 |
| bins of knock-off videos at the night market |
Internet access in Myanmar is intermittent, so I wasn't able to send off more than one blog during our trip there. Now that we're home, I'll be adding to the blog count as I have time--but a little out of order.
Our first day in Yangon, we had three excellent meetings with an American who has started an investment firm there, a senior official at the U.S. embassy, and the general manager of the brand new Ford dealership. I'll be blogging about those visits and all we learned over the next week or so.
 |
| plentiful vegetables and fruits |
Meanwhile, Mandalay has a very lively night market, open for the last several years. It makes shopping easy for people who work past the closure times of most of the markets. None of these are like anything we know here. They are street stalls, people sitting on the ground, in the mud, on the sides of streets, on plastic stools or wooden platforms displaying their wares.
 |
| women selling rice rolls |
 |
| mound of fried crickets |
Last night we walked through the night market in
Mandalay, crowded with women sitting on the muddy margins of the road, selling
their voluminous produce. There were
palmellos, oranges, limes and lemons, beautiful wild mushrooms just plucked
from the flood plain by the Ayerawaddy River, bananas, onions and garlic,
asparagus and cauliflower, cabbage, palm shoots, and so much more. The food supply seems to be ample at least in this part of Myanmar.
 |
| quail eggs and dumplings ready to eat |
We watched a vendor lugging a large cart through the
market. He was renting car batteries to
the larger vendors to power their long florescent lights. Down another street were women cooking all
kinds of fried food from dumplings to quail eggs to mounds of crickets, dark
red and prickling with legs and antenna which made them rather unappetizing to
me, at least. One food cart had long
bamboo tubes stuffed with sticky rice.
Farmers like to take these to the fields because they can stick them in
their pockets and peel back the bamboo during the day to get to the sweetened
rice. A Burmese farmer's lunch box.
There are no trash containers, so all debris gets tossed
in the road or the mud beside the road.
The activity is vigorous, with lots of bargaining. Vendors know what their sales will be for the
night, so bring that amount of their fruits and vegetables with them. Everything is obviously very fresh and ripe
and looks beautiful. Activity starts
here about 4 p.m., when the merchants arrive to jostle for the best location
along the road. The market closes about
10 p.m. For those who want cheap music and videos, knock-offs provide 16 movies for about $2. I didn't see any I just had to have, but the business was brisk.
 |
| fruit is fresh and beautiful |
