that I somehow missed. I think I got Hepatitis A just from reading this post. You are so going to survive the apocalypse better than me.
I liked the set-up of this one – I was getting ready to think that you were having to crouch in the soggy alley because you had no cash at all and that was your home for the next week.
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Nah, my home exchanged the puddles for the reek of a sewer system being gradually overwhelmed by monsoon rains. This morning when I woke up it was thick enough that I could taste it in my throat. Time to leave.
You set up the fortress and I’ll be the food taster, and we’ll outlast some zombies just fine.
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Nah, my home exchanged the puddles for the reek of a sewer system being gradually overwhelmed by monsoon rains. This morning when I woke up it was thick enough that I could taste it in my throat. Time to leave.
You set up the fortress and I’ll be the food tester, and we’ll outlast some zombies just fine.
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Mmm, Yangon! I love the way you wrote this… I went when I was 17, and I remember absolutely adoring the food. I also remember getting serious, viscera-squeezing food poisoning. But the food was so good it was worth it.
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Yikes, that’s a scary thought. I actually was getting some stomach pains when I went to bed after a particularly dodgy meal last night, but I seem to have survived. How long ago were you here? I can only imagine it has changed a huge amount in a very short period of time, and will again, moving forward.
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Ten years ago. Wow. I hadn’t even really realized that I was old enough to have the answer to any question be ‘a decade’! It’s probably wildly different. I do remember hauling literally half a dozen plastic shopping bags of banknotes into the house we were staying, and staring at it with my mom thinking… How on earth could we ever check whether we got the right amount for our money or not??
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Ha! I love it. The physical bulk of the moneychanging experience has apparently calmed, but I love that image. And don’t feel old, if you’re 27 then you’re (maybe) just starting the next phase! (https://vagabondurges.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/happy-rebirthday-its-gonna-change-you-life/)
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I don’t like your headlines 🙂
All the best,
Hanna
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I’ll try to find more places that include the word “paradise”…. 😉
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Great!
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Wow, you’ve got a good gut there! Imagining the sights, smells and culinary chaos from my sofa here…mmmm-hmm!
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“Culinary chaos” is exactly right! Can I use that? I do my best to take pictures of them, when it’s not raining or doing so would cause me to fall out of a moving vehicle (embarrassing myself is no longer an impediment), so if I ever get a decent internet connection again, I’ll try to upload some pics. Greetings from Mandalay to your sofa!
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Use away! Hope your recent street-side dishes have delighted rather than distressed!
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awesome post Tim…dude you get a merit badge for being able to eat that food without any repercussions 😉 street food out there is amazing. Go into the interior and the home cooked stuff is mind blowing 🙂
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The mutton soup a couple nights ago made me a bit nervous, but I think I’ve just had good luck. There’s one dish (maybe you know it’s name? Chen…dwa…something?) that is some sort of leafy green that seems to have partially rotted. I do my best to avoid that one. I’ll take mind-blowing, just not gut-blasting!
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good choice… 🙂 Chen Dwa is disgusting but considered a delicacy by the locals. Like spinach but some odious sauce put to it.
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Its monsoon over there i guess… best time for germs to breed. Travelers need to take care of food & water… Hospitals may not be cheap either… 😉
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I go with street food because at least I can see the cooking area…some of those restaurants look pretty shady to me. Hospitals and prisons are the two “cultural experiences” I do my best to avoid; I hope I never need to post a fundraiser blog to pay my hospital bill!
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I continue to marvel at your adventures – from my safe little village in Ohio. Glad you are managing well and enjoying Yangon.
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A little village in Ohio sounds pretty good right now. The last three nights were in a pantry-sized room that smelled increasingly of sewage as the monsoon rains gradually overwhelmed the sewer system. Time to head somewhere else! As always, thank you for reading!
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Such vivid and hilarious descriptions of Burma! I’ve been dying to visit there before tourism hits too hard and it becomes a trap like Thailand. Thanks for the heads up on the money situation!
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Turns out the ATM thing is not true. You can use the banks here just fine, at least with VISA and Mastercard. There’s some Australian one that doesn’t work though, I guess? But the exchange rate is a bit lower (but not drastically) so if you can, bring pristine US dollars and change them on the street. The country is in a pretty good zone right now, where there are enough difficulties and annoyances that most of the tourists are the more determined type, actually curious to encounter a country, not just get plastered someplace new. I am curious (and afraid) to see if they go the Thailand route, or something more modern, like the Costa Rican route. My reluctant bet would be the former.
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Dukoral is good to prep the gut before foreign travel! Love the description!
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I will remember that, and try to pick some up! I’ve actually been lucky this trip (knocking on wood) and not gotten sick, but I remember it’s not fun. Glad you liked the post, thanks!
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