Night market of Mandalay

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