Burmese Street Food

My flight back to Rangoon arrived at 11:00 this morning and I headed into the city for my last day in Myanmar. My plan was to drop my bag off at a hotel, update my blog, pick up some Burmese laquerware to ship home to my mom, and get in a few hours of sight-seeing before calling it a night.

I'm really lucky I finally got to a decent internet connection. It was nice to finally be able to update the blog, but I checked my Yahoo e-mail account, that I only use to make travel arrangements, and I found out that my flight to Bangkok tomorrow has been cancelled. That wouldn't be such a big deal, except that I have a flight to Bhutan on Druk Air that leaves from Bangkok early Wednesday morning. If I missed the Druk Air flight then I'd have to pay an extra $400 to fly from Bangkok to Kathmandu. On top of that, I'd miss out on the Bhutan trip that cost me $1800. The cancelled flight to Bangkok was a massive inconvenience.

I checked my Lonely Planet book and found out that the Thai Airways office in Rangoon was only two blocks down the street. I made a b-line for the office and fortunately it was still there, it was open, and they had available seats on a flight leaving to Bangkok at 7:45 tonight. The ticket set me back an extra hundred bucks, but that's a whole lot better than waiting until Wednesday to get to Bangkok. I easily would have paid three or four hundred for the same ticket.

After picking up the ticket at 2:00 I was left with three hours until I had to head for the airport. I hurried back to my hotel to cancel my room reservation for the night, then made a mad dash around Rangoon looking for a decent laquerware shop. First I took a cab to a market downtown, then I took another one to a street where a tour guide told me I could find a good shop. After finding nothing at either of those places I went a few miles across town and searched for an obscure art gallery that my guide book recommended as a place to buy lacquerware. I found the gallery and walked in, only to find that it since has been sold and is now a private home. Finally I took a cab back downtown and found a shop with laquerware at an upscale hotel; about a block away from where I started two hours earlier.

With an hour left after buying the laquerware, I had just enough time to do nothing. I walked aimlessly down a city street in downtown Rangoon and spotted some tasty looking food being hawked by a street vendor. I sat down and handed the boy at the kiosk a few hundred kyat as he dished me up. My meal was a thin yellow curry poured over a mix of vegetables, spices, and some kind of fried pasta. The stuff was so good that I had a second bowl before I went on my way. As I was walking off it dawned on me that I had to spend all my kyat ASAP, as it's completely useless outside the country and nobody will exchange it anywhere, even in Myanmar. I had some more food from street vendors, but after three small meals and two desserts I still had only spent $1.10 worth of kyat. Luckily the manager at my hotel agreed to trade a few thousand kyat for a mixture of US dollars and Thai baht, and I headed straight to the airport.

All things considered, the cancelled flight isn't such a bad deal. Being out an extra hundred bucks is crappy, but the trade off is that I get a full day in Bangkok instead of a half day, since I'm leaving tonight instead of tomorrow. Originally I was planning on getting a Thai massage and some Thai food and then just lounging at the hotel, but now that I've got a whole day, I think I might actually be able to do something worthwhile.