Vijay and Shefali's TAtW

Mandalay is great on a good night’s sleep. After our fourteen-hour ride on the crazy train it was great to be somewhere that didn’t constantly move under your feet. That didn’t mean there was necessarily ground to walk on. The sidewalks here are… unfinished in places. Like the path will just drop off into some sewage. It was a lot like Malaysia. Which brings me to the food. I wanted to love the food in Myanmar, I really did. And there were several dishes I at least somewhat enjoyed, only to find out that most were Chinese in origin. In general, the food tended to be strongly flavored and in ways that are alien to me since I didn’t grow up with it – sour, bitter and mildly spicy aren’t normally considered complimentary flavor profiles as far as I’m aware but I found that combination more often than any other. Also, it’s oily. So oily. Everything has oil. Like they’ll marinate something in oil, then they’ll cook it in oil, then they’ll throw on extra oil before they serve it to you. All snacks are fried in oil. If you get another style of food, like Thai food for example, it will have extra oil. It will have more oil than could seem healthy or even necessary. The salads, inexplicably, leave an oily residue as you eat them.

We finally saw our first tourists at the U-bein bridge. It was recommended by our hotel as a great place to watch the sunset. That’s another thing about this trip – who knew how great sunsets were? So the bridge goes across a lake for a little over a kilometer. It is dangerous as hell, I’m sure of it. There’s no way it was designed to support as much weight as it gets with all the tourists stressing it. Also, no guardrails. It’s not super high but if you fell off, you wouldn’t simply limp away. You’d be wondering when you grew a knee joint in your shin. I’m probably doing a poor job conveying just what it’s like to feel this structure swaying and creaking beneath your feet as you walk out into the middle of the bay, but I promise you that when you’re there depending on it to keep you from having to swim home it may as well be made of popsicle sticks. It’s a calculated risk that hundreds of people are perfectly okay with every day.

Also we got a tip that Myanmar had a unique approach to beer. Rumor is that there’s a beer here brewed with spirulina (green algae). We actually experienced one like this already in Singapore, and that brew (as well as others in SE Asia such as Tsingtao Green) were inspired by the same style in Myanmar. We saw ads for this everywhere so it must be close. So now we have a mission.

[1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/97388931@N08/sets/72157641510632573/